Pascal Salin Many of the texts which have been used for the present book
were presented as papers at a conference organized in Brussels by
Michiel van Notten for the 1 Institutum Europaeum in December 1980on the
subject of European Monetary Union and Currency Competition. However,
this book is more than the mere proceedings of a conference. It aims at
presenting the reader with an homogenous text, not a patchwork of
papers, in spite of the large number of contributors. Though it would be
absurd to pretend that these contributors -some of whom are prominent
thinkers - agree on everything, their dissenting opinions do not go
beyond the usual qualifications one may find in a book of which the
final direction is quite clear, but where the requirement of
intellectual strictness leads to the analysis of both the pros and the
cons of a problem. It may also seem to some that this book deals with
two different subjects, currency competition and monetary union, which
have been joined together more or less randomly. We believe, however,
that this impression will be dis- pelled as soon as they commence
reading. Both sections of the book deal with one and the same topic: the
optimal organization of a monetary system. Present efforts to achieve
European monetary unification all suffer from the same preju- dices with
respect to the organization of the monetary systems within each country
and within the world as a whole.