We spent the afternoon on an inevitable bus tour around the city, stopping off at most of the main sights; the Capitol, the White House, the various ministries, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the Martin Luther King Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials, the Iwo Jima Marines’ Memorial and Arlington Cemetery, the Pentagon… So many memorials! Not for the first time, I found myself comparing and contrasting with the European Union’s ‘capital cities’ – Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Why are there so few statues and memorials to Europe’s ‘founding fathers’? There are buildings and bridges, but why no statue of Churchill in Strasbourg? There is a bust of Schuman in front of the Cinquantenaire in Brussels, but why no bust, statue or memorial to Jean Monnet? There is a bust of Paul-Henri Spaak in the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg but it took until 2008 for him to get a bust in Brussels, and then it is in the Place Horta. I suppose part of the explanation is that the definitive seats of the institutions were decided only in the 1990s and that too much pomp and circumstance would have been regarded as being pretentious and/or provocative. Is it being excessively idealistic to imagine that there might one day be a public sculpture of that iconic moment when François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl held hands at Verdun?