The adventures of the euro
So now that you have learnt all about the euro notes and coins, it is time to take the next step and find out why the European Union decided to create this single currency. Where did the idea come from? Why do we need a single currency? How was it created? Who uses it? Find the answers to all of these questions below.
You could say that the idea of the euro is connected to European friendship and cooperation. This aim can be traced back to the 1950s. During this time, just after World War II, the governments of six European states realized that it would be much better for everyone if they tried to avoid another war. It was agreed that the best way of doing this would be to cooperate and work together. This was the beginning of strong European friendship, which today is known as the European Union.
One of the most important parts of this cooperation was that countries who decided to form part of this group also made sure that they made it easier to buy and sell goods from each other.
This was one way of helping the citizens of each country to sell whatever they produced and this also helped each country to remain strong and avoid war.
Many years passed and the European Community grew bigger as more countries joined. In the 1970s they decided to make their cooperation and friendship even stronger by creating an Economic and Monetary Union. This may sound complicated, but it’s really quite simple. Economic basically means ‘buying and selling’ and Monetary means ‘money’.
As you know a union is a ‘group’, so altogether Economic and Monetary Union simply means a group of countries that buys and sells each other’s products and that uses the same money. This was the idea behind the creation of a ‘single currency’, which today is called the euro.
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