Our Europe — Remarks
The Task — Building Europe from the Bottom Up
BERNHARD SCHNEIDER
WITH REMARKS BY STEVE AUSTEN
The EU as a Scapegoat
The question is on the table as to what legitimation and which forms of cohabitation will keep the European Union cohesive. Institutions and mechanisms of the EU work from the top down and threaten to turn Europeans into passive beneficiaries or into persons simply affected by European politics. Elected officials and members of government like to strut about when they succeed in knocking out a deal for their respective clientele “in Brussels”. This is how to turn citizens into consumers of the goods of politics, along the lines of “I want my money back” (Margaret Thatcher, 1984).
European common welfare on the other hand is an unknown quantity. In the eyes of many Europeans, the EU is mutating from a former project of the future to a scapegoat for globalization fears and dashed hopes. In Great Britain, political speculators couldn’t resist the temptation to pit one half of a deeply dis-United Kingdom against the other and to plough into a referendum on EU membership — top-down. Many in Europe praise this as the embodiment of democracy, even there, in the country where parliamentary sovereignty was born. But, if anything, this boils down to plebiscitary coercion when you force questions of such complexity and existential importance into a Yes-No vote without any qualified majority, the repercussions of which, like with the case of Great Britain, stretching far beyond the area of responsibility of those eligible to vote.
Finally, in so far as the domestic policy of national governments deviates too much from what has been agreed in Brussels or in the Treaty of Lisbon, they will have to fear the corrective measures of the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, or the European Court of Human Rights. Anyone who is properly aware of this will be aware that the democratic content of the EU is not at all in a bad way, especially by comparison with the situation in some of the member states. Anyone, including the heads of state, who accuse the EU of not being democratic enough will thus have to realise that it is not uncommon for those who voice such criticisms to bear some responsibility for the democratic content that is the butt of their criticisms.
A representative and morbid example of this is a 2013 speech by David Cameron, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. At first sight, Cameron’s criticism of the Union for lacking democratic principles seems strong. When it comes to the possibility of citizens electing or dismissing their own European government, the Union (still) has its weak spots. This, however, is not in the last instance due to the fact that Cameron’s government and the preceding British governments have cherished the ideal of limiting the significance of the European Union to that of a free trade zone.
It is well known that free trade zones are by nature undemocratic. If Cameron is so concerned with the democratic principles of the EU, even if it were to be limited to his ideal of a community of states based on a treaty, he will be forced to recognise that there is no international trading union that functions as democratically as the EU at present. These and similar, in a certain sense incongruous positions adopted by government leaders and politicians, local authorities and members of the prevailing administrative élite are no exception in the present discourse.
Members of the Dutch government and parliament also have no difficulty, no sooner than they have returned from Brussels, in using the national broadcasting channels to contradict or criticise the agreements that have been made there. Of course, this attitude undermines the further inevitable extension of the European Union and above all acceptance of the unification process by the citizens. Realisation that the Union offers additional guarantees, besides citizenship in the nation state for all who have a European residence permit, is not yet given enough emphasis in the national citizenship programmes. All the same, there are great opportunities for giving the experience of European citizenship a new and appealing content. The value of the European dimension will now have to be added to the respective citizenship programs of the member states designed to provide information about the origins of the nation state and the democratic national institutions.
The idea that the Union will, to a greater or lesser extent, replace one’s own nation state can be vigorously combatted. After all, they are both complementary.
Building Europe from the bottom up
The discredited Union needs more “Europe from the bottom up”. We need to flip the work for Europe off its head and onto its feet. We need a Europe whose citizens don’t operate as consumers, but as jointly responsible producers of the European project. So that Europeans see and accept this project as their own, it needs to be returned to them.
While originally it was enough to convince participants in citizenship education programs of the necessity of the EU by referring to the absence of war, which was indeed the primary objective of the European Coal and Steel Community, the notion of freedom — which was still too closely associated with freedom from occupation and dictatorship — can be given a new content. That will also enable us to put an end to the complaints about the absence of a single European people, a European ‘national’ anthem, a shared European feeling, a European identity, and so on. These aspects of belonging are already there, particularly at the level of the nation states and the regions.
Although these notions are not always based on observable reality and are certainly not the result of democratic decision-making — quite the contrary — these ideas and rituals are desirable and necessary to contribute to the definition of the notion of freedom that is created precisely by the additional guarantees that European citizenship offers to the citizen. Freedom in Europe means that every one of the 500 million citizens knows that they are linked with all the other Europeans, that they can develop their own personality as they choose without the interference of any political or social force, that they have freedom of movement in the widest sense of the word within the territory of the Union, and that outside it they can count on the protection of the national and European organs.
This individual freedom for European citizens has its limits, as applies to every activity that forms part of a treaty-based community. Investigating the possibilities that individual freedom within the public space of Europe offers has only just begun. It is to be hoped that the mantra of no war, peace and security can slowly but surely be replaced by a new content for the notion of peace that is now related more than ever to the experience of citizenship in a community that shares European values. Whenever it is a question of giving form to entirely new concepts, especially when the governments and citizens of 28 democratic member states must take part, it will call for a continuous process of trial and error and harmonisation. Perhaps the best comparison is with the procession to Echternach, in which the pilgrims are obliged to take three steps forwards and two steps backwards — a good exercise in European progress.
The intellectual and artistic contributions of young Europeans that are emerging everywhere are sufficient grounds for optimism.
No one can then be confused by the Europeans only seeing the bigger picture of Europe from their own specific national, regional and local perspectives. A Finn’s perspective differs from a Portuguese’s, a Scot’s differs from a Latvian’s. They would have a lot to say to each other about this Europe which they know so well. And the same applies in their own country and region.
It is where Europeans live that we find the original theatre for the soul of Europe. When Jacques Delors, the distinguished President of the Commission from 1985 to 1995, says that Europe needs a soul (Il faut donner une âme à l‘Europe), then this call for a cultural centrepoint to the political undertaking that is Europe always receives an answer from multiple voices, a somewhat cacophonous answer at times. This is the only way Europe’s soul can be understood, as a century-old plural entity, full of cultural self-will, that came into being before all nations.
The idea of culture playing a more prominent role in local, regional, national and European processes than before, does find more and more acceptance.
By implementing the new rules of the game, the EU can no longer be seen as primarily an economic project. Inclusion of citizens’ aspirations in ALL fields of policy changes the paradigm from economic to cultural notions.
When citizens have common cultural aims, even if the cultures themselves are different, the decentralised cross-fertilising of ideas becomes a way for active citizens to develop a common Europe while keeping their own sense of who they are intact. By removing labels, except those individuals choose to express themselves, we remove the need for protection against outsiders who mean us no harm.
Cities, city-states and regions produced the political culture of Europe, its public spaces, its judiciary, financial systems and trade, its languages and dialects, its sciences and cuisine. Other cultural bases for the life of the continent are the national academies, the public and private research facilities and the big and small festivals of music, theatre, dance, film or fine arts. They periodically transform cities and regions into cultural meeting points of Europe and the world. And they themselves “nourish” each other from the liveliness of the art and culture which thrives on their stages. However, the political and cultural instruments to make this diversity fruitful for the creation of the EU from the bottom-up are still in need of development.
How A Soul for Europe will include the citizenship education component in all its activities is a matter of creating more awareness of the education capacity among initiators of civic initiatives, including artistic and cultural activities, all over Europe, especially on a local level, in the cities where they are based.
The European city: a common orientation for its citizens
In an ever increasing mesh of national, regional and urban interdependencies in Europe, the early medieval citizen seems to be a good starting point for thinking about the meaning of European citizenship and forms of citizenship education. The concept of citizen harks back to the Latin civis, a member of the civitas, a political community that is not necessarily tied to a particular territory.
Citizenship, as it will gradually have to be expressed in the EU, will lead to a complex discussion that makes it difficult to make hasty decisions. That immediately explains the attraction and the problematic acceptance at the same time of the European concept: how the future will look is partly up to us. This process makes the greatest demands on the cultural competencies of Europeans. For many the idea of European citizenship is new and one of the reasons why it is vigorously rejected by large groups of voters in almost every member state. Nevertheless, these defensive phenomena are part of an inevitable cultural process that marks the transition from exclusively national to more European solutions.
In such cases, in spite of the alleged scepticism about Europe, it is increasingly common for citizens to not take everything that their national governments consider to be in the national interest lying down.
They know, after all, that they have the backing of citizens elsewhere in Europe. (In legal perspective the citizenship of the EU that has been laid down in the treaty regulations and accepted by their own government is fostering the rights and responsibilities of the citizens nowadays.)
It is thus logical for the public space in Europe to be increasingly full of initiatives from (young) European citizens who point to the ‘value community’ that must form the core of every society at local, regional, national or international level.
It starts at home
To begin with at home: in the cities where citizenship found its origin. Supported by the overwhelming citizens initiatives in practically all fields of society; from pop-up restaurants, temporarily alternative spaces, informal interregional networks and social design modelling pilots to a multitude of start-ups where international cooperation is practised. All these initiatives are having their influence on the renewal of our cities from bottom-up. The daily practise of all these proofs of active citizenship should be seen as part of the process of giving form to entirely new concepts, of communication, information, cooperation and participation with governments and citizens of 28 democratic member states. This necessitates a continuous process of trial and error and harmonisation. And of course ‘Education Permanente’. This is perhaps the best definition of the role artists, cultural initiatives and institutions can play. After all, they are attracting millions of citizens that for one reason or another are coming together without being obliged by any government, religious organisation or political party.
The practice of enjoying cultural events is based on individual citizens’ behaviour, a European value in itself. Let’s share this value.
At the first Berlin Conference of the initiative “A Soul for Europe” in 2004 the Romanian philosopher and former Foreign Minister, Andrei Pleşu, saw the problem in correctly interpreting the differences between us, to stand by these differences and to understand them! …. That’s the “union” we need to strive towards. The rest is purely administration.
The founding father of the European Community, Jean Monnet (1888–1979), reportedly said that if he had to start the European integration process over, then he would start with culture. The cultural similarities are a solid basis for the legitimation of a united Europe, while simultaneously longer lasting than the then important joint projects could be, such as the coal and steel industry or the Single European Market. At the same time, cultural differences and diversity also endanger cohesion, which is why they need to receive special political attention.
While politicians like to cite this Jean Monnet quote, few have actually been consequential in assigning a fixed role in the setup of the EU or its political agenda either to culture or specifically to the cities and regions which generate culture. As such, the phrase “Unity in diversity” is nothing but poetry without the commitment. Similarly, the admission of President of the Commission Barroso at the Berlin Conference in 2004 was also without any identifiable practical consequences: “The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….”. The task therefore is to pave the way from the defensive double negative of “no longer ignore” to a productive integration into development.
Europe needs them all
Europe’s culture is at home in the cities and regions. And among the people, the Europeans who live there. So anyone who has anything to do with culture in a city or region, be that as a citizen or as a holder of public office, is performing a European duty. Whether they know this or not, they are the protagonists of Europe from the bottom up. They need to be made more aware than previously that they have this responsibility.
This is currently becoming clear when dealing with migrants who played and continue to play such a prominent role in the campaigns for the referendum in Britain and when calling for further referendums. They are arriving in Europe’s towns and regions and it is in these places more than anywhere else that it is decided whether or not outsiders are to become fellow citizens, whether immigrants are to become inhabitants of Europe, and whether a European problem can become an advantage for the local people and for Europe as a whole.
But don’t be fooled: Europeans will believe in the EU, not based on how much their national and regional understanding of it is broken down to a lowest common pan-European denominator, but by how much it stays important to them — the Bulgarian Europe, the French, the Swedish, the Cypriot, the Dutch, the Sicilian, the Hanseatic, etc. If Europe is supposed to become more than just the sum of its parts, then this sum needs to be part of the game in the first place. Here, the “periphery” plays a special role, and in particular the eastern member states, with whose entry in 2004 the EU gained not only in terms of expansion, but also in terms of complementary cultural substance.
The EU needs all of them, all of these different versions, to be European, otherwise it will remain fragmented. No Prague taxi driver will agree with former Czech President Václav Klaus when he said that an integrated Europe is nothing for normal people, but is instead something for a minority who fly to London and go shopping the next day in Florence. No, Bohemian Europe has always belonged to the cultural core of all Europeans and vice-versa with Prague University, founded in 1347, modelling itself on Paris. Wenceslas Square in August 1968 and the German Embassy in September 1989 have become sites of a pan-European history. These lieux de mémoire do not belong to Prague and the Czechs alone. And Kafka’s Castle never did anyway.
A challenging future?
What do Tirana, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Athens, Istanbul, Sofia, Paris, Petersburg, Belgrade, London, Amsterdam , Barcelona, Bucharest, Ljubljana and Skopje have in common?
Cities and universities have something going with each other. Is city life conceivable without an intellectual dimension? I would say hardly at all. In this respect there is no difference between large and small cities. Its area is in any case an unworkable criterion in deciding whether a particular place may adorn itself with the title of city. Of course in theory every borough council is free to take the settlement they run and push it upward in the movement of peoples by extolling its virtues as a city. It is after all no longer a protected title. Whether it has the privileges of a city or not, what does it matter? City and city-dweller appear to be inseparably linked. One might ask what came first, the city or the city-dweller? It was city-dwellers who exacted those privileges for the city. A straightforward act of civil emancipation and self-awareness. Is it strange that the first universities arose in cities and owe their birth to private initiative, to the citizens? It was the enlightened middle classes of Florence who in about 1450 laid the foundations for numerous societies, associations and foundations elsewhere in Europe, which then brought just as many scientific and artistic initiatives to fruition. The influence of the church and the nobility declined in favour of the middle classes.
So the great interest there currently is for cultural networks is by no means new; now that ideologies are increasingly losing their grip on society, the individual citizen can take the next step in the never-ending process of emancipation. If in the late Middle Ages it was the nobility that got it in die neck, in the twilight years of the political power monopolies we are now seeing, it is the national state. This is the structure which, in its most enlightened form, the parliamentary democracy, was, in its turn, until recently considered the peak of civil emancipation. We are living in a time of transformation, on this occasion at the cost of state influence. Some lament this, others applaud it, but this erosion of the power of the state in every field of life can be found all over Europe. We are living at a time when centralised bodies no longer hold monopolies. It is not without reason that it is a very long way off political union: the member states are not about to let the last remnants of sovereignty slip out of their hands just like that. It is at the same time precisely in Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg that the increased influence of the citizen is becoming visible. He has joined all sorts of lobbying and pressure groups, movements and networks. He has established the formal and informal non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have unequivocally claimed their share of the political decision making process. This process of siphoning responsibility down to lower ranks was until recently seen as the recipe for including the European citizen into the European machinery. Decentralization however had its limits as we can learn from business. Companies cannot generally be compared to states, let alone states ruled by parliaments, but they are very much products of their time and in that sense are barometers of the state of the civil society in which they are situated. Again the citizen demands more freedoms. The citizen’s freedom to claim his or her share of society’s decision-making process can lead to complicated situations, in some people’s eyes, at least. There is an unmistakable climatic component in this process of emancipation, that of restlessness, discontent, egotism and thirst for knowledge, in short the perfidiousness of the city. It is this climate that has governed the relationship between the city and the state over the centuries. In contrast to the city, in modern history the state has had the monopoly of power. It is the exercise of power by the state that suppresses unrest in the cities, if too many anarchistic features come to light. Is it possible to speak noncommittally of the cultural identity of a city, against the backdrop of these phenomena?
Is, for example, a city more a theatre city than a music city? Of course it’s possible. But the question is whether this is sufficient explanation of what is specific to a city, what special things make a city a city. That touch of rebelliousness that, in contrast to any provincial town, is so essential to combat boredom. When is the demanding modern man or woman bored? In any form of monoculture, I would say.
If there is one thing that characterises cities, it is their independent power to rid themselves of phenomena whose aim is to put life on the right track or to impose order, which want to make not only the traffic, but also everyday life, more manageable. In this sense Berlin is finally becoming a city, and Amsterdam still is one, though to a lesser degree than Paris or Rome.The fall of the Wall has given Berlin the opportunity to make one city from two provincial towns. The omens do not play us false: more dirt on the streets, higher criminality, more tailbacks and more unchecked commercial activity. In short, we are on the right track. Now for the inhabitants. Shouldn’t cities be the places most suited to putting the multiform society into practice? Can we still call it a city when it is ethnically or ideologically cleansed? Cities may turn out to be the only places where it is possible to live together in spite of hate. It is a never-ending experiment in coexistence. Constantly summoning up irritation, pleasure, revulsion and love amongst its visitors and inhabitants, the ultimate remedy against boredom. So far so good. There is more, of course: the individual. We have not mentioned him yet. A product of the city, without the slightest doubt. A special kind of citizen. One that makes his own choices, and whom, in so doing, is not influenced by the appreciation of others. A participant in the process of civilization, in the civil society that we all like to see coming about. When the pressure is raised too high at street level the individual will sooner or later rise up. It is due to the citizens of Budapest and Prague that civil freedoms are a reality throughout Europe. The freedom to express thoughts, to assemble, to lodge protests, and to disagree with a whole lot of things and, most of all, to make that known in word and print.
In art this freedom is present in its optima forma, artistic freedom is the way of the city. It is the melting pot of appraisals without which discourse is unthinkable. Discourse degenerates into scandal if art is present without the urban climate. The question is whether art can actually survive in such an environment. The whole thing soon looks artificial, and fossilized. In this sort of case it is far less art and much more the prestige or the tradition that has in the first place to be served. Seen in this light a consideration of the urban character of Salzburg or Avignon might provide us with interesting prospects: Isn’t it strange that the most prestigious film festival in Europe takes place in Cannes? It would be with a certain amount of suspicion that one might observe the efforts of a borough council trying to lure a festival within its boundaries. In my view too many festivals serve to conceal the fact that the local cultural life is not worth mentioning, and that the inhabitants are denied a richly patterned and varied artistic life. The festival can degenerate into an instrument that is both inimical to art and archaic: too often it conceals a local narrow-mindedness towards the artists and art lovers whose requests for support or recognition from their local council usually go unheeded.
Perhaps the ideal city would be characterised by its capacity to permit every possible form of human activity without the presence of any one of them making another impossible. This demands a constant commitment from all its citizens, who, as it were, consult informally with each other every day in order to discuss and comment on the state of the balance.
To this end, in addition to coffee houses, places of reflection and creation are also essential. Museums large and small, theatres and concert halls, theatre companies major and minor, artists’ studios, galleries and street performers are all part of a continuing process of growth and death. Without death no life. Without new developments every equilibrium fossilizes, which leads irreversibly to rigidity, to the loss of life from the city. Perhaps the ideal city would be characterised by its capacity to permit every possible form of human activity without the presence of any one of them making another impossible. This demands a constant commitment from all its citizens, who, as it were, consult informally with each other every day in order to discuss and comment on the state of the balance.
Steve Austen, permanent fellow of the Felix Meritis Foundation, Amsterdam, cultural entrepreneur, consultant, publicist, and member of the group of initiators of “A Soul for Europe”. He has been active in cultural life of the Netherlands and Europe since 1966 and was co-responsible for “Amsterdam — The Cultural Capital of Europe 1987”. Together with Günter Grass he co-founded the informal working body “Gulliver”. Since 1987 he has been president and lecturer of the Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University.
Read more about the A Soul For Europe Pre-Conference debate here.
