Book Review: Markus K Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas and Kenneth Dyson and Ivo Maes (eds), Architects of the Euro: Intellectuals in the Making of European Monetary Union
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917718668 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsEurope |
Book Reviews 665
associations have better access to executive
institutions and they are most influential when
the issue lobbied is not suitable for public
mobilisation. Citizen groups use more outside
lobbying, they do not engage in multilevel lob-
bying as often as business associations, and
they enjoy better access to legislative than
executive institutions. They are best able to
exert influence when an issue has public sali-
ence and is therefore susceptible to outside lob-
bying. In many ways, labour unions and
professional associations resemble citizen
groups more than business associations.
Unlike other studies relating to the interest
group literature, this book is an attempt to
explain interest group strategies (inside lobby-
ing vs outside lobbying and multilevel lobby-
ing in Europe), access and influence in one
comprehensive study. Most studies in the field
explore only one of these aspects.
The main strength of the book is its empiri-
cal richness. The study covers a large number of
groups in several countries. Contrary to the
commonly used citizen groups versus sectional
groups (business associations, labour unions
and professional associations) classification, the
authors argue that professional associations and
labour unions are more akin to citizen groups
rather than business groups. Therefore, the book
also provides theoretical novelty which will be
subjected to scrutiny by other researchers. The
book will be of interest to postgraduate students
and experienced scholars working on interest
groups, civil society and EU studies.
Direnç Kanol
(Near East University, Nicosia)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917716889
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus
K Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-
Pierre Landau. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016. 440pp., £24.95 (h/b), ISBN
9780691172927
Architects of the Euro: Intellectuals in the
Making of European Monetary Union by
Kenneth Dyson and Ivo Maes (eds). Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016. 307pp., £55.00
(h/b), ISBN 9780198735915
The need to understand the architecture of
Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and
especially its institutional flaws with their con-
stitutional implications, has rocketed since the
beginning of the Eurozone crisis. The books
reviewed here contribute to clarifying some of
these issues from two different perspectives:
one paying attention to the conflicting views
about how to tackle the crisis resulting from
French and German political traditions (The
Euro and the Battle of Ideas), the other focusing
on the influence of the intellectuals involved in
the historical process to design and finally make
EMU operative (Architects of the Euro).
The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by
Markus Brunnermeier et al. combines history
and political economy with a detailed knowl-
edge of the intricacies of the Eurozone crisis
in order, first, to identify the main elements of
the French and German traditions in political
economy and, second, to assign the post-crisis
developments in EMU to one of the said tradi-
tions. The differences between the two his-
torical driving forces of European integration
are rooted in these countries’ cultural and
political systems: while Germany, as a federa-
tion, relies on the rule of law in order to solve
problems, in centralist France, conflicts are
settled through political discretion at the gov-
ernmental level.
Curiously enough, these approaches had a
clear impact on the switch in the two coun-
tries’ economic traditions after the Second
World War. Hence, liberal laissez-faire France
suddenly fell under the spell of dirigisme,
whereas in Germany, the reaction to the Nazi-
era arbitrariness was to subject the economy to
clear rules (the ordo-liberal ‘economic consti-
tution’).
Perhaps, the major achievement of the
book is to show that beyond the literal word-
ing of EMU’s foundational agreement, that is,
the Treaty of Maastricht, each country contin-
ued to interpret those provisions according to
its own tradition. This did not cause serious
problems until the crisis began and, for exam-
ple, the fundamental contradiction between
the no-bailout rule and the treatment of all
sovereign debt as free of default risk was
revealed (p. 99). Subsequently, disparities
about what should be considered a problem of
solvency or of liquidity arose (p. 127).
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