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EUROPE | MARCH 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 11 |
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The Euro As Child's Play Cartoons, comics and kids' books are enlisted to sell the new currency By JAMES GEARY
Some euro supporters are convinced that the best way to reach adults is through their children. That's why a push is on to sell the euro to kids. In Italy, for example, children can read about the adventures of a cartoon duck who tries to replace the 937 types of money on the planet Bazar with a common currency. Next month a British company plans to put a comic strip on the Internet in which Captain Euro and his buxom blonde sidekick Europa will, as the firm's publicity brochure puts it, "defend the security of Europe and uphold the values of the union." And in Germany a new children's book--Die Euro Kids--follows a troupe of 15 children as they travel around Europe to find out if "people really want the new money." The Euro Kids' odyssey in particular proves that old stereotypes don't die, and neither do they just fade away. Die Euro Kids, a strange mixture of cultural cliches and hackneyed history published in Cologne by Wienand, opens with "the President" and a group of 15 European finance ministers in conclave in Brussels. The politicians send the Euro Kids off on tour to test public opinion of the single currency. First stop, appropriately enough, is Frankfurt, future home of the European Central Bank, where the Euro Kids purchase two 18th-century Austrian kreuzer for a single euro. As the children trek across Europe, they encounter one national stereotype after another. In Ireland they visit a pub where rugged sailors huddle around a corner table, their beer mugs brimming with Guinness. In Spain they catch a bus with a peasant (wearing a beret and sporting a handlebar moustache) sipping wine from a leather flask. Sadly, these stale portrayals reflect an outdated image of Europe as a place where ethnic cliches still rule, not one supposedly moving towards "ever closer union." The Euro Kids are stalked throughout their journey by a sinister figure clad in dark sunglasses and a yellow trench coat. In a Frankfurt train station, he peers furtively at them over a newspaper. In Italy, he follows them into a museum disguised as Pinocchio with an elongated nose. The stalker is eventually revealed to be an E.U. finance minister. But why he's depicted as such an ominous and threatening character (And why Pinocchio's long nose? Has he been lying?) remains a mystery. The Euro Kids visit Crete too, where they retell the legend of Europa: how Zeus, in the form of a snow-white bull, abducts the Phoenician princess to be his consort. When they return to Brussels, the Euro Kids give the President a gift: a hat made from two bull's horns glued onto an old bathing cap. The echoes of the ancient Greek myth are clear. But like so much else in this jumbled book, the significance is not. Is the President a new Zeus, whisking Europa off into an unwanted economic and monetary union? With euro-dissatisfaction running so high--and confusing messages like those of Die Euro Kids so rife--maybe it's getting to be high time that some non-fictional European politicians came down from Mount Olympus to explain to both children and adults what the European Union is really about. --With Reporting by Ursula Sautter /Bonn |
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ust as 11 European nations have reported economic results good
enough to qualify them for the single currency, public approval
of the euro--and of the European Union in general--has hit an
all-time low. According to statistics compiled by Demos, a
London independent think tank, only 47% of Europeans support
Economic and Monetary Union (40% are against it) and just 46%
believe their country's membership in the E.U. is a good thing.
With the launch of the single currency less than 10 months away,
how can public attitudes be turned around?