Europe’s uncertain identity Gilles Andréani
Introduction The launch of the euro is a success of historic proportions.1 It is also the ultimate vindication of the method first sketched out nearly fifty years ago in the Schuman memorandum. That memorandum—the work of 1A French version Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet—sought to promote economic of this text, integration in order to attain a political objective, while avoiding “L’Europe des a precise definition of what that objective should be. Today, as we incertitudes”, witness the birth of the euro, this “method” is still very much alive. appears in Uncertainty has thus all along been an innate feature of the “Commentaire”, European integration process. And ambiguity has undoubtedly Spring 1999 helped the process, by offering its opponents a moving and ill-defined target.