The CES shares its golden anniversary with the Werner Report, a major milestone on the road to EMU. Although it was not the first high-level study on this subject, the Werner Report was the first to be taken up by member states, which set 1980 as a target date for the irrevocable fixing of exchange rates by current and aspiring members of the EC. This commitment was dropped amid the economic turmoil that followed the demise of the Bretton Woods System and the first oil shock. But the Werner Report's vision of what is needed to make EMU work has endured, more so, in some respects, than the Delors Report, which formed the blueprint for the euro's eventual launch in 1999.

Asymmetry

The Delors Report envisaged an asymmetric EMU. Monetary policy was placed under the control of a single decision-making body while economic policy remained in the hands of member states. The report implicitly rejected the link between EMU and political union, concluding that a Community with a single currency could “continue to consist of individual nations with differing economic, social, cultural and political characteristics … and autonomy in economic decision-making” (Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union 1989: 17).

No mention was made in the Delors Report of a fiscal transfer mechanism. Preoccupied with the harmful effects of national economic policies on monetary policy and the Community's economic situation more generally, it instead proposed that macroeconomic policy be subject to binding procedures and rules. So was born the excessive deficit procedure (and later the Stability and Growth Pact), with its threat of financial penalties and fines against member states that posted excessive budget deficits and unsustainable public debt. A coordinated rather than a centralized approach to banking supervision was also proposed.

The Werner Report imagined a more symmetrical EMU in which monetary policy was delegated to a Community organ modeled on the United States Federal Reserve, while economic policy was subject to the control of a supranational Centre of Decision for Economic Policy. It saw political union not only as essential for the sustainability of EMU but an inevitable consequence of it.