In December of 1991, the nations of the European Community signed the Maastricht Treaty, an accord which was intended to mark a major step forward toward the complete economic integration of Europe, and the culmination of a process that had begun in the 1950s. Business and political leaders around the world regarded "1992" with mingled enthusiasm and anxiety; it would mark the birth, so it was supposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of a new economic superpower. In mid-1992, however, Denmark failed to ratify the Maastricht Treaty. The defeating vote was narrow--50.7 percent of the Danish electorate voted against the measure--but it at once stalled the formal process, and signalled a much broader anxiety among Europeans regarding the impending integration.
This anxiety took a variety of forms, at several levels. On the most emotional level, Maastricht could be viewed as symbolizing some degree of loss of national sovereignty (especially for the smaller European Union (EU) countries), and even perhaps an impending loss of national identity. At a more practical level, Maastricht called for the integration of economies which, though all "developed" in the broad sense, differ far more in their levels of development than do, say, even the richest and poorest of American states.
More specifically still, Maastricht posed unresolved issues of European currency management. When the negotiations that led to Maastricht began, the Cold War division of Europe was still in force, and it was implicitly assumed that this division--and specifically the division of Germany--would continue into the indefinite future. Even in this Cold War environment, the then-West German Deutsche Mark had a special standing among European currencies, a standing rooted partly in the sheer power of the West German economy, and partly in the long-standing zeal with which German monetary authorities, historically anxious about inflation, sought to mai...