Where economists and diplomats meet

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Within the European Union, the introduction of the common currency has given birth to the euro area. Coordination between the euro countries increasingly exceeds purely monetary aspects, leading to the euro area’s conceptualisation as an actor in its own right. Its external representation at international level can be understood as part of an incremental development that has gained further prominence against the background of recent financial crises in several euro countries. Using sources such as expert interviews and starting from a basic neo-institutionalist analytical framework, the book combines a systematic problem analysis with a critical appraisal of real-world developments from the origins of Economic and Monetary Union to the year 2011. It complements the state of the art in research on European integration in a domain at the interface between economics and foreign policy that has received little attention thus far.