In September 1992, I began a five-month visit to the Bank of England as a Houblon-Norman Fellow, planning to think and write about international monetary cooperation. My hosts, however, had other plans. They asked if I would like to follow the work of the intergovernmental conference on economic and monetary union in Europe, concentrating on the long-run issues: How might a European central bank formulate and implement a single monetary policy? What role might remain for the national central banks? What are the implications of monetary union for the conduct of national fiscal policies? How would European monetary union affect the functioning of the international monetary system? I was soon fully absorbed by these questions and deeply interested in the negotiations themselves. I drafted several memoranda on those basic issues and a number of short notes on certain provisions of the proposed treaty.

Shortly before the treaty was adopted at the Maastricht Summit, I looked over my work and discovered that it could be converted into a comprehensive critique of the plan for economic and monetary union (EMU) embodied in the treaty, and my hosts at the Bank of England encouraged me to do that. I began work right after the Maastricht Summit and finished the first draft of a monograph six weeks later, just before leaving London. I presented portions of that draft to a conference at the London School of Economics (LSE) and to a seminar at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where I was a visiting scholar in the spring of 1992.