What is Europe about....an occasional series.
I have been engaged in vigorous exchanges of email with some American friends over Europe recently. They are north-eastern academics, picture thirtysomethings in woollen V-neck sweaters, scattered in elite campuses set in rolling wooded hills across the north-east. They are anglophile, with anglophile prejudices.Onen group's preconceived idea has been that it is some elitist project, driven by irreligious jacobin commission officials - unstable, unanchored in the wishes of the majority, driven by a desire to impose an abstract system of governance on a group of organic societies. They are followers of the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. They tend to think the revolution is going to fail. Another group has argued that the EU is heir to the Third Reich; they point to the elitism of the EU institutions; the fact that an early version of the EU was on the third reich drawing board, that Germany has bankrolled the EU for much of its existence; that European socities are poor at integration, that we have anti-semitism and a very rightwing parties (I know, but that is what they think). They also think that the EU - based on my description -seems to developing an elite kind of person, the superior European, different and manner and very contemptuous of the "democratic" American...and others. They have a point. There are in Brussels a lot of youngish Germanic men in horn-rimmed flasses and sidecombed hair, thin noses and superior intelligence - bureaucrats who plan the new Europe who make you think, mmmm, I wonder what they would have been doing sixty-five years ago, probably subcategorising people of Jewish ancestry according to the blood status of their grandparents into Mischling grade I or Mischling grade II. In those days they would have banned bad genetic blood lines of humans; today they ban genetic crops. Facing these arguments - whose common factor is that Europe is a pretty elitist place, I tell them a little story about dreams. While the European institutions gift their employees with extra-ordinary means to fulfil their potential, this is under threat - and that's bad. Let the threat to the elitists be told with reference to a well-known science fiction story. Confused? You won't be. Read on.
You, my intelligent American friend, D, a journalist, are in Brussels. It is lunchtime, Albert Speerstrasse, the long parade route that runs to the centre of Brussels. Actually it is called rue de la loi. They cleared workers housing twenty years ago, small organic housing, with squares and parks. Now the area is just one of concrete office blocks housing the 26 directorates that run the affairs of 500 million people.At lunchtime, thousands of European officials pour out of the Berlaymont, and the Justsus Lipsius, the two biggest buildings in a parade of low skyscrapers in the area. Many hold the Financial Times. Hundreds are milling around in the lobby of the Council; many have neckscarves and compact trolley suitcases of airhostesses. There is an intense sense of busyness, as high heels clack on the black marble floors under a high atrium ceiling. You always liked European girls; they are all in skirts, and you wonder who they will be spending the night with....most girls do, after all, have someone or other. Their average age is about 27. There are few north Italian aquiline faces: no blacks, Arabs, no obvious Jews. (There are in fact very few Jews working in the EU) The friend emerges: his name is Christophe Langenmarck. You hail a black mercedes limousine cab. He tells you immediately he is balling an interpreter; he also tells you he was working on legislation with the Americans about the new European Galileo satellites. He takes you to the Place Jourdan, a square preserved from the developers where you can have sancerre and halibut in the spring sunshine. He tells you he has been listening to Gary Numan. That it is the music of the new Europe.Hard, metallic. Then he tells why he liked Bladerunner. Because the replicants seem to be the bad guys, but it emerges that they are the good guys. They are the aristocrats. They are created by the inferiors, human beings, and their violence when escaping to earth can be explained by the fact they are looking for the one gift denied them: a normal lifespan. They have to be killed. Deckard - Harrison Ford - the bladerunner - is dispatched to kill them. He kills all but the leader, Roy, who saves Deckard just as he expires himself, under his replicant's shortened lifespan. At the end of the movie, Deckard himself realises he is a replicant - and will probably die shortly. Humankind used a replicant to kill replicants, the only one to take them on.
"You destroyed the EU," Christophe says. "You are a bladerunner."
And then your friend quotes the last line by Roy in the film. ""I have seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen seabeams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
He doesn't have to spell it out: what he means is that the clever people who work for the commission, travelling business class all over the world, see and meet people the average voter and reader of your paper never has, never would. They meet the top thinkers, top politicians, visits killing fields and refugess camps, protected forests, the Houston space centre and the inner sanctum of the Kremlin. And out of this they have a vision for a greater Europe - a greater Europe for all, but led by them.
On your way back home on the London tubr from Heathrow airport, you pass all the commuter homes, containing suburban lives, as you read the Evening Standard headline that the EU will dissolve itself within three years. You feel rather sad for those who saw things people wouldn't believe.
You, my intelligent American friend, D, a journalist, are in Brussels. It is lunchtime, Albert Speerstrasse, the long parade route that runs to the centre of Brussels. Actually it is called rue de la loi. They cleared workers housing twenty years ago, small organic housing, with squares and parks. Now the area is just one of concrete office blocks housing the 26 directorates that run the affairs of 500 million people.At lunchtime, thousands of European officials pour out of the Berlaymont, and the Justsus Lipsius, the two biggest buildings in a parade of low skyscrapers in the area. Many hold the Financial Times. Hundreds are milling around in the lobby of the Council; many have neckscarves and compact trolley suitcases of airhostesses. There is an intense sense of busyness, as high heels clack on the black marble floors under a high atrium ceiling. You always liked European girls; they are all in skirts, and you wonder who they will be spending the night with....most girls do, after all, have someone or other. Their average age is about 27. There are few north Italian aquiline faces: no blacks, Arabs, no obvious Jews. (There are in fact very few Jews working in the EU) The friend emerges: his name is Christophe Langenmarck. You hail a black mercedes limousine cab. He tells you immediately he is balling an interpreter; he also tells you he was working on legislation with the Americans about the new European Galileo satellites. He takes you to the Place Jourdan, a square preserved from the developers where you can have sancerre and halibut in the spring sunshine. He tells you he has been listening to Gary Numan. That it is the music of the new Europe.Hard, metallic. Then he tells why he liked Bladerunner. Because the replicants seem to be the bad guys, but it emerges that they are the good guys. They are the aristocrats. They are created by the inferiors, human beings, and their violence when escaping to earth can be explained by the fact they are looking for the one gift denied them: a normal lifespan. They have to be killed. Deckard - Harrison Ford - the bladerunner - is dispatched to kill them. He kills all but the leader, Roy, who saves Deckard just as he expires himself, under his replicant's shortened lifespan. At the end of the movie, Deckard himself realises he is a replicant - and will probably die shortly. Humankind used a replicant to kill replicants, the only one to take them on.
"You destroyed the EU," Christophe says. "You are a bladerunner."
And then your friend quotes the last line by Roy in the film. ""I have seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen seabeams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
He doesn't have to spell it out: what he means is that the clever people who work for the commission, travelling business class all over the world, see and meet people the average voter and reader of your paper never has, never would. They meet the top thinkers, top politicians, visits killing fields and refugess camps, protected forests, the Houston space centre and the inner sanctum of the Kremlin. And out of this they have a vision for a greater Europe - a greater Europe for all, but led by them.
On your way back home on the London tubr from Heathrow airport, you pass all the commuter homes, containing suburban lives, as you read the Evening Standard headline that the EU will dissolve itself within three years. You feel rather sad for those who saw things people wouldn't believe.
