Designing belonging: The long and winding road to the Euro

There was a time when trust in the euro was yet to be built. When euro cash was introduced at the beginning of 2002 across twelve countries, a persistent sentiment took root among the public that everything was getting more expensive. In Germany, language critics crowned the neologism "Teuro" – a blend of "teuer" (the German word for expensive) and "euro", coined by the satire magazine Titanic and propagated by Bild (which was well-read in Luxembourg, too) as the Word of the Year 2002. It was a wave of dissatisfaction that slopped over to Luxembourg, where the OGBL picked up the term in a press release following an earlier-than-expected indexation.

There was a lingering feeling that across the eurozone that the cost of living kept increasing. Research and statistics tell us that this perceived inflation did match reality to some degree, but not as drastically as imagined – in May 2002, Germany recorded an inflation rate of just 1 percent – but that did little to quell public discontent. Even in the Grand Duchy, where the Central Bank of Luxembourg, in collaboration with other institutions, had distributed an instructional euro handbook complete with practical exercises to all households to help everyone best prepare for the transition, some had difficulties dealing with change. In hindsight, that might be little surprising, since the transition to the shared currency as essentially a top-down decision; ordinary citizens and the social partners were not involved in the decision-making process.