Main About the Euro Adoption in Lithuania The Euro and the Euro Area History of the Euro

History of the Euro

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1957 – The Treaty of Rome was signed, creating the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and the European Economic Community (EEC). The objective of the Member States was to remove trade and tariff barriers between them and to form a common market.

1979 – The governments and central banks of the nine Member States (Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, West Germany) created the European Monetary System (EMS) which had the main goal – to create a common currency.

1988 – The European Council, that is the Heads of State and Governments, confirmed the objective of realising Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). A committee of experts, chaired by the then President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, examined ways of achieving EMU. Its report (the Delors Report) proposed a transition in three stages.

1992 – Representatives of twelve European Union (EU) Member States signed the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) that provided for the establishment of a single EU currency and the founding of the European Central Bank.

December 1995 – The European Council decided to adopt the euro as the name of the future single currency of the EU (the Lithuanian form in unofficial documents is euras). The official graphic symbol of the euro € is derived from the Greek letter epsilon, denoting the first letter of the word Europe. The symbol is crossed with two horizontal lines, symbolizing stability in the euro area. The alphabetic code for the euro is EUR, while the digital code is 978.

Euro graphic symbol

You could see the larger image clicking on the euro graphic symbol.

From 1 January 1999 – The new currency unit, the euro, replaced national currencies in electronic transfers in 11 countries:  Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, France, Finland, Germany, and from the beginning of 2001, Greece.