Speech by Mr Yves Mersch, Governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg, at a lecture in memory of Mr Pierre Werner, organised by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), London, 14 October 2010.
"Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Neither the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty of 1950, nor the 1957 Treaty of Rome dealt extensively with currency. This might have been because convertibility after World War II was not very wide-spread and capital controls were the norm.
Belgium was one of the first countries to establish free movement of capital but only within a dual exchange rate regime. This particularity had been one of the reasons for Luxembourg to emerge as a financial activities center for Europe.
The principle of fixed exchange rates had been a feature of the international framework for currency stability after World War II for the economies of Europe, North America and Japan. The Bretton Woods System was based on gold and the US dollar as the predominant monetary standard and worked for several years with almost no frictions. By 1968 a new era of currency instability threatened when market turbulence forced the revaluation of the German Mark and the devaluation of the French Franc. These developments clearly revealed the weaknesses of the Bretton Woods System as well as the threats to the common market and specifically the common agricultural policy.
Ideas of a new European currency framework gained momentum and Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Werner, also Minister of Finance, was asked to steer a Committee mandated to design the path to an increased economic and monetary integration of the six then members of the European Economic Community. That report, finished on the 8 October 1970 and sent to the Ministers of Finance in the first instance, laid down the achievement of Economic and Monetary Union by 1980....."
Source: http://www.bis.org/review/r101019b.pdf?frames=0
Wiki: Werner plan
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