Nobody ever said creating a common European identity would be easy. Toward the end of his life, Jean Monnet, the architect of the European Community, said that if he had to build Europe all over again, he’d start with culture, not economics. And indeed, behind the diplomatic wranglings of last week’s Copenhagen Summit lay a question of Hamletesque gravity: what makes Europe European?
Radical changes in its size, shape and makeup have left the region’s traditional fabric looking threadbare. Fifteen million European Muslims–not to mention more recent immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America–have exploded traditional notions of Europe as a Christian structure built on classical foundations. America’s overwhelming might, made all the more palpable by the war on terror, underscores that Europe’s days as a Great Power are a mere memory. And next May’s accession of 10 new members–many of them post-Soviet and relatively poor–will mark the end of the Union as a wealthy West European club.
Traditionalists fret that these new forces will be the death of Europe and its culture. On the contrary, they will be the making of it. For the people surest of what Europe means today are those at its margins, be they in Ankara, Bucharest or immigrant neighborhoods of London, Paris or Berlin. More than most, they understand that the new forces reshaping Europe free it from old-fashioned markers of identity–a particular landmass, a single faith or language. They’re forcing Europe to evolve into a more open, multicultural and (dare we say it) more modern society–a state of mind rather than a giant nation-state. And here’s the real surprise: these changes ultimately will make the Old World look a good deal like the New. For all its protestations, Europe is recasting itself in the image of its great “Other” to the West–America.
What a twist of fortune. For decades Brussels kulturcrats have dreamed of building a European identity, untainted by McWorld. Like a modern Medici, the European Union funds a glittering array of initiatives, ranging from traveling dance festivals to digitalizing the Louvre’s artworks to translating the works of Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa into Norwegian. The EU spends more than 500 million Euro a year on its cultural policy, which aims to tease out Europe’s shared heritage while championing its diversities. “There is no one European culture,” argues Viviane Reding, the EU’s Culture and Education commissioner. “It’s a cultural mosaic.”
The cracks in that mosaic, though, are very real. A proposed Museum of Europe in Brussels foundered after a dispute over when Europe began. Greece objected that exhibits would start with Charlemagne in A.D. 800, leaving out Homer, the Parthenon and Plato. Transnational projects like the Strasbourg-based television network ARTE, brainchild of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, feel synthetic and elitist. (After a decade on-air, this “television without borders” still nods to national sensibilities, resorting to news broadcasts that alternate weekly between French and German anchors.) Nor have symbols like euro notes stamped with aqueducts and Gothic arches, or the gold-and-lapis flag, done much to create Europeans. The most recent Euro-barometer poll shows that only 38 percent of EU citizens think Europe shares a cultural identity.
Faced with numbers like these, the European Union cultural establishment has realized that it can’t ignore deep-rooted local cultures to manufacture a synthetic European one. Film buffs still cringe at the memory of “Europuddings,” contrived coproductions of the early 1990s that featured labored transnational scripts and cast lists that read like U.N. roll calls. (Remember “The Milky Life,” a Spanish-German-French production set in California, starring Mickey Rooney in diapers, prattling baby talk and suckling on German actress Marianne Sagebrecht? Thought not.) The artists with the strongest Pan-European appeal–be they oh-so-English popster Robbie Williams or the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar–draw on national cultures to explore universal themes. Taking note, EU institutions like the European Film Academy have been counseling young directors to make movies with simple local plots that travel well. Oft-cited blueprints: hits like “Amelie,” a love note to Paris that made French actress Audrey Tautou an international star, and “Billy Elliot,” a boy-with-a-dream yarn set in a British mining town that took in 25 times its own production costs at the box office.
This sense of “Europeanness” as a melange of arts and pop culture seems oddly quaint, even retro. It’s also a marked contrast to the view of Europe held by tens of millions of newcomers. For Europe’s swelling population of immigrants, Europe isn’t about Shakespeare or the Sistine Chapel. It’s about opportunity and liberty. “Of course I know what Europe means,” says a North African Muslim taxi driver in Brussels. “It’s about democracy and freedom.” In Poland and other former Soviet-bloc countries, decades under communism helped sharpen this sense of European culture, says Jacek Purchla, director of Krakow’s International Cultural Centre: “Perhaps we felt our European identity more than in Western countries, because we clung to it to survive the time and to struggle for freedom.” “Europe is something you only sense when you’re on the outside,” observes Ulrike Guerot, of Berlin’s Council on Foreign Relations.
There’s a clarity to Europe, seen from afar, that’s often lost when viewed from the inside. These days, to be European is very much about not being American. The threat of war in Iraq, coupled with the Bush administration’s perceived unilateralism, has sharpened Europe’s sense of identity as a place apart from its longtime ally. Europe’s positions on emotional issues like the death penalty, the Kyoto accords and Israel are no longer simply issues in themselves, but a means of differentiation from the suspect superpower. Alienation from America thus helps create Europeans on the links at the Ryder Cup. “Those beery cries of ‘Europe, Europe,’ didn’t mean the denizens of the 19th hole had suddenly been converted into good Europeans,” a Scottish commentator tartly observed. “It simply meant they weren’t American.” Or as the French sociologist Emmanuel Todd puts it: “Being European is about not being American.”
It’s an odd self-conception, inherently conflicted. For in the end, the culture of the European Union is destined to become rather more American than many Europeans might like to admit. That’s not because Europe’s culture will somehow be mangled in the jaws of Hollywood, or crushed by J. Lo’s publicity machine. EuroDisney near Paris may remain Europe’s top tourist destination, and American movies may take the lion’s share of profits at European multiplexes. But Europeans will always retain a healthy appetite for homegrown culture, be it the music of fabulously successful French rapper MC Solar or the novels of Cees Nooteboom, whose books have been translated into 15 European languages. And who knows what renaissance might now be sparked by a borderless, ever-larger Europe?
Still, that’s surface stuff. On a deeper level, European identity will inevitably be “Americanized” as the EU dilutes people’s ties to bits of land or ways of life. Labor will become more mobile. Rising immigration will forge new constellations of ethnicity. To be a European, rather than simply a German or Spaniard, will increasingly require an imaginative leap. Europeans of the 21st century will need dual allegiances–one to the land of their ancestors, and the other to Europe. Lacking the traditional props–a king, a nation bound by a single faith or language or history–they will define themselves less by geography or tribe than by more modern ideals of freedom, diversity and tolerance. In so doing, they’ll build a culture that, unwittingly but in spirit, looks a lot like that other big nation of immigrants and unified states to the West.
With Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Katka Krosnar in Prague, Friso Endt in The Hague, Stefan Theil in Berlin, Tara Pepper in London And Toula Vlahou in Athens
