Pulling out a Deutsche Mark note to purchase admission to climb Berlin’s Victory Column (Siegesäule), the tourist might notice how this new political correctness also applies to European currencies. European bills and coins generally display the likenesses of famous artists and scientists, in sharp contrast to the money of that ruder, pan-continental power across the Atlantic. Although it also has suffered from vicious civil conflict (and in recent years replaced almost all the specific images), America still displays on its currency historical figures such as George Washington (military victor against the British), Abraham Lincoln (who chose to fight rather than let the Confederate states secede), General U.S. Grant, and that renowned Indian-killer, Andrew Jackson.
Now many of those European currencies are due to be replaced by the Euro which, judging from the new Euronotes, takes this pacific trend in European legal tender to the ultimate extreme. But this is hardly an accident. Indeed, the rules under which graphic artists competed to submit designs for the new currency explicitly forbade the display of any recognizable national icons - places, monuments, or historical figures - on the grounds that these could inadvertently favor one member state over another.
Politics and history, which can upset people, thus yielded to the rather more innocuous architecture and civil engineering. The front of each of the new Euronotes displays windows and gateways, according to the ECB website to "symbolise the European spirit of openness and co-operation." The back has, in addition to a silhouette of the European continent and the EU circle of 15 stars, the likeness of a different bridge, to "symbolise the close co-operation and communication between Europe and the rest of the world." But no specific, real-life European bridges, mind you - although here it is probably already too late for the 5 Euro note, whose bridge looks so similar to the Pont du Gard, a Roman-built aqueduct in the south of France, that by now all Frenchmen can recognize it.
These lucky Eurocitizens have thus managed to pluck from their new money a tangible connection to their own heritage, of which their franc provided them plenty for decades, but which somehow ran counter to the explicit intentions of EU officials. (Expect it to disappear in the next 5 Euro design.) So can we write off the Euro as simply another example, as a commentator in Le Monde put it, of "the incapacity of the technocratic princes governing Europe to produce either meaning or symbolism?"
No, because there will also be new Eurocoins. These present a veritable cacophony of symbolism. Meaning, however - at least of the pan-European variety - is another question entirely. Member states are allowed to imprint illustrations of their choice on one side of the Eurocoins they mint. The more sober (Benelux plus Ireland) are content with supplying only one for all, not that these appeal very much to people from outside their borders: the Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix, for example, or Luxembourg’s Grand Duke Henri. But the other EU states provide at least three different images, and some (Italy, Greece, and Austria) supply one for each of the eight new coins, many of rather obscure significance for the non-national.
These coins will nonetheless all be legal tender throughout the EU, and the use by a Finn (say) of a coin minted far to the south to make a newsstand purchase should impress him at a practical level, like nothing that has come before, with the high degree of economic interdependence among EU states. But that Euroglow might diminish somewhat if he first takes a closer look at the piece in his hand and finds himself staring uncomprehendingly at the image of peace activist Bertha von Suttner (on the Austrian 2-Euro coin) or politician Eleftherios Venizelos (on the Greek 50-Eurocent piece).
Ultimately, then, the Eurocurrency does not quite succeed in providing a set of unifying symbols for the common European polity, but this is not for the reason that most commentators adduce. It is simply not true that this new currency is too abstract and sterile, because the coins are currency, too, and they are too hermetic and particular. Apparently two different committees, assigned to address the two physical forms of the new currency, have each, figuratively speaking, shot wide of the mark on either side.
Was their technique the deliberate one of an artillery gunner, gradually zeroing-in on target? Or was the ideal fairly easy to imagine from the start: namely common banknotes and coins for all, embellished with images directly alluding to the bold pan-European political experiment which this money represents - displaying Jean Monnet, say, and Robert Schuman, and Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi, and even Charlemagne. These Eurodreamers of the past deserve this honor; the Eurodreamers of the present - and they are out there - simply need to gain more influence within these committees.