Little Progress at Meeting to Unify European Currency : Money: Finance ministers of 12 European Community nations discuss ways to achieve monetary union. They are far from a consensus.

Europe’s finance ministers, stumbling on the path to economic unity, emerged Saturday from an all-day meeting as divided as ever on whether and how to transform the moneys of the 12 nations of the European Community into a single currency.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major said he won new sympathizers for his go-slow approach to monetary union. “Of the 12,” Major said after the meeting, “nine in one form or another saw some merit in elements of our proposals.”

Karl Otto Pohl, director of the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, was asked whether the meeting advanced the cause of monetary union. “Not at all,” he said.

Italian Treasury Minister Guido Carli, as host to the session, claimed that “some progress has been made in identifying ways in which differences can be met.”

But he conceded that the 12 finance ministers were far from a consensus on all the delicate issues involved in abandoning such currencies as the British pound, the German mark and the French franc.

EC President Jacques Delors proclaimed himself optimistic that European heads of state could advance the cause of monetary union when they meet in Rome in December.

Delors is the author of a 1989 report urging movement toward a single European currency promptly after the 12 EC nations create a single market for goods and services as of Jan. 1, 1993. A single currency, in Delors’ view, would bind the European economies more closely together and eliminate the cost of exchanging money from one currency to another as it crosses borders.

Although France and some of Europe’s smaller nations have signed on to the Delors formula, officials in Germany and, more particularly, Britain have balked.

Pohl, less favorably disposed toward currency union than German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, has argued that Germany’s vigilantly anti-inflationary monetary policy might fall victim to a common monetary policy for all of Europe.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has warned that to accept a common European currency would be to abandon an important aspect of national sovereignty.

Earlier this year, Major launched an alternative proposal to establish not a single currency for all of Europe but a pan-European currency that could be used even as the existing 11 currencies (Belgium and Luxembourg share the Belgian franc) stayed in use.

A single European currency cannot work, Major said after Saturday’s meeting, unless all nations adopt matching economic policies. Although conceding that none of the other finance ministers supported the British position in full, he said many of them expressed support for elements of the plan.

The 12 EC members range from the German juggernaut to the relatively weak economies of Greece and Portugal, and Major said the weaker nations would face massive unemployment and a collapse of asset values if they were yoked to the tight monetary policies that the larger European nations would demand.

But Major insisted that the goal of a single currency is not dead.

“All that has happened,” he said, “is that people are coming upon some of the hard practicalities.”