Dead Eurocrats
Printed money, like the
government budgets behind it, is conceived in optimism, if not in fantasy. The
very designs on the bills--such as the fortresslike Treasury that appears on
our $10 note--seem to promise a happy future of redemption amid prosperity. The
bills aren't called promissory notes for nothing. What they promise is a flush
till.
In this time-honored spirit,
the new designs for the uniform currency of the European Community offer
beguiling visions of unity and wealth, of responsible fiscal practice and
thriving trade. Revealed last December and slated to go into use across the
continent in a few years, these notes herald nothing less than a new and nobly
unified Europe.
But for
all their color and utopian promise, the new notes are lifeless. After all,
coinage and currency usually reflect the character of the issuing state, and in
this case the state is largely bureaucratic. The European Monetary Institution
in Frankfurt, which under the 1991 Maastricht Treaty is charged with making the
new Eurodollar, is described in its own literature as "an organization of the
European Union, with legal personality." "Legal personality" is right on the
mark. This is money designed not by bureaucrats but by Eurocrats, an all-star
team of international paper-pushers.
Everything about the new currency is vintage Eurocrat. Its
name, the euro, was picked because it translates easily into almost every
member country's language. Only Greek, with its own native alphabet, requires a
second rendering of the name on the bill. Its counterfeitproof
construction--which includes the use of unreproducible holographs--attests to
the businesslike thought of its designers. And the decision to cut each of the
seven notes in a different size (as well as a different color), to help the
visually impaired, reveals the practical-minded Eurocrats' more considerate
side.
The
specifications laid out for the look of the new bank notes by the institution
are as tortuously legalistic as the notorious specs issued in Brussels, the
seat of the new Eurocracy, to regulate intracontinental trade. (The Brussels
rules fastidiously prescribe every detail of what can and cannot be sold within
the European economic community, yielding such creations as the Euroapple,
already infamous in the orchards of Wye, Westfalia, and everywhere else that
fruit cultivated for centuries has been found not to make the grade.) Back in
June 1995, the European Monetary Institution set up committees to choose
possible "themes" for the designs, settling at last on two: a historical one,
the "ages and styles" of Europe; and a geometrical one, "abstract modern."
These themes were broad enough to encompass almost anything individual
designers could come up with. What they ruled out were portraits of people,
especially portraits of leaders. Individuals inevitably raise the specter of
nationalism. No dead presidents here.
The institution next held a competition,
inviting design teams from the central banks of the various member nations to
enter. Thirtysome entries flowed in, for consideration by a jury of 14 experts
whose diverse national and professional backgrounds rivaled even the crew of
Star Trek --ranging from Baron Philippe Robert-Jones, art historian and
permanent secretary of the Academie Royale des Sciences des Lettres et des
Beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels, to Guido Crapanzano, rector of the
Instituto di Scienze della Comunicazione in Milan. Last July the jury picked a
winner, although it has kept the creators' identities unpublicized in the
interest of future continental unity.
The winning designer went
for the "ages and styles" theme, interpreted as such stock architectural
elements as bridges, windows, and gateways. The eight ages in which these
bridges, windows, and gateways appear are Classical, Romanesque, Gothic,
Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo, the age of iron and glass architecture, and
the age of modern architecture. The colors are muted and staid, the
illustrations as innocuous, impeccable, and dispassionate as those you would
find in an economics textbook.
They're
also supposed to have symbolic meaning. The windows and gates represent the
spirit of openness and cooperation of the new confederation, we are told, while
the bridge is a metaphor, as Bill Clinton showed, guaranteed not to go over the
heads of the populace of any continent. More specifically, according to the
literature, the bridge "epitomizes the dawn of the new common Europe with its
common cultural heritage and the vision of a common future in the next century,
indeed, the new millennium." These are not, mind you, actual existing bridges,
like London Bridge or the Pont Neuf, but are "generic, and cannot be attributed
to any particular place in any single country."
The result is an entire landscape of the generic--a place
that is never France or Germany but always just Europe, as it might figure in
landscapes chosen for American travel ads. Looking at them, you try to conjure
up the people whose wallets these bills will inhabit, the new race of Europeans
who will have no English umbrellas, French berets, or German bellies. It is not
easy.
These notes, cool and
considered, may make more practical sense than our greenbacks, with their wacky
eye on the pyramid swiped from Masonic lore and the Model T-era automobile that
still putts along in front of the Treasury building. But will they ever really
circulate? According to the Maastricht Treaty, the currency will be put into
circulation only after individual national economies have hit certain
"targets"--such as a sufficiently low ratio of debt to gross domestic product.
But these targets still seem far out of reach. Germany, which has the largest
economy and the strongest currency in the group, was supposed to lead the way,
but recently German unemployment has jumped to levels not seen since the Weimar
Republic, and the mark is softening.
The European Monetary
Institution promises that it will announce within the next two years the exact
date on which the euros will go into use. It's supposed to be no later than
Jan. 1, 2002. Not until then will we know whether this is real money or funny
money--whether it will be worth a continental.
