Il trattato sull'Unione monetaria latina del 1865, un monito per la moneta unica

On December 23, 1865, four European countries (France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland) signed the Latin Monetary Union Treaty (Lmu), establishing a particular mechanism making their national currencies freely interchangeable. The Lmu, later enlarged to other European States like Greece and Spain, represents one of the most important and interesting European attempts to realize an integrated monetary area without substituting a single currency for national currencies. In particular, it was clear to the policy makers of the time that to develop trade traffic and to increase the wealth of Europeans a form of monetary integration was necessary.However, the Lmu failed for different reasons. First of all, the Pontifical State and Greece, owing to their chronically economic weakness, were not able to satisfy the economic rules at the basis of the Latin Monetary Union. These States responded to their internal economic problems by decreasing the amount of gold in their coins, thereby devaluating their currency with reference to the currencies of the other nations, with a clear breach of Lmu provisions and were formally expelled. Secondly, the Lmu was lacking in institutions looking after the functioning of the treaty. The euro crisis seems to present interesting points of contact with the collapse of Lmu. In this paper theAuthor intends to put emphasis on the elements of similarity between the two monetary unions and their crisis, particularly underling that both phenomena entered into crisis owing to the lack of an effective unification of national economic policies. The history of different forms ofmonetary union, at European and extra European level, shows that a single currency or other form of monetary cooperation are unable to work correctly if there is not a corresponding transfer of economic competences from the national to a supranational level.