Delors Committee

[3]: 315-317 Delors leveraged this environment and in late March 1988 managed to convince German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who at that time held the half-yearly rotating presidency of the Council of the European Community, to set up a committee along the lines suggested by Genscher and to directly involve central bank governors in the process.

[3]: 318–319 It was thus Delors's idea that the committee should be principally composed of the EU countries' central bank governors, who were both technically most directly in charge and potentially the most opposed to currency unification, since that would make them lose their distinctive national monetary authority.

[7] Viewed in retrospect, the Delors Committee was spectacularly successful,[2]: 3  aided in its task by the fall of the Berlin Wall a few months after the delivery of its final report.

According to Lamfalussy, the success owes to Delors's "genius" in persuading leaders, and especially Helmut Kohl, of the indispensable nature of monetary union to ensure the viability of the European single market, which allowed him to overcome the resistance of national central banks and especially of the Bundesbank.

[9]: 119  This was however corrected in the Maastricht Treaty with an enabling clause that became the basis two decades later for European Banking Supervision, with a decision of principle in mid-2012 and implementation in November 2014.