A la recherche of a europaeische Identity

I have always been pro-European so I was glad to read this interview with Jean Quatremer. He says, seen from a distance Europe may look soulless, but when you are in the thick of it there is human passion. He enthuses about the finely balanced mechanisms that keep conflicts of interest from drifting into crises or even wars. And

I am convinced that this federal Europe my wishes are calling for will see the light of day, not because of a desire for increasingly tight-knit federalism, but because the world will oblige us to create it. In 2050 Europe will represent no more than 4% of the global population. If we are not united we will not exist in the emerging world: Europe's domination of the world died in 1945.

While Quatremer talked of necessities, the interview still managed to exude a passion for the European idea. So I agreed with everything he said - as far as my shaky French and my ignorance of the intricacy that is political Europe would allow me.
But alas, Quatremer is quite aware that as yet a sense of European identity eludes most European people. "It is when we have to defend our values that a European identity will take shape, that being European will have a meaning".
At this point I went in search possible sources for shared European values. My first stop was history. How about the Roman empire?

Quite good, but too little east, too much south. Then there was religion as seen on this map of the crusades.
Too much hocuspocus and too little south. And because I was born there, I have a soft spot for the Hansa:
Yes, I know, this union reached only a tiny bit of northern Europe and held no real political power. But at least it was a union, it had to be negotiated - albeit with the help of the odd skirmish.
And although neither the Roman empire nor the catholic church could be considered European in spirit they left a language and a set of values. So Europeans could talk, and talk they did. Borders did not stop them, weeks/months of travelling or waiting for an answer to their letters did not stop them, wars did not stop them. And when the discourse started to include women they switched from Latin to French, but they kept on talking. Politics did not stop them either, because initially, there was nothing much they could do about politics.
Two world wars and four decades of cold war with the iron curtain firmly drawn finally shut them up; prevented us from continuing the discourse. Now we have a political union (of sorts), but the discourse is fragmented to smithereens and instead of a lingua franca we have 23 official languages multiplied by untold issues.
So it is hardly surprising that Quatremer, after his brief excursion into the realm of hopes and aspirations for Europe, returns to his blog, Coulisses des Bruxelles, the next day to tackle the nitty gritty reality: Europes chief diplomat does not answer her phone. The piece starts and ends with quotes from a European diplomat.

"Catherine Ashton is about to kill the job", says a despairing European diplomat.
...
"In short, "she has got neither the team, the profoundness, nor the intention of making this post what it ought to be", concludes a European diplomat.
(all translations my own - I hardly trust them myself)

Among the many shortcomings of first High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy listed in Quatremer's post, one is that she speaks nothing but English. And why should she? Has not English become the new lingua franca?
But that was the beauty of middle Latin - it was a second language for everyone who used it. When you switch from one language to another, your perspective changes, suddenly you can say things you could not even have thought before. Use a second language and you have another mindset at your disposal. Could this be the reason that Julien Frisch feels more comfortable blogging about Europe in English? If we want to rekindle the European discourse that was so brutally interrupted by the 20th century's hot and cold wars we need to get reacquainted first in all our diversity. Embracing le plurilinguisme could be a much better idea than making do with a mere working language.

EUROPA writes a letter

I have always been passionately European, but it turns out, that I know hardly anything about Europe, so it is a good thing that I can find out on the EUROPA site. Helpful as the site already is, it turns out, that it will not always give me results. Have a look:

Below this 12 documents were listed, but I also wanted to be able to look at the legislation, so I clicked Eur-Lex. Here is the result:

So I did try again, but this time I used a reference number I found next to 'amflora' on the EUROPA search results and bingo!

But this is cumbersome to say the least. So it is a relief to find that the site managers of EUROPA have written an open letter to the incoming EU commissioners and president Barroso, suggesting changes to the site.

We will need a major shift in attitude to break away from the one-way, top-down communication culture, still prevalent in many parts of the organisation, and develop an in-house communication culture that encourages and empowers staff across the organisation to use the internet to interact with people.

Imagine what it must be like to think of a potato with the deceptively pretty name of amflora as EH92-527-1, and the documents that regulate this potato as 52007PC0813 and 52007PC0336. Will it distort your perception? And this is just one example. What about issues concerning asylum seekers or seasonal workers? I could not empathise with a reference number for the life of me.

So I wholeheartedly agree with kosmopolito's comment on this letter:

I think it is a very good initiative. There are a lot of opportunities for EU institutions by engaging with web tools. Unfortunately there is still a rather widespread skepticism among politicians and officials despite a few good examples how to use web 2.0 tools successfully. Hopefully this letter will contribute to a rethink in the institutions. Moreover, this would also be a good topic to bring up during the Commission-designate hearings in the European Parliament this week…

To express my enthusiasm I simply had to see what it looked like in wordle - in patriotic colours, of course.


I'm glad that I found the letter thanks to a retweet by #bueti.