Hymans:The Changing Color of Money in contrast to the many sui generis aspects of national cultures,at least since the late 19th century nearly every state has undertaken the issue of legal tender.There is thus ample room for cross-national comparison.Second, unlike postage stamps for instance,money must be instantly recognizable to all citizens,as well as internationally,and thus states have to prioritize particular images rather than multiplying such images ad nauset.Third, unlike flags and anthems for instance(see Cerulo,1995),new banknotes are regularly issued,both because inflation requires new denominations and- even in the absence of inflation -because forgers are constantly working to defeat the existing notes'security features.The requirement of regular updating of banknotes means that their design at any one point in time reflects not mere inertia but rather a relatively contemporaneous,conscious choice.This probably unique combination of universality,selectivity and regular updating makes currency iconography an ideal avenue to assess the content of nation-state,and now EU,identities. The article is organized as follows.Section 2 lays out in more detail the theoretical case for a secular evolution in currency iconography.Section 3 shows the merits of this hypothesis through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of over a century of European paper money.Section 4 then suggests the implications of this study for the interpretation of the new curo banknotes and for the possibility of the birth of a European 'demos'. 2.The Nature of Currency Iconography:Static or Evolving? As noted above,the conventional hypothesis on the nature of currency iconography has been that pedagogically minded states would use the issuance of money to foist their cherished,specifically national,values on the captive public.For instance,Emily Gilbert and Eric Helleiner have written, Policymakers recognized that currencies could act as important carriers of nationalist imagery,particularly if their supply were monopolized....Policy- makers inspired by nationalist thinking took full advantage of advances in printing technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide detailed imagery of their vision of the nation on their coins and notes.(Gilbert and Helleiner,1999:8) Gilbert and Helleiner and their co-authors marshal much case study evidence to bolster this claim-though,significantly as we shall see below, much of it comes from a small number of British Commonwealth and North American cases. An alternative,equally plausible but heretofore unexamined hypothesis on the identity-currency connection starts from the notion that the state is rarely secure,powerful and motivated enough to force-feed its values on its 7 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.Further reproduction prohibited without permission.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission