The Euro and Its Rivals: Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City

Preface

PREFACE This book is not about the yen and the dollar, the most obvious rivals to the euro. Instead, it is about the underreported ways in which daily monetary usage and public debates about monetary policy play a role in constructing the boundaries of community. It is an attempt to look at the euro through a specifically anthropological lens, since the lion’s share of work on the euro has been within the fields of economics and political science. There is a metaphysics of money that is swept aside by the fields that typically study it, and that sometimes turns too magical when studied by people outside those fields. I have tried to ground the power that money has outside the economic sphere by relying on standard ethnographic techniques—watching what people say and do about money on a daily basis—and not succumbing to a more Baudrillardean approach that sees it as all fictitious, diaphanous, and endlessly recursive. I take seriously the idea that money can create communal attachments, even when rational economic actors insist that it is a purely scientific instrument. This book bridges the typical gap that keeps these two distant wings of research around money from even speaking to one another. Each view can inform the other, but there must be more of a common language to bring the two together. The time is ripe for such an approach to money. As this book goes to press, the world is awash in monetary chaos, and every day brings a sense of foreboding that the entire edifice of monetary stability will collapse in a sea of worthless paper. In early 2010, Greece was at the brink of such a collapse, which illuminated the precise sort of monetary community that I use as a conceptual apparatus in this book. Europeans of all stripes were challenged with the question of just how much solidarity they felt with their fellow EU citizens from Greece. Were they hopeless spendthrifts? Or had they fallen on hard times because of an unforeseeable business cycle? x Preface Fascinatingly, the euro and its sociolegal underpinnings meant that these questions had been answered already. Because all of the euro-zone countries had their fate soldered to Greece’s with the founding of the euro, they were largely compelled to act in solidarity with their Greek neighbors. Sweden and Denmark—both outside the euro zone—were under no such compunction. Because they are outside of the vast monetary community of the euro, they had no need to show compassion or solidarity to the Greeks. It was left to the members of the euro zone to part with their hardearned money and use it to prop up Greece. To save the euro from collapse, they had to treat the Greeks as members of their community who were in need of aid, regardless of whether the problems were the result of an objectively vicious business cycle or subjectively dubious behavior. This story is similar to the stories I trace here. How did Swedish bankrupts and vagrants come to be treated di√erently than non-Swedish bankrupts and vagrants as the country gradually built a sense of national solidarity over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What sociolegal instruments make it possible to see a similarity in the legal and moral treatment of vagrants and bankrupts? Seen through the lens of daily currency practices and infrastructure, these two groups have much in common. Money is almost like language—a fact remarked upon since at least Marx—but I don’t mean this in the typical sense. Instead, I am referring to the fact that both money and language somehow present frictionless surfaces to history and society. In their ubiquity, they are frequently viewed as neutral forces. This makes them hard to study, for people often do not see currency (or language) usage as a value-laden act. The debate about joining the euro in both Sweden and Denmark changed all that. But so did two other variables that form the backbone of my story. The novel attempt to build the transnational Øresund Region opened up new possibilities for grasping the meanings of monetary usage in Sweden and Denmark. The region sought to destroy a border that had been in e√ect since 1658 by bringing together two big cities—Malmö and Copenhagen—by way of a giant bridge-tunnel complex. The bridge spawned vast dreams of an entirely new world, at least for Malmö, which had long su...