The most immediate predecessor to the EMU was the 19th Century Latin Monetary Union, which attempted to unify several European currencies at a time when most circulating coins were still made of gold or silver.
It came into being in August 1866; its initial members were France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, and they agreed that their national currencies should be standardised and interchangeable. There was no shared, single legal tender, but the currencies of the member countries were pegged at a fixed rate with each other.
Two years later, the four founding nations were joined by Spain and Greece and in 1889 the union was further enlarged by admitting Romania, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Serbia and San Marino.
(...)
Ever since it gained its hard-fought independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, Greece has been plagued by recurrent budget crises, frequent state defaults and long periods during which it's effectively been cut off from the international capital markets.
So while it was one of the earliest nations to join the Latin Monetary Union, its membership soon became more a cause of concern than celebration, for its chronically weak economy meant successive Greek governments responded by decreasing the amount of gold in their coins, thereby debasing their currency in relation to those of other nations in the union and in violation of the original agreement.
So irresponsible and unacceptable did Greece's behaviour become that it was formally expelled from the Latin Monetary Union in 1908. As a result, some effort was made to readjust the nation's monetary policy and Greece was readmitted to the Union two years later.
(...)
It's an intriguing historical irony that among the pioneers of these endeavours seem to have been none other than the ancient Greeks.
One of the earliest examples of such a union occurred sometime about 400BC, along the western coast of Asia Minor, where seven Greek states allied themselves and produced a coinage that directly foreshadowed later European monetary unions. On the front of the coins was a common design of the baby Heracles strangling a snake, and the first three letters of the Greek word for alliance. On the reverse, each state placed its own particular image. All these coins were minted to the same weight and formed a unified currency, which was the tangible symbol of the seven members' economic alliance.
No-one quite knows why or when this early effort at a monetary union collapsed but 200 years later, the ancient Greeks had another try, organised through what was known as the Achaean League, an alliance of territories and city states covering the whole of the Peloponnese that had been formed about 280BC.
Once again, their shared currency had a common obverse design, in this case the head of Zeus, and reverse patterns that were specific to the individual issuing authority.
The result, according to the historian Polybius, was that the Greeks "had not only formed an allied and friendly community but they have the same laws, weights, measures and coinage, as well as the same officials, council and courts of justice". Here was a level of integration, which the most ardent and ambitious Eurocrat of today might envy and this may help explain why, unlike the Latin or the Scandinavian monetary unions, the Achaean League lasted for well over 100 years.
Its eventual dissolution, in 146BC, was not because the members of the league fell out with each other, over the currency or anything else but was the result of an external shock in the form of a crushing military defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Corinth. Which leaves us with the following paradox: the ancient Greeks were pioneers of monetary unions and were quite eager to keep them in being.
Modern Greece, by contrast, has been a threat and a danger to any monetary union that it has ever joined.
