In a few weeks the European Central Bank is due to vote on the design of the new euro banknotes.

After 24 years of idealised windows and non-existent bridges (at least until a nice Dutch artist built them all in the charming village of Spijkenisse), it is apparently time to give a strong and recognisable identity to those banknotes that many of us still handle every day.

The ‘finalists’, on which the idea competition for graphic designers and illustrators was based, were two: characters from European culture or birds and rivers.

Her name was Sklodowska, by golly

As was to be expected, the bet on cultural figures immediately started.
There was talk of Cervantes, Beethoven, the divine Maria Callas (hopefully without any hidden reference to Kaja Kallas), Marie Curie (pardon: Marie Sklodowska, as the Poles always nitpickily point out) and, in Italy’s share, of course, Leonardo da Vinci (it is always moving to see the Italian contribution to humanity represented by a military engineer with a passion for clinical anatomy).

It would be a nice burst of pride, no doubt about it.
The message would be clear: Europeans are done being ashamed and hiding, they are proud of their civilisation, they have decided to remind themselves of it every time they pay for a beer and to reiterate it to hundreds of millions of non-European visitors every time they change money in the airport lobby.

Few, on the other hand, have commented on the alternative with birds and rivers.
Which is a pity, also because, in all likelihood, birds and rivers will win and we will soon find ourselves pulling them in and out of our wallets.

It’s like watching a movie that has already been written: someone will protest that among those ‘characters of European culture’ there is no Maltese, no Latvian or no Croatian.
The British will protest that ‘European culture’ is being restricted to the Eurozone countries, sparking off an interminable debate about putting Shakespeare in place of Cervantes (‘Better Hamlet, the first of the bourgeois who cannot decide to fight, or Don Quixote, the last of the knights who cannot decide not to fight?’) or perhaps John Lennon in place of Beethoven.

In the end, so as not to offend anyone’s sensibilities, they will fall back on the wallcreeper and the bee-eater.

A river of interpretations

At a first glance, the ornithological-fluvial option would appear as the triumph of the decadent spirit of our times: the white man perceives himself as an intruder in this universe, dismisses all his own creations in defiance and withdraws into silence, at a placid pace, leaving the so-called “nature” (or, more prosaically, the Chinese man who does not have the same scruples) as master of the field.

But this would only be a superficial reading. Just as superficial as the official reading given in the competition announcement: birds in their flight know no borders, rivers in their flow connect different countries, and so on with other pearls of Tiktok sentimentality.

In reality, if one were to look at those images of rivers and birds with a mischievous eye, one might find something far more controversial.

Those who know a little of the rhetoric of 19th and early 20th century nationalism, for example, know that rivers were a fixed ingredient: from Rhine Gold to Deutschlandlied, from March 1821 to the Piave Song, from the Vltava to the Yellow River Cantata, examples abound.

Watercourses and wildlife, in fact, recall a much more ancestral belonging than novelists and scientists: belonging to one’s own land.

It is a purely sensorial, instinctive, wild bond, not mediated by abstract language and therefore not subject to any rational parameter. The banks of my river, the song of my birds, the landscapes of my adolescence remain the hidden substratum of my every experience, forming the most inaccessible and least negotiable part of my identity.

Where storks dare

Now, united Europe has so far tried to give itself an ideal-abstract collective identity: beyond differences in language, religion and taste, we share values, a vision of society and (broadly speaking) a way of life.

Whether it is really possible to create such a sense of belonging in 450 million people is by no means certain, but let us assume for a moment that it is possible.

Well: would depicting natural elements on the new banknotes, and thus making them speak to the most primitive, non-verbal and nostalgic part of our selves, be functional or counterproductive?

For those who consider national pride and irrational attachment to the earth as the antagonists that the European project was meant to defeat, the answer is certainly ‘counterproductive’.

They should tremble at the €50 bill with a stork on it: seen by a Castilian, it would bring back memories of the storks’ nests on the tall, severe bell towers in the villages of his region, while seen by a Romanian from Bukovina, it would bring a tear to her eye thinking of the nests on the electricity pylons next to the wheat fields where she grew up.

For those, on the other hand, who argue more realistically that European values and the European vision of society are merely procedural tools developed to protect pre-existing identities, and cannot, nor should, themselves constitute an additional identity to replace them, the reference to water and wilderness is less of a cause for concern.

Preserving the environment. But for whom?

On the other hand, as chance would have it, it is precisely the preservation of natural environments that has been one of the missions in which the European community has excelled so far.

I am not referring to the ‘Green Deal’ of 2020 and the suicidal lone charge against the windmill of the greenhouse effect, but to historical legislation on air quality, fishing quotas, the environmental impact of buildings, protected oases and the regeneration of biodiversity.
The results of these initiatives have been concrete and, compared to other regions of the world, even flattering. Nature-themed banknotes would therefore celebrate a success.

Certainly, however, to pull up the countryside and mountains while neighbouring human settlements are emptying out may appear hypocritical.
The province’s unease is deep, it is felt without distinction in each of the twenty-seven states and it swallows up the votes of parties hostile to the Union.

To find oneself the lark and the kingfisher on the banknotes that are not enough to fill up the petrol tank could be a mockery that adds to the damage for those who live in inland areas, gratifying only those who live in the big cities and look to ‘nature’ as a poetic diversion.

Is it really necessary to look for trouble?

In conclusion, the banknotes with Leonardo and Cervantes might upset a few Luxembourgers and Cypriots, but apart from this obvious (and hopefully brief) resentment, they would not produce any other side effects.
What emotions they would arouse and what messages they would convey is easy to predict.

Birds and rivers, seemingly harmless, instead have enormous potential to cause unpredictable damage. Their message could get out of hand in ways we cannot even imagine today.

Perhaps – just perhaps – it would be more prudent to silence the white man’s guilt complex for five minutes, print traditional banknotes with the artists and scientists, put up with some blasphemy in Lithuanian, and save ourselves worse trouble in the future.