Mercurial money vs. the resilient state: Why do governments surrender their monetary sovereignty

Why do governments surrender their monetary sovereignty? Is the state retreating in an age of globalized capital markets from hitherto sacrosanct spheres of sovereign control? How do fiscal imperatives interact with monetary policies and currency domains? Does monetary sovereignty matter to the sovereigns? The current widely accepted wisdom emphasizes the advent of the lean competition state, which has surrendered many domains of policy control to the unassailable forces of the global market. A fundamental aspect of sovereignty's defeat is reflected in states' loss of monopolistic control over the demand for their monies. I look at the motivational and causal roots of this particular manifestation of the "retreat of the nation-state"; arguably one of the most controversial symptoms of the ascendancy of the market over state autonomy. In distinction to existing literature, I place the calculus of monetary autonomy within a framework of the fiscal prerogatives of the states. I develop an alternative explanation, in which issues of monetary autonomy are dominated by fiscal priorities, and in which the fiscal calculus of the state is fundamentally constrained by the social preferences of their authority bases. Different authority bases permit different combinations of financing strategies. Monetary orders in their turn have a direct bearing on the financing strategies. By combining the political constraints and possibilities with economic factors, I generate hypotheses about which states would be more or less willing to compromise their monetary sovereignty. I test these hypotheses using aggregate data. Despite methodological problems, I find strong support for the role of fiscal factors in the choice of currency policy. Further support is provided by the analysis of a case study---Bulgaria's surrender of sovereignty with the adoption of the currency board. By focusing on the fiscal foundations of state monetary choices and the social constraints of fiscal constitutions, this research complements and expands the understanding of the political economy of monetary policy and monetary geography. It attempts to redress areas of unbalance in the current research: one is the narrow evaluation of monetary policy for its own ends, and the other is the emphasis on the deterministic effect of market forces over state policies in the age of global capital.