“Europeanism,” then, is merely an “invented tradition” (as Eric Hobsbawn would say), which contains a fragile hope that its far-reaching, inclusive agenda might appeal to a majority of the citizens and peoples of Europe. So far, alas, precious few efforts have been made to construct such a common master narrative. In part, this is because Europe lacks a common natural language. Among the numerous national, ethnic, and cultural traditions on the continent, “Europeanism” does not figure very high on anyone’s list of identities. Moreover, it would not be too excessive to claim that the systemic and institutional integration of the European continent increasingly diverges from cultural integration. Indeed, it is with understandable regret that I must state the obvious: the European Union has not yet succeeded in building a satisfactory series of images, values, and ideals that would transcend our immediate existence with all its difficulties and joys. “Europeanism”—as an orderly constellation of aspirations, values, images, attitudes, convictions, and concepts that could serve as a source of individual inspiration and grant meaning to collective behavior—such “Europeanism” has not yet appeared on the horizon.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that it needs to be jointly contemplated and envisioned; otherwise, we all will find ourselves, rich West Europeans no less than poor Central and East Europeans, in an undesirable situation. We will share institutions and agencies overseeing free-flowing financial and labor transactions, but our respective cultural spheres will remain condemned to an existence of reciprocal tolerance at best, that is to say, mutually encouraged passivity and a lack of active interest in regard to each other’s immediate experience, as Will Kymlicka suggests in Multicultural Citizenship. Without a broad social consensus on the legitimate and, thus, publicly recognized presence of a grand narrative in which Europeans can recognize themselves precisely as Europeans—and not exclusively as Poles, Germans, Lithuanians or Croatians—any attempt to construct such a narrative has to resort to abstract postulates. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the development of a “common mental framework,” in which the rich experience of European cultural diversity could be symbolically integrated and remodeled, faces greater difficulties in both form and substance than the development of a “common market.” John Stuart Mill, in Considerations on Representative Government, expressed this need in a classic formulation: “Among a people without fellow feelings, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist.”
Supranational identifications presuppose the need to recognize multiple loyalties. Inasmuch as the diversity of cultures has traditionally been a key element of Europe’s greatness, this very diversity should be reinforced and celebrated. The forging of a new European identity as a complex, hybrid invented tradition calls for the recognition of the ineluctably multiple identities from which “Europeanism” might be designed. There is, of course, an element of wishful thinking here: multilayered identities should allow for the simultaneous celebration of local, national, and continental elements. It should not be impossible to be at the same time Catalan, Spanish and European. Basic allegiances need not be exclusivist allegiances.
Alas, the current strategies of the ongoing negotiation on the shape and character of “Europeanism” are to a large degree guided by a profound distrust of particular and national identifications. Such distrust may be understandable, but it is epistemologically unacceptable in a globalizing world in which “Europeanism” is itself but a particular identity. That is why it is impossible to fashion any common ground of shared European identity if one is forced to eschew fecund local and particular markers. If one shies away from the troublesome dialectics of particular and general, the only sustained answer will necessarily remain abstract and, ultimately, noncommittal. If one willfully avoids engaging the relevance of the cultural habits and values of the various nationalities of Europe, one’s “Europeanism” will end up looking hollow, simulated, and insubstantial. Neither the authority of the European Commission nor the civic and ethnically blind character of Europe’s supranational bodies possesses the ability to inspire citizens; these institutions are too hollow for any social mobilization and too immaterial to spark spontaneous affection, as John Keane has eloquently stated.
As I tried to calm down my excited children on the terrace of the Saint Francis Hotel in Assisi, I vaguely deliberated on this topic, as much as one can on a hot August afternoon. If my deliberations were disjointed and fragmented, a moment of truth was nonetheless approaching. As the dignified and reserved waiter brought the bill, “Europeanism” revealed itself in its full, miserable, and abstract nature. When I tried to pay with a bunch of new, hardly used euro banknotes, the waiter turned them down politely but firmly, just as he had undoubtedly learned to turn down suspicious-looking checks and bogus credit cards. More important than my annoyance at this inconvenience was the realization that there is, indeed, something artificial about euro banknotes. They are—if we look at them closely—completely lacking in character. To put it bluntly, they resemble a “Europeanism” imposed from above.
What visually distinguishes the five-euro bill is a picture of a vaguely ancient viaduct that could have been erected anywhere in the Roman Empire. The ten-euro bill boasts a Romanesque portal and bridge, while the two-hundred-euro bill, which I did not offer to the waiter, bears a less-than-clear image of a glass door and some kind of iron bridge. Unlike national currencies, the euro is too timid to show a face and too reticent to suggest a biography, to give pride of place to any story. Not a single human being appears on these crisp banknotes. Incapable of inspiring any sense of recognition, of de te fabula narratur, these notes are abstractions, ideas suggesting little, if any, tangible or familiar sensual quality. In vain one searches for portraits of such figures as Erasmus, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mickiewicz, Velasquez, Newton, Goethe, Andrić. The columns and arches on these notes suggest ruined empires, transformed into a nostalgia for connection and community, something lost in the sands of the irrecoverable past. This past is irrecoverable because it has no foundation, no recognizable landscape. The banknote imagery of the euro visually represents a no-man’s land without historical memory. Currency can serve as a kind of collective I.D. card, which tells people they belong to a nation’s imaginary community. What we must sadly infer from euro banknotes is that post-Maastricht Europe is a land with no founding event, destiny, or battle for independence—with, in fact, no real independence, if one considers America’s increasingly reluctant security guarantees for the grand European experiment.
In this regard, Europe’s weakest point, as I see it, is that it cannot offer enough transnational ideas that would function integratively and at the same time not rely solely on the laws of the free market. This failure concerns me not only in regard to the fragmentary cultural conditions of “Europeanism”; there are even more sinister effects. In the vacuum created by the lack of integrative works of the common imagination, many offshoots of political populism can flourish, since they are adept at using such simplistic and easy-to-understand metaphors as “a full boat” and “Fortress Europe,” as Jean-Marie Le Pen has done in France and Jörg Haider in Austria, to mention but two notorious examples. These right-wing political metaphors have one goal in particular: to mask economic interests with ethnic slogans. These rhetorical appeals to an exclusivist concern for one’s own ethnic community seek to cover up the effects of globalization on the distribution of wealth and the erosion of the important European tradition of the social state. Since the political elite cannot deal critically with transnational corporations, on which its survival increasingly depends, the simplest way to solve the problem is to make a scapegoat of foreigners, immigrants, and the Eastern masses (to say nothing of the third world). An enlightened segment of public still recognizes these outbursts of “fascism with a smile” as aberrant and unacceptable political behavior. The key issue, however, lies elsewhere. Expressions of chauvinistic populism, indeed, cannot be simply reduced to deviations from the norm but are, rather, a constituent part of an integration process that concerns itself exclusively with the freedom of the market, which, in turn, ushers in the corporate homogenization of everyday life. The hidden handshake of solidarity once guaranteed by the social state and its safety nets has gone by the wayside.
In this context, one notices even more painfully that awareness of the need for a comprehensive, inclusive, and pluralistic grand narrative is articulated only in very vague terms. This vagueness, of course, is intimately linked to the willed, rational, and deliberate construction of such a grand European narrative. I have no illusions whatsoever about the “natural,” “everlasting,” or “stable” nature of founding narratives, which are always the provisional outcome of ongoing negotiations over the choice of constitutive elements and their constellation. It is essential, however, that we agree on this: the construction of Europeanism must be based on the entire field of cultural and ethnic traditions. The difficulties of reaching such a consensus present a series of practical impediments to the project. Even more important than the undoubtedly large practical impediments is a poorly reflected basic presumption, which I have described as “metaphysical.” It derives from the ambiguous use of the term “Europe”—and the corresponding public perception—which reserves the term for Western Europe or the European Union alone. The danger of such coterminous usage in political parlance was appallingly well revealed in the wars of Yugoslav succession. The shameful role and calculated inactivity of the E.U. in the Balkan conflict very bitterly exposed the fragile nature of the existing “European” grand narrative. For the longest time, the conflict was either dismissed as “tribal,” “ethnic,” and “primitive,” or discussed solely in terms of humanitarian aid. It was not, by and large, viewed as a “European” conflict.
the art is inside
