Where the euro was conceived
Driving from Maastricht to the nearby town of Kanne along the river Jeker, things get confusing easily. You cannot really pinpoint it but things start to feel different. The road signs are slightly different. Houses are different. Even the road itself is not the same.
Without knowing it, you have crossed the border to Belgium during this 14 minute drive. Nobody bothered to place a sign, much less a check post to let travelers know they are crossing borders. Why would they? The last time the Netherlands and Belgium went to war was 200 years ago to confirm to everyone that Belgium really was a separate country. Since then they have been mingling on and off, first in Benelux then in the EEG (they were both founding members) and finally in the EU.
They are like that couple that have known each other since forever, had a brief but unsuccessful marriage(from 1815 until 1830, mainly pushed upon them by other people by the way) that ended in divorce and after that kept saying that they ARE not together anymore although they always DO things together. Now they are so close that there are places where you can sit a table sharing a beer with someone who sits in Belgium while you are sitting in Netherlands.
A recent example of their close relationship is the discarding of their national currency and replacing it with a common one, together with a handful of other European countries. This over ambitious and very reckless project was conceived in the 1980ies and delivered during the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992. The signing of the treaty by the head of states was by no means a rubber-stamp and months of bickering between member states preceded before everyone agreed.
Although the relentless maneuvering of the Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers certainly helped, for the real reason that everyone eventually fell in line you have to go back to the town of Kanne. Actually right before Kanne. Perhaps not even 200 meter before you pass the invisible border to Belgium there is a small road that leads up to a beautiful castle, Château Neercanne. It was here that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands invited all the politicians that were negotiating in Maastricht for an informal dinner in December of 1991.
When walking through the beautiful garden terraces of the Château overlooking the magnificent Jeker Valley it is impossible not to be reminded of the big picture, the grand vision. It is impossible not to forget your temporary, petty objections. The dinner guests were then invited to visit the wine cellars. The self-produced wines are stored in a cave right next to the castle building that is older than the building itself, in fact the castle was built with characteristic yellow rock left when excavating the cave.
During this cave tour the manager of the castle broke protocol and asked all distinguished guests to sign their names on a prepared stone plaque in the cellar using charcoal. The queen was not amused but nonetheless signed first. After her signature, everyone followed from German chancellor Helmut Kohl to British prime minister John Major. After that everyone must have realized that signing a document shouldn’t be such a big deal.
The signing of the official Maastricht treaty followed a few months later on February 1992 and the document is labeled as European heritage. But the unofficial document is the stone plaque (dubbed the birth certificate of the Euro by a leading dutch newspaper) and you can still admire it in the cave carved in 70 million years old rock accompanied by dozens of other visitors’ signatures who cheering their new currency and dissolution of borders.
