INTRODUCTION

The purpose and scope of this documentation

When, on 1 January 1999, the new single currency of the European Union, the euro, was quoted for the first time on the international exchange markets under its international abbreviation, ‘EUR’ ¹⁾, a widespread interest in its history emerged, with questions such as: when the idea of a single currency originally came up; what different arguments and options were put forward; who contributed to and influenced the debate; how, in the end, did the European Union’s economic and monetary union (EMU) come about?

This compilation of historical texts is intended to give at least a partial answer to these questions and to make internal sources of the European Commission in the run-up to EMU accessible to the public. It also shows the Commission’s own involvement, from the beginning, in the decisions that ultimately led to the creation of the euro.

This reader will enable anybody who is interested in answering the question of why we needed a monetary union and how we got the euro to look behind the scenes of this more than 30-year-long process of creating a common currency for the European Union and to analyse it from different angles: professional, academic, historical, political or public.

A fully comprehensive collection of texts would have been unmanageably large, so we have given priority to those documents that are either important reference documents or have not been published before. Where decisions, studies or papers are referred to but are not accessible electronically in this compilation, the source is indicated for further research.

The internal documents as well as already published texts, are accessible in an electronic database (Historical documentation).

The collection of historical texts on EMU, will, in particular, give an inside view of how, at the beginning of 1970 within the space of less than two months, the European Commission prepared the first 'Plan by stages' for the creation of an economic and monetary union’, in line with the decision taken by the summit of Heads of State and Government in Den Haag ²⁾ on 1 and 2 December 1969 to make economic and monetary union an official goal of the European integration.

In addition to a number of internal papers about the organisation of and discussions within the preparatory Commission's inter-service group, the documentation also includes documents and studies which existed at that time, and which were taken as working or reference documents by the group, such as the "Memorandum of the Commission concerning the co-ordination of economic policies and monetary co-operation within the Community" (February 1969, ‘Plan Barre’), the Belgian plan (‘Plan Eyskens’), the German plan by stages (‘Schiller-Plan’), the ‘Giscard d’Estaing plan’, the Luxembourg plan (Werner, January 1968), the European Parliament’s Dichgans report (November 1966) and plans for a European currency by Robert Mundell, Pierre Uri and Hans von der Groeben.

Finally, a number of background documents used in the information and communication campaign in the run-up to the introduction of the euro might be useful as reference documents for conferences and seminars and help to understand the question: why did the European Union need, and subsequently introduce, the euro as a single currency for its Member States?

¹⁾ daily quotations at stock exchanges within and outside the European Union were recorded under the 'epsilon' (€) symbol.

²⁾ with view to the multi-lingual use of this website geographical and original names have been kept in their original language(s).