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romanian!
I am writing this at the beginning of June 2005, and at the moment there is a small crisis in the European Union: the French and the Dutch have voted “No” in referendums on a new constitution for the Union. I’m not going to discuss this constitution here, and there are all sorts of reasons – contradictory reasons – for the No vote. However, it seems to me that there is a common theme running through many of them: the different peoples of Europe are desperate to cling on to their identity. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, it’s obvious that the people have a very different vision of Europe than the political elite have. The elite – for the best of motives – are building a Europe unified in its beigeness. They believe that this is the only path towards peace and prosperity. They have already created monetary union, with the euro. The constitution would have been a step on the road to political union, without which the euro can’t function properly. The third stage, inevitably, would be cultural union. Beige. Ordinary people sensed this in their bones, and were disturbed. It seems that the passionate crowds still have a soul after all, when their not worshipping in the glass cathedrals, a colourful soul. We see this in many other ways of course – for example in the popular demonstrations to write off African debt. A bit of a paradox here – on the one hand we become the willing victims of consumerism, whilst on the other hand we stage a moral protest against the effects of consumerism. That’s life.
What am I saying? I would certainly prefer a eurobeige to the American version, and I don’t know if there’s a third alternative available to us now. I hope there is.
Honestly I’m not saying beige is wrong. Throughout history, the peoples of Europe have lived in squalor, fighting and killing each other because of differences of religion or language or tribe – surely it’s good that we’ve arrived at a place where everyone can flourish, where you can believe whatever you want, where every individual is the same as every other… isn’t it … ? “The Third Man” is an old black-and-white film set in post-war Vienna, an occupied city home to a thriving black-market. The chief black-marketeer justified himself thus:
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produce Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
