Designing Europeanness: Euro Banknotes and Coins

The previous case studies show that the EU institutions did not develop a coherent and centralized “identity policy.” Different actors at the European level—in the European Commission, in the EP, at the intergovernmental level—envisaged actions in order to highlight European history or culture and to legitimize and promote the integration process. These actions were consistently focused on a specific and limited group of actors (professors, historians, cultural managers, and institutions) and aimed to involve noninstitutional actors in transnational European initiatives. These specific actors were invited to give contents to the fuzzy potentially controversial concepts of European culture, identity, or history and to diffuse these contents at the local level.