Etc. Europe

摘要

In the early '90s, officials of the newly created European Monetary Institute, the predecessor to the European Central Bank, met to discuss what their new currency, the euro, would look like. They agreed that no one country's iconography should appear on the bills, since there were to be seven denominations-from €5 up to €500-and at least 12 member states. In the interest of fairness, the officials settled on generic monuments to adorn the paper money. The structures would be nowhere in Europe, specifically, but could be anywhere, theoretically. Now, as the currency celebrates its 10th anniversary with understandably little fanfare, and the monetary union appears closer than ever to disbanding, critics in Europe still question the wisdom of those initial design parameters and wonder whether they were symptomatic of a deeper fallacy. But they can no longer say that the designs don't correspond to reality.