The Werner Committee, a group of experts from six Member States set up by the European Economic Community (EEC) in the wave of the Hague Summit (1st-2nd December 1969) to explore – under the chairmanship of Pierre Werner, Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Luxembourg – the achievement of economic and monetary union, published its conclusions on 8 October 1970 in a document known as the Werner Report. The committee’s work was characterised by political and doctrinal differences between economists (the countries with weak currencies – France, Belgium and, to a certain extent, Italy) and monetarists (the countries with strong currencies – Germany and the Netherlands)– namely, those who saw monetary integration as a means of economic integration and those for whom it was the ultimate goal. The conflict was ultimately resolved by the adoption of a parallel approach between economic cooperation and monetary coordination in the Member States, a principle of equilibrium on the basis of which Pierre Werner was able to secure a consensus.
This paper makes extensive use of Pierre Werner’s previously unpublished archives and a collection of original oral history accounts with key players of European monetary integration. An interdisciplinary approach, together with digital methodologies (network analysis and the TXM corpus analysis framework), will be used to explore the negotiations within the Werner Committee by examining the dynamics between group members, their emerging views on EMU, their political commitment to a European currency, the similarities and differences between their ideas, their personal networks, the influence of their respective countries, their theoretical and methodological input and their contribution to the political agreement.
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