The European Community is stepping tenta- tively toward a European Monetary Union (EMU)

that would replace most of Western Europe’s cur-rencies with a single money, perhaps called the Euro-pean Currency Unit (ECU). * No previous monetary union ever involved such a large portion of the world economy or resulted in the disappearance of so many major trading currencies. Historical evidence presented here suggests that a durable monetary union requires that one monetary authority control policy for the entire union and that it have sufficient power to enforce the agreement on the member nations. For non-Europeans, transacting business with en-tities in a European Monetary Union would be quite different from dealing with entities in today’s separate nations, each with its own currency. Furthermore