The Single Currency and European Citizenship

• Author: Giovanni Moro - Lucia Mazzuca - Roberto Ranucci
• Pages: 411-432

411

Studi sull’integrazione europea, VII (2012), pp. 411-432

Giovanni Moro*, Lucia Mazzuca**, Roberto Ranucci***

e Single Currency

and European Citizenship

S: 1. The Euro and European Citizenship: Facing the Paradox. – 2. The Other Side of the

Euro in Scientific and Policy Literature. – 3. Towards an Empirical Definition of the

Dimensions of the Other Side of the Coin. – 4. Conclusions.

1. Generally speaking, social sciences have devoted a considerable attention

to money as a non-purely financial object, highlighting its relations with the

building blocks of cultures, societies and political communities1. When talking

about money, we deal with a phenomenon with multiple meanings and func-

tions. In being used as the “natural” means of exchange for the purchase of good

and services, money absolves other relevant functions, more or less evident2,

arising from the intrinsic tie bounding it to the community in which it is utilized.

Such intrinsic relationship could be simply discovered thinking that money is a

social construction3, and so that, as other social constructions (e.g. the lan-

guage), it is connected with being citizen of a certain community.

In light of this premise, we could expect that the introduction of the single cur-

rency had been accompanied by a significant share of studies and researches about

the implications and impacts of such a watershed event on European citizenship.

On the contrary, we soon discover to be facing a paradox, which could be phrased

as follows: while the purpose of building European citizenship is the very rationale

for the project of the single currency, the Scholars – but also the policy community

– have mostly underestimated if not neglected this relation, both in terms of public

policy making and discourse and of interpretation and forecasting.

Actually, the considerable attention paid to the euro is related to the evidence

(or the failure) of the European project on the single currency, but essentially

* Presidente FONDACA; docente di Sociologia politica nell’Università degli studi di Roma Tre.

** Ricercatore FONDACA.

*** Ricercatore FONDACA.

1 See for example S 1900; K 1924; D 1939; W 1958; B 1964;

M 1970; M 1972; F 1977; Z 1989; D 1994; B 1996; I

1996, 1998, 2000; W 1997; H 2003; M 2006.

2 See V, forthcoming.

3 I.e. “money exists because we believe it to exist. (…) money comes into existence because

human beings assign the function of money to certain entities” (K, forthcoming).

Giovanni Moro, Lucia Mazzuca, Roberto Ranucci

412

considered from a macro-economic perspective: the lion’s share in the public

and scientific debates is played, indeed, by the sizeable amount of analysis, stud-

ies, statements about the economic and financial implications of the adoption of

the euro. Conversely, a similar level of attention is found with greater difficulty

observing the single currency from a political, cultural and social standpoint, in

its multiple connections with the European citizenship-building process.

Moreover, in the case of the euro the lack of a specific focus on what could

be named “the other side of the coin” is due to the fact that the single currency,

as a citizenship-related topic, is trans-disciplinary. That is, it does not clearly

belong to the realm of a specific social science discipline, but is rather a shared

field of research. Since no one is its owner, it is easy for it to be forgotten or not

considered.

As a natural consequence of all of that, relevant features of the single cur-

rency happened to remain hidden, poorly considered and almost not thematized.

In order to fill this gap, the first part of this article will present the main find-

ings emerged from a documentary research conducted by FONDACA between

2010 and 2011, aimed at mapping the existing academic and policy thematiza-

tions about the hidden dimensions of the euro. The second part will be devoted

to define “the other side of the coin” as an empirical phenomenon.

2. a) The Research Design and Development4.The research presented in

these pages aimed at investigating the level of knowledge about the features

characterizing the relationship linking the euro to the building of European citi-

zenship, as considered and thematized in the existing literature, both theoretical

and empirical, and in the policy statements and programs. Operationally, such

relationship has been investigated through the identification of 4 dimensions5,

which together compose what we have called “the other side of the coin”. They

have been defined as follows:

– Cultural Dimension: the set of values, representations and cultural patterns

that are referred to by the currency as a repository of symbols.

– Social Dimension: the set of interactions, representations, institutions and

communication and exchange relations that give place to a social environ-

ment which people using the single currency live in and belong to.

– Everyday life economy Dimension: the place in which the single currency

acts as a unit of measurement, exchange tool and stock value giving rise to

a market.

– Political Dimension: the place where the single currency acts as a vector for

the political community-building process.

4 For more detailed information on the research’s features see M, R, 2012.

5 The research operations led to add a further category focused on the general aspects con-

cerning the context and developments of the euro project (mainly referred to the EMU and euro

history and legal framework, to the changeover and to the design of the coins and banknotes),

since they have been quite often taken into account in dealing with the other side of the coin’s

dimensions.