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National Geographic : 2002 Jan
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By T. R. Reid Photographs by Stuart Franklin get to flags and courts and currency, you're talking about the attributes of a nation-state," says Mark Mazower, a historian of modern Europe at the University of London. "But the EU is not that. It's not going to be a United States of Europe. The most accurate thing you can say is that Europe is engaged in a historical process, built around the principle of coopera tion, that is creating some new kind of state." This month that cooperation has produced one of the biggest unifying steps yet as 12 of the 15 member nations begin using a common currency, the euro, casting their francs, marks, liras, and pesetas into history's trash can. How much cash does it take to fill the wallets of 307 million people in a dozen different countries? The first minting of euros, to be exchanged for the old currencies over the next two months, totals 50 billion coins and 14.5 billion notes. Just delivering all that money has been one of the great logistical tasks of recent history. Virtually every armored car from Lim erick to Lesbos is being pressed into service; some old banks have had to shore up their floorboards to bear the weight of all the coins being exchanged. But the transfer can't come soon enough for Hans Robert Eisenhauer, a television executive I met at the fete des Asperges (that is, the annual asparagus festival) last spring in the charming Alsatian village of Hoerdt, a French town with a German name. Herr Eisenhauer is a German native who works in France and travels to almost every other European country, as his bulging wallet made clear when he showed me the contents. He fanned out a monetary rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, orange, and green: Belgian francs, French francs, German marks, Russian rubles, Finnish markkas, Spanish pesetas, Dutch guilders, and even a few stray U.S. dollars. "It is pain to carry it all," he complained. "And you lose always money on the change of currency. But soon most of these bills will be in museum. The one Europe will have one currency." With all this unifying going on, one of the more delicate issues facing the new Europe is how to create a common foundation without carpeting over the continent's rich tapestry of peoples, languages, cuisines, and cultures. Even Herr Eisenhauer, despite his overstuffed wallet and his commitment to unity, was worried about that. "European culture is a bouquet de "Ifwe can build a single Europe, there
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