20 Dollars Pierre Werner

Pierre Werner, Luxembourg's Prime Minister from 1959 to 1974, is best remembered for the 1970 Werner Report — the first serious blueprint for European monetary union, proposing a complete economic and currency union within a decade. Politics killed it. The oil shock of 1973 and the collapse of Bretton Woods shredded the political will, and the plan was shelved for nearly twenty years before resurfacing, substantially intact, as the framework for the Maastricht Treaty.

Liberia's Central Bank issued a long run of silver commemoratives in the early 2000s honoring European statesmen, largely marketed to collectors outside Africa. Werner died in June 2002, the same year this coin was struck.