In the Treasury market, risk--or term--premiums are generally evident as maturities extend and reflect mostly the interaction of risk aversion and uncertainty about the future path of interest rates.
As the four freedoms of the Single Market were put in place, the far-reaching economic linkages among EU countries were making independent economic policies more and more difficult. In particular, fluctuating exchange rates were regarded as detrimental to internal trade. It was just a logical step to irrevocably fix exchange rates between the EU countries and introduce a single currency.