The committee of Central Bank Governors as a source of rules

The creation of economic and monetary union (EMU) offers an unusual opportunity to examine how informal institutional practices are sometimes retained in the later adoption of formal rules. Long before the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty, the central banks of the Community's member states had developed numerous informal practices regarding their mutual relations; there is considerable continuity between those practices and the organizational forms, rules, and norms of behaviour that obtain under EMU. This article employs previously unpublished documentary evidence to describe the emergence of informal practices of co-operation amongst the central banks of the member states of what was then the European Community, focusing on questions of leadership and staffing during the thirty-year history of the Committee of Central Bank Governors. The article also examines the rapid evolution of these practices in the early 1990s in the face of a likely political agreement to form a monetary union.