This project seeks to reform the symbols of Euro currency.
For three reasons, the EU’s current symbols are no longer capable of eliciting European-ness. First, existing icons are inadequate vehicles for expressing the project of European unity as they are backwards-looking, appealing to a manufactured myth or an archaic vision of European-ness defined by Cold War ideology. Second, existing icons were almost exclusively selected by elite policymakers decades in the past: with the expansion of the EU in the 1990s and 2000s, both geographically and socially as the Union encompassed more peoples and grew from a distant economic entity to a fact of daily life for its citizens (particularly through currency), the Union’s symbols were (and are) frequently interpreted by citizens and policymakers as unwelcome interlopers, symbols of the EU’s democratic deficit and apparent erosion of national identity and national sovereignty. Related to this problem is that the EU’s current symbolic identity is backwards-looking; using symbols which appeal to an imagined unity in history (a unity which never existed) rather than embracing Europe’s diversity and looking forward to what the EU will become in the future. Third, the EU’s current symbols are incapable of appealing to emotions and fostering affiliation to the Union as current icons belong to the realm of ‘heroic European-ness’: official symbols which are intended to behave like the traditional symbols of nation-states. This barely functions for a national identity based in an imagined ethnic, primordial unity, and cannot possibly work in a supranational entity such as the EU, which is far too young to have acquired the necessary myth for people to emotionally identify with it. Subsequently the EU’s symbols must compete with national symbols. This is a battle which EU symbols inevitably lose, as a common European identity does not exist. The election of a largely Eurosceptic Parliament in 2014 demonstrated the extent to which citizen identification with the EU is eroding. The spectre of Grexit, public hostility, the Spanish banking crisis, ongoing Eurozone protests, objections to TTIP and CETA, a surge in anti-EU populist politicians, and the threat of a second migration crisis if Turkey suspends its deal with the EU, are all related symptoms of a ‘general crisis’ of the European Union. One important theme running through this is a lack of public support for the EU – either apathy or outright hostility – among national populations. This is mediated through symbols. Formal, rational politics cannot compete with the emotional, symbolic, fundamentally arational politics of symbols and visual language. Emotion is not an adjunct of politics but the very foundation, and it is through symbols that citizens’ emotions are funnelled into political behaviour and a sense of European-ness. Political activity is not defined by purely rational thought, and particularly in the context of a supranational entity whose governance remains distant from citizens, ‘political life is rooted in the manipulation of symbols’. EU policymakers continue to assume that a European identity will emerge as a consequence of functionalist spillover and consequently, studies on political identity consider symbols to be ‘something of a quaint survival, a bit of puffery that has little influence on the real stuff of contemporary politics’. At the heart of this problem is the neofunctionalist assumption that the EU’s current symbols, and their deployment, follows the national pattern and the assumption that an identity will ‘spill over’ from integration. This is demonstrably not the case. EU policymakers want to give the EU ‘a soul’; a political rallying-point which appeals to Europeans’ emotions, expressed in symbols of what it means to be “European”. But this soul cannot be manufactured from abstract emblems. Faced with pressures that encourage Europeans to reaffirm their national identity, the EU thus requires supranational solidarity. This requires reforms in the EU’s symbolic identity.
