Abstract
Several authors (Cohen, International Affairs 84(3):455–470, 2008a; Marsh, The Euro: The politics of the new global currency. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009; Rogoff, The global fallout of a eurozone collapse. Financial Times, 2011) have acknowledged that if (and this is still a big if) the euro survives and becomes a consolidated project it will act as template for monetary unions in other parts of the world. However, theirs are only speculative assumptions. They do not base their claims on empirical evidence. I provide the empirical material to support their hypothesis. On the basis of near 80 semi-structured financial elite interviews in China, Brazil and the GCC (concretely in Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), my empirically grounded research shows that indeed the euro is seen in China as a harbinger, in Brazil as a source of inspiration and in the GCC as a role model for regional monetary cooperation. Furthermore, the consolidation of the euro does also show that a multipolar monetary system might be more stable than the current system dominated by the dollar. In all these cases, the euro project is seen as a laboratory for future monetary developments, thus the ideational influence and power of Europe in monetary affairs is considerable.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For Blyth (2002, p. 35) ideas matter because they allow agents to reduce uncertainty by interpreting the nature of the crisis; they serve as collective action and coalition-building resources; they are used as weapons that allow to attack and delegitimize existing institutions; they are seen as institutional blueprints to construct new institutions; and they underpin the new emerging institutional framework.
- 3.
Other indications that we are in a moment of Knightian uncertainty in the IMS are the high price of gold, long run fiscal problems in the US and the EZ, the over-accumulation of foreign reserves by China, the use of unprecedented monetary policies such as quantitative easing in the West and an ongoing global public debate about the lack of political leadership in the world system.
- 4.
Current fieldwork in China undertaken in May 2012 shows that these perceptions are still broadly valid.
- 5.
The 76 interviews are geographically distributed as follows: UK (n = 5), Brazil, (n = 11), Saudi Arabia (n = 15), United Arab Emirates (n = 16), China (n = 29). The anonymised transcripts of the interviews can be requested for evidence-check by contacting the editor.
- 6.
Participants in the latter groups were chosen as primary sources because of their policy advisory roles. Others were interviewed as secondary sources to enhance the background knowledge.
- 7.
In Brazil the interviews were conducted in Portuguese, and in China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE in English. I acknowledge that a possible bias in the answers could be my European identity, which could make the interviewees more inclined to speak more positively about the euro. However, in light of the critiques that most of these elites directed to the EZ for not speeding up the integration process, if existent, this bias was rather minor.
- 8.
The ten countries forming ASEAN are Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
- 9.
In parallel to the CMI and CMIM initiatives, the ASEAN + 3 countries have also put great efforts in establishing an Asian bond market. This development also needs to be seen as an important step towards regional monetary integration and out of dollar unipolarity (Gao 2008, p. 379).
- 10.
These seminars, which bring together the governors of the central banks and senior staff from the European Commission and the GCC General Secretariat, are currently conducted every 2 years. The three seminars organised so far were held in Mainz (Germany) in 2008, in Rome (Italy) in 2010 and in Abu Dhabi (UAE) in 2012.
- 11.
Geopolitical considerations are common among GCC financial elites that do not hold public positions. One of the geopolitical rumours in Dubai is that the UAE did not drop out of the GCC because of the future GCB location in Riyadh, but rather because of US pressure to abandon a project that could lead to a more independent GCC monetary policy and therefore to the de-pegging from the dollar. In a region washed with conspiracy theories, this might be another one. Nonetheless, several participants would refer to it and others would consider it as perfectly plausible given that dollar hegemony depends to a large extent on the GCC region remaining pegged to the dollar (I-Y-3 2010; I-Y-8 2010; I-Z-13 2010, see Momani 2008).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Federico Steinberg, Magnus Ryner, Andy Kilmister and Stephen Hurt for useful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Oxford Brookes University for providing me with the financial support necessary to undertake the fieldwork for this research.
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Otero-Iglesias, M. (2013). From Harbinger to Role Model: The Influence of the Euro in Regional Monetary Cooperation. In: Boening, A., Kremer, JF., van Loon, A. (eds) Global Power Europe - Vol. 1. Global Power Shift. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32412-3_10
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