The writing was on the wall already as the European left searched for an exit from the global capitalist crisis of the 1970s. This was especially the case when the Programme Commun forged by the French Socialist and Communist Parties ran up against the implicit neoliberalism embedded in the Treaty of Rome‘s ambitions for free trade and free capital flows across Europe. With the massive capital flight that pursuing Keynesian measures led to in the face of German and American monetarism, it was the German Social Democratic leader Helmut Schmidt who forced François Mitterrand‘s famous U-turn by telling him capital controls were impossible unless he abandoned the European project. The roots of the arbitrary 3 per cent ceiling on fiscal deficits in today‘s European Stability Pact go back to the ceiling first imposed on the Mitterrand government in the early 1980s(via ZNet)