'Valerie Caton's book is a sure-footed, impressively researched and very readable guide to the conception, negotiation and execution of the EU's most high-risk project to date. Rarely has France's decisive role in bending economics to politics been laid so bare. Her book is essential reading for understanding the fissile interplay of politics, economics and diplomatic poker which has brought Europe to its current crisis of economic performance and political legitimacy. For all Germany's growing economic primacy, Caton leaves her readers in no doubt about France's key role in - and special responsibility for - resolving that crisis.' Maurice Fraser, Professor of Practice in European Politics and Head of the European Institute, London School of Economics, UK 'Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl sought to build a haven of stability, peace and prosperity at the heart of Europe. Two decades after the end of their historic partnership, the EU offers only austerity for too many of its citizens. The reasons lie in the keystone of the Mitterrand-Kohl project, the euro, whose story Valerie Caton tells, drawing on previously unused archive material in this excellent book.Caton's great strength is to demonstrate the rationality of decisions as they were taken at the time, while underlining their longer-term irrationality, and their unintended consequences. Her tale is therefore both sober there is explanation without finger-pointing and sobering, because it tells of the hole at the heart of the euro, a currency lacking the economic and political underpinnings to withstand the perfect storm that broke over the world financial system in 2007-8. That ways were found to stave off complete disaster testifies to the determination of European leaders to make it work. That they had to be improvised testifies to the weaknesses of the initial project weaknesses to date only partially remedied.' Andrew Knapp, Professor of French Politics and Contemporary History, University of Reading, UK