Towards the Euro

In 1988, during its presidency of the European Council, as early as the inaugural address to the European Parliament by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Germany championed the ideas of a European Central Bank modeled on the Bundesbank and of a single currency. To achieve this, EMS Member States would have to remove foreign exchange controls, establish independent central banks, and have structurally balanced public finances. On January 1, 1990, the French government abolished the exchange controls established in 1936 by Léon Blum. Prime Minister Michel Rocard created the minimum integration income funded by the wealth tax. He saluted the work of Yvette Roudy, who is best known for the Law of July 13, 1984, on gender equality in the workplace. On September 12, 1990, on the occasion of the signing of the Two Plus Four Treaty (the two Germanys and the four Allied Powers signatories to the 1945 Potsdam Agreement), Hans-Dietrich Genscher expressed his delight at seeing Germany finally reunited and sovereign. The European Union’s enlargement continued at a brisk pace, with Austria, Finland, and Sweden joining in 1995, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013.