Presented at the Sixth Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Torino, 12-15 September 2007

Why do monetary unions fail? Answers to this question from a material-based approach tend to point to a breakdown in elite political support, especially when actors have material incentives to ‘cheat’ on their multilateral commitments rather than cooperate to overcome the collective action problem that a monetary union entails. Recent ideational approaches have focused on the role of shared economic ideas among elites, as well as elite struggles over ‘national identity’, as crucial ingredients in the construction, maintenance, or failure of a monetary union (see Abdelal, 2001; McNamara, 1999). Both approaches focus on elites as the key actors driving monetary change. This paper draws on a historical sociology approach to argue that the informal actions taken by non-elites as survival strategies in a monetary crisis provide an important additional ingredient for understanding monetary system change, which is illustrated through a case study of the collapse of the ruble zone monetary union over 1991-3.