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An Opportunity or a Threat? 15hoped would drive the EEC forward towards out and out political unity. 14 Hence itwas extremely good news for the European Commission that the Heads of Stateand Government had collectively decided that the Community needed to press forwardinto a number of challenging and important new areas of activity.Of these the single most exciting was probably monetary cooperation. This wasadmittedly a field where the European Commission had already taken its first tentativesteps. 15 Indeed the Hague communiqué explicitly referred to the Barre Plan ofFebruary 1969, one of the recent Commission forays into the field of monetary affairs.But the Barre Plan had been more notable for its caution than for its audacity.16 Receiving member state sanction to go much further and faster towards fulleconomic and monetary union was a huge and potentially highly rewarding development.This certainly was an area of European activity which would provide amplescope for Commission activism and for large-scale economic and politicalspill-over. Only a truly moribund institution could have failed to react with excitementto this prospect.Another reason to welcome member state activism on monetary affairs was theway in which discord and inaction in the field of exchange rates might actuallythreaten the EEC’s existing activities. This danger had already been brought hometo the Commission in the course of the preceding year, when first the devaluation ofthe French Franc and then the re-evaluation of the Deutsche Mark had brought toan end that cocoon of currency stability within which most of the early phase ofEuropean integration had occurred, demonstrated the degree to which unilateralmember state actions in the monetary field had the potential to aggravate relationsamongst the Six, and greatly complicated the operation of the CAP whose centralisedprice system had been posited on the maintenance of exchange rate stabilitybetween EEC nations. 17 Should the 1969 currency movements prove to be harbingersof much more generalised exchange rate instability, then the Communitymight not merely find forward movement difficult, but could actually discover itselfto be moving backwards, with both the CAP and the customs union seriously underthreat. Again there were strong reasons for Rey and his fellow Commissioners to bethankful that the summit had not chosen to ignore this issue. 1814. For a good example of ongoing faith that spill-over would in the end prevail, see W. HALLSTEIN,Europe in the Making, op.cit. The influence of ‘neo-functionalist’ theory on the Commission’sown understanding of how the future would evolve is discussed in Jonathan P.J. WHITE, TheoryGuiding Practice: the Neofunctionalists and the Hallstein EEC Commission, in: Journal ofEuropean Integration History, 1(2003), pp.111-131.15. For an indication of how lengthy the pre-history of European monetary cooperation was, see B.CURLI, Questioni monetarie e costruzione europea (1955-1962), in: Europa Europe, 10/1(2001),pp.94-119.16. See ECHA, COM(69)150, Memorandum de la Commission au Conseil sur la coordination despolitiques économiques et la coopération monétaire au sein de la Communauté, 12.02.1969.17. For the anxious Council debates that followed the French and German decisions see Council ofMinisters archive, Brussels (CMA), R/2416/69, Procès-verbal de la 78 e session du Conseil,11-12.08.1969 & R2420/69, Procès-verbal de la session extraordinaire du Conseil tenue àLuxembourg, 27.10.1969.