The dream of a single European currency, sketched out by a few visionaries in the 1920s, will become reality with the birth of the euro on January 1st, 1999, after 30 years of setbacks.
The founding text of what was to later become the European Union (EU), the Treaty of Rome on March 25th, 1957, did not plan for the creation of a European monetary zone, and the ups and downs of relations among the European neighbours at the time - such as Britain's initial refusal to enter the old European Economic Community (EEC) - blocked any progress on this point.
It was not until the 1960s that the first concrete attempts emerged to create a veritable "economic and monetary union".
Mr Raymond Barre, the rotund, avuncular, very pro-European French economist who went on to become his country's Prime Minister from 1976 to 1981, got the ball rolling again when he was vice president of the European Commission. His proposals led to the so-called Werner report of October 1970 that laid down a "phased plan for implementing economic and monetary union" in the then EEC. This was the first practical attempt to unify the monetary system in western Europe, as part of a broader scheme to foster greater unity in an area that had been split by two major wars this century alone.
It would take 10 years, however, to bear fruit, thwarted in the early 1970s by the gradual breakdown of the fixed exchange rate system set down at the Bretton Woods conference in July, 1944.
Created in 1972, the "snake in the tunnel" system, as it was called at the time, was an attempt to stabilise exchange rates but it was destabilised by the dollar's flotation and especially by the first major oil crisis in 1973-74.
This system was replaced by the European Monetary System (EMS), baptised in 1979 by then French President Mr Valery Giscard d'Estaing and former German Chancellor Mr Helmut Schmidt, which attempted to rectify the problems with the "snake" system. But the EMS was itself heavily shaken several times because of the macro-economic differences that were still too great among member states.
It was at the European Council in Hanover, Germany, in June, 1988, that the EEC, which then had 12 members, revived the idea of a monetary and economic union, and less than a year later, Mr Jacques Delors, then European Commission president, produced a detailed report on the matter.
The major impetus to go through with the single currency project, came with the event no one ever foresaw or actually expected: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
Concern that a united Germany - with its strong deutschmark and economic dominance - should be firmly anchored within a wider, unified Europe, prompted its partners, with France under then-president Mr Francois Mitterrand in the lead, to step up the process towards integrated, monetary union.
The plan, backed by Germany's Chancellor Mr Helmut Kohl, led to the Maastricht Treaty on European union, signed on February 7th, 1992, in the Dutch city of the same name. It laid down the framework for the European Central Bank (ECB) and it will be in place by July 1st at the latest.
After a long quarrel between France and Germany, the single currency was given a name at the Madrid summit in December, 1995: it would be the "euro" and not the "ecu" as the French had hoped.
The symbol for the euro - a yellow and blue Greek epsilon - and the new coins and notes were unveiled a year later at the EU summit in Dublin. The move towards the euro has continued on schedule, though not without much squabbling, internal debate, and predictions of doom .
Despite rumours of postponement coupled with the outright hostility of many Europeans against this historic currency change, the EU partners have managed to meet the deadline for the euro's official launch on January 1st. This will be followed by a three-year transition before it replaces national currency in 2002.
