Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Only when powerful leaders of dominant states agreed for reasons of their own to work together toward some common purpose could change be brought about. Thus it was Willy Brandt and Georges Pompidou who had launched the first system of monetary coordination, the ‘Snake’; Helmut Schmidt and Giscard d’Estaing who developed it into the European Monetary System (EMS); and Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, their respective successors, who would mastermind the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that gave birth to the European Union. It was Giscard and Schmidt, too, who invented ‘summit diplomacy’ as a way to circumvent the impediments of a cumbersome supranational bureaucracy in Brussels—a further reminder that, as in the past, Franco-German cooperation was the necessary condition for the unification of Western Europe.