Activity

The European Economic Community (EEC), as the European Union was then known, comprised Germany, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy, the original six founding members and signatories of the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25 March 1957.

anticipating another anodyne meeting like all the previous ones

Thus in 1971 Europe was jettisoned from the dollar zone by a United States intent on preserving its hegemony and unwilling to turn to austerity to save Bretton Woods.

An international fund would be created to play the role of the world's central bank and issue its currency--the bancor, as Keynes provisionally named it.

a closed, autarkic (meaning self-sufficient) economy [...] may be poor, solitary and undemocratic, but at least it is free of problems caused by other economies, by external deficits or surpluses