The paper employs a contingency mode, stressing the connection between strategic dynamics (bargaining games), cognitive dynamics (learning by interaction, policy entrepreneurship) and the specific institutional milieu, to help explain the nature of the role played by the European Commission and Jacques Delors in relation to the initiation and negotiation of the EMU project. It thus covers the period 1988-91, and the focus is more on agency than on the wider structural factors affecting EMU. It is based on the results of some 250 elite interviews with leading policy actors across Europe and on the contents of private papers concerning the Intergovernmental Conference made available to the authors. The paper stems from research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK
