The euro notes are a crash course in art history, showing seven periods of European architecture: classical for the €5 note; Romanesque for the €10; Gothic for the €20; Renaissance for the €50; baroque and rococo for the €100; age of iron for the €200; and glassy modernism for the €500.

He began the design process by scanning in architectural images from library books and toying with them on his Apple Macintosh. The initial landmarks included known sites such as the Rialto bridge in Venice and Pont de Neuilly just outside Paris. But Mr. Kalina, guided by the need to stress a European identity over any national loyalties, painstakingly eradicated all recognizable vestiges of each image, pixel by pixel.

"The idea was to create a feeling of commonality, of belonging," he said. "I worked hard so that either an Italian or a Frenchman could look at the Gothic windows on the twenty and say, 'That could be here in France,' or, 'That could be here in Italy.' It was very difficult to make each universal."

For all their aesthetic merit, the bills remain abstract and faceless — just as many view the soul of EU government in Brussels. Few deny that Brussels remains "far removed from ordinary people," as the EU Parliament concluded in a recent resolution. Complaining that the EU has advanced in secretive closed-door dealings, Mr. Schroeder said, "Many people still have more questions than answers about Europe."

One consistent source of doubt is the confusing and uncertain construction of Europe itself. The euro is the world's only major money that lacks a government to back it up. Nor will one emerge anytime soon, as the current EU debate makes abundantly clear. Nor does anyone know which countries will belong in the future, after the poorer ones of Central and Eastern Europe join after 2004.

"We have expectations that run too high," said Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a professor of economic and social history at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. "The old loyalties, which took a couple of hundred years to grow, cannot be superseded by coins and banknotes."

The entire project nearly derailed several times during bouts of currency market turmoil in the early 1990s. Not until May 1998, little more than a half year before the euro's start as a virtual currency, did the EU finally give an assurance that it would move ahead. Even amid those celebrations, the Union forced yet another compromise that in retrospect was one of its most crippling. Mr. Duisenberg bowed to pressure from President Jacques Chirac of France and agreed "voluntarily" to quit sometime before his eight-year term is over in 2006.