Curie or the Stork? Europe Argues With Itself Over Its Own Money
More than six million people have voted on whether new euro banknotes should honor cultural giants or the continent's birds and waterways
By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Ask a European what represents Europe, and you'll get an argument. That, it turns out, is the point of a currency redesign now underway at the European Central Bank, which has thrown the question open to the public rather than settling it behind closed doors.
The choice on the table: banknotes built around towering cultural figures — Marie Curie, the physicist and two-time Nobel laureate; Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish novelist who gave the world Don Quixote; Ludwig van Beethoven, the composer whose deafness never stopped the music — or banknotes built around nature itself, images of a migrating stork or a bee-eater winging across borders that, on a map, don't much trouble the birds.
More than six million people voted within a week of the survey's launch, according to the Guardian, a startling number for what is, on its face, a bureaucratic design exercise. But currency has never been merely bureaucratic. A banknote is a small, constant civic object — handled, folded, spent, forgotten — and what a government chooses to print on it is a quiet statement of who a nation, or in this case a union of nations, believes itself to be.
The stakes here are modest in the way that symbolism is always modest and always more than modest at once. The European Union has spent decades being cautious about appearing to build a shared identity, wary of stepping on national pride. A redesigned euro note that opts for Beethoven over a bee-eater — or the reverse — is a small departure from that caution, a bet that Europeans are ready to see themselves reflected, rather than just represented, on the money in their pockets.
No final design has been announced. The vote, per the Guardian's reporting, is ongoing.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know. This one's still being written.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."