THE GHOST OF 2005

Europe is preparing less to invent a new currency than to forge a new shell around the one it already has. On September 15, the Eurosystem opened applications from merchants to participate in the digital euro pilot, with a launch targeted for 2027 and possible issuance by 2029. At first glance, the initiative appears both sensible and logistically urgent: cash is receding, our lives are moving onto smartphones, and Europe is waking up to its dependence on non-European payment infrastructures and services — Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay or PayPal. Why should public money remain outside this transformation? Because beneath the surface of technical modernisation, something much more consequential is taking place. The digital euro is not merely an application; it is the revelation of an architecture of power that urgently needs to be brought back into the arena of political conflict.

Power has a face

The ECB has clearly identified the concerns surrounding the project and has multiplied its assurances. The digital euro would complement cash rather than replace it. It would not be a “programmable currency” capable of directing or prohibiting particular purchases. For offline payments, the ECB even promises a degree of privacy comparable to cash. We should take those assurances seriously. There is no need to summon the spectre of dystopia when the deeper problem lies at the very heart of the institutional machinery.

The real question is not whether an algorithm will prevent us from buying a train ticket tomorrow. It is who controls the infrastructure and what political architecture this currency is being embedded within. European institutional engineering excels at hiding itself behind cold acronyms: ECB, Ecofin, Eurosystem. It is a language remarkably well suited to creating the impression of an impersonal and inevitable machine.

Yet power has faces, trajectories and interests. Christine Lagarde, the current President of the ECB, previously led the IMF after serving as France’s Economy Minister during the 2008 crisis under Nicolas Sarkozy. Ursula von der Leyen moved through several German ministries — Labour, Family, Defence — before becoming President of the European Commission. Naming them is enough to remind us that behind the acronyms stand identifiable people, choices and institutions. But the problem reaches far beyond those who happen to lead them today: it lies in the architecture itself, which will outlast their terms in office.

The ghost of 2005

This is where a date returns to haunt the story of supposedly irreversible European integration. On May 29, 2005, 54.67% of French voters rejected the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. They did not vote against technical innovation, nor even against the existence of the ECB. They rejected a treaty that entrenched a supranational and neoliberal order beyond ordinary political contestation, placing monetary power in the hands of an independent central bank and constitutionalising the principle of free and undistorted competition.

The motivations behind that vote were many, but the political fact remains: the sovereign electorate rejected that constitutional project. Two years later, the Lisbon Treaty restored much of what had been rejected at the ballot box, this time through parliamentary ratification. A people may reject the transfer of sovereignty, yet the European centre can continue moving along the same trajectory under a different legal form.

Treaties are not tablets of stone

Whenever this architecture is challenged, the same supposedly definitive objection appears: “the treaties do not allow it.” European treaties, however, are not sacred texts handed down from above. They were negotiated by governments, politically ratified, and they can therefore be politically revised.

Article 48 of the Treaty on European Union itself provides mechanisms for revising the treaties, including changes that can reduce competences conferred upon the Union. Existing law does not mark the end of history. If France, as one of the founding states of European integration, were tomorrow to demand the return of certain competences, its partners could legally and politically oppose it. But that disagreement would be exactly that: a political conflict to be resolved, not the discovery of some sacred frontier democracy is no longer entitled to cross.

The engineering of distance

The European Union routinely speaks the language of “freedom” and “democracy”. Yet a significant part of its architecture is designed precisely to distance major political choices from direct electoral control. Article 130 of the Treaty, for example, formally prohibits the ECB from seeking or taking instructions from elected governments — a safeguard presented as indispensable to preserving price stability.

But removing money from electoral control does not make monetary power disappear; it simply relocates that power into an institution insulated from direct democratic instruction. Money structures savings, the financing of the economy and the survival of society in moments of crisis. To claim that such a fundamental instrument of sovereignty can be placed in the hands of a supranational central institution without diminishing the substance of democratic control is a formidable political proposition — and one that should never be treated as merely technical.

A common currency does not require a monetary monopoly

The alternative is not to replace the euro tomorrow morning with a universal cryptocurrency. That would merely reproduce, under another name, the reflex we are contesting: one currency, one architecture, one answer imposed upon everyone.

The monetary space itself needs to be reopened as a political question. The euro can remain a common currency, used for public obligations, exchange and the functions that require a shared monetary language. But we should ask what room might exist around it for other forms of money: cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, complementary currencies, peer-to-peer payment systems or currencies created by communities that voluntarily choose to use them.

Some will fail. Some will be badly designed. Others may produce solutions no central bank would ever have imagined. The real question is therefore the role of common authority: should it decide in advance which monetary instruments are legitimate, or should it instead establish a clear framework — combating fraud, enforcing contracts, protecting fundamental rights — and then leave greater room for experimentation?

This is where cryptography genuinely changes the political question. A distributed ledger can allow multiple actors to verify a shared state without requiring every operation to pass through a single central operator. That does not prove that decentralised models are always superior. But it is enough to challenge an old assumption: digital technology does not require us to reproduce the centralised architecture of the existing monetary world.

What might this look like in practice? A citizen could keep conventional euros, use a European digital currency when useful, pay another person directly using a digital asset of their choice, participate in a local or community currency, or use a stablecoin when it provides a particular service. Open protocols could allow these different systems to communicate. Common law would establish essential safeguards; it would not decide on behalf of everyone which monetary instrument deserves to exist.

For genuine monetary pluralism

The choice, then, is not between the ECB’s digital euro and monetary chaos. It is between two philosophies.

The first digitises the existing order: a common currency administered from the centre, to which a new interface is added.

The second accepts that the digital age can finally produce monetary pluralism: a common currency where one is necessary, freer monetary forms where they are possible, open protocols, communities capable of experimenting and citizens free to choose the instruments in which they place their trust.

Europe should at least have the courage to open that second path to serious political discussion. The real measure of progress would be to return to Europeans some of the power to decide what they are willing to call money.