Еуропалық валюта бірлігінің тарихы

Basket of the currencies of the European Community member states

The European Currency Unit (, Lang es, Europäische Währungseinheit; ⟨⟩, ECU, or XEU) was a unit of account used by the European Economic Community and composed of a basket of member country currencies. The ECU came in to operation on 13 March 1979 and was assigned the ISO 4217 code. As a unit of account, the ECU was not a circulating currency and did not replace or override the value of the currency of EEC member countries. However, it was used to price some international financial transactions and capital transfers.

Using a mechanism known as the "snake in the tunnel", the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was an attempt to minimize fluctuations between member state currencies—initially by managing the variance of each against its respective ECU reference rate—with the aim to achieve fixed ratios over time, and so enable the European Single Currency (which became known as the euro) to replace national currencies.

In 1990 the British Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major proposed the creation of a 'hard' ECU, which different national currencies could compete against and, if the ECU was successful, could lead to a single currency. The move was seen by France and Germany as a wrecking tactic, especially when the increasingly Eurosceptic Thatcher announced her outright opposition to European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and the idea was abandoned.

The ECU's symbol, ₠, consists of an interlaced C and E—the initials of "European Community" in many languages of Europe. However, the symbol was not widely adopted. Few computer systems utilized by financial institutions and governments could render it, and commercial payment systems were obliged to use the ISO code, XEU, as with other currencies without widely recognised currency symbols. The Unicode designation for the ECU symbol was not implemented on many personal computer operating systems until the release of Unicode v2.1 in May 1998, which also introduced the euro sign Microsoft did include the ECU symbol in many of its European versions of Windows beginning in the early 1990s; however, accessing it required the use of an Alt code, and not all typefaces provided a glyph. By 2009, Microsoft referred to the ECU symbol as "historical". Support among other operating systems, including Macintosh operating systems, was inconsistent. Although the acronym for ECU is formed from the English name of the unit, the écu was a family of gold coins minted during the reign of Louis IX of France. The name of the ECU's successor, the euro, was chosen because the name did not favor any single language, nation, or historical period.

As the ECU was only an electronic unit of account and not a full currency, it did not have any official coins or notes that could be used for everyday transactions. However, various European countries and organizations like the European Parliament made commemorative and mock up coins and notes. A common theme on the coins was usually celebrating European unity, such as celebrating membership of the European Union. Gibraltar issued commemorative coins from 1993 through 1998, though these were (nominally) legal tender only in Gibraltar, which uses the pound sterling.

+Composition of 1 ECU1.0 (100%)