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“If I had it to do all over again, I would start with culture.” It is questionable—to say the least-- whether this remark, a favorite of speechwriters drafting balcony addresses, actually was uttered by Jean Monet. Presumably, the founding father of the idea of European unity, born on November 9, 1888 (!) in Cognac, was far too smart and down-to-earth to have issued such a mushy statement, since it hardly fits his vision of the gradual convergence of Europe’s core states through industrial mergers and the dismantling of trade barriers. More likely, the remark should be attributed to the former French Minister of Culture Jack Lang, who craftily modified the alleged quotation from European icon Monnet by adding a subjunctive codicil: (“He could have said it”). One suspects that Lang wanted to justify a bigger budget for culture: his culture, the culture of the “good, true, and beautiful.”
Is there a European culture?
It would indeed be a nice idea to “give culture a try.” But is there a European culture? Can there be one at all? And: what would it even mean to want to forge a European identity based on culture? Today and in the future such questions are more than simply fodder for bored salon chatter. After all, Europe can participate in the geopolitical circle dance only if Europe really exists. The burden of proof for that is not trivial.
In a geographic sense, Europe occupies an ill-defined space. One has the option of including in or excluding from it Russia west of the Urals, Türkiye, or French Polynesia. Even Christianity is rather imprecise if taken as the unique feature of European identity. After all, Christians are to be found in a variety of groups within Europe. Traditionally they have tended to be responsible for wars and schisms. Also, many other religions are practiced in Europe. Besides, the notion of an “ecumene” was born on the island of Crete, where, as is well known, the goddess Europa arrived riding a bull. That is the source of the myth of the same name.
Where tolerance prevails
What is more likely to help us here is a glance at the relatively obscure little island of Delos in the Aegean Sea. Treeless and mostly uninhabited by permanent residents today, it was once the spiritual and eventually the economic heart of the Delian (aka Attic) League, whose treasury was located there. And for that reason, it was also the League’s meeting-place, where inter-state agreements were negotiated among the various political entities around the Aegean with an eye to forming alliances and strengthening themselves against the constant threat emanating from that era’s great power, Persia.
Delos must have been a place where tolerance and inter-religious cooperation prevailed in a very small space. Today it’s a huge rubble pile on which little remains but a few grazing goats: a symbol of both the existence and the fragility of the European idea.
Of course, the Romans were here too. And, incidentally, they likewise made of Delos a free-trade port, very much in the spirit of Jean Monnet, hoping to succeed in breaking the maritime supremacy of Rhodes. Without Romans there would be no Europe. What would we be without them? To be sure, they were hardly beyond reproach in matters of culture. True, we are indebted to them for Roman law and the idea of a mixed constitution, from which Montesquieu derived modern Europe’s central political idea, the separation of powers. But viewed from the standpoint of artistic culture, the Romans were poor copiers and barbaric administrators of culture. Nothing was so bad that they wouldn’t sell it off to satisfy populist wishes. There were no copyrights in Rome, but there was a lot of plagiarism.
What about the Holy Roman Empire, to which the phrase “of the German nation” was later appended? For that reason alone, it should be disqualified from being regarded as the historical seedbed of the European idea, not least because it excluded both France and England. Not even the “Holy Grail” in the Imperial Treasury of Vienna’s Hofburg Palace can change that fact. But it is not this formidable, massive agate bowl (with a diameter of 76 cm, the largest carved stone bowl in the world) that has found its way into the heart of European culture. It is the myth that is entwined around the vessel: the story of The One who comes to sweep away the imperfections of noble spirits. The shining light. It is the most poisonous ingredient of European (non-) culture. And yet it is so pleasant to indulge this impulse And so well and truly he or she may come along: a hero, a savior, a knight in shining armor. What would European culture be without this theme? Classicists will sigh and romantics will groan, all in different ways. Here, blood, the grail, and soil are all of a piece. Europe—a fairy tale on stage? The European powers at odds with one another at the Round Table, as bathers in their own blood. A revenant of European culture, neither good nor true nor beautiful, but extremely popular!
“A myth entwined around European culture”
It seems as if the first half of the twentieth century had put an end to that myth. In fact, Europe was drowning in its own blood. Outside intervention alone was able to save the continent. If the old Europe faded away in the First World War, then World War II put paid to a German myth: of The One who comes to overawe those who engage in petty political quarrels. That myth has now lost its existential justification. And the bloody road toward that conclusion entrenched itself so deeply in our memories that at last peace did ensue for a while, even if it may have felt more like a cold war.
The ancient world plus humanism
Were it not for the Enlightenment, which drew its inspiration from the ancient world and the humanism that antiquity fostered, Europe would have had no way to get back on its feet again after 1945. Divided, frozen into a bipolar world until 1989, then apparently freed of its shackles after the fall of the iron curtain, Europe found in the Enlightenment a compass for the now-irreversible European way. Democracy, pluralism, freedom, individuality and the subsequent effort to make economic activity more sustainable: those principles seemed to be the guardrails of European development, apparently as incontestable as the inviolability of nations’ territorial integrity. Yet we naïve German westerners would have mentally added the proviso: “With the aim of overcoming those territorial boundaries.” Meanwhile, other nations in eastern Europe, far more dynamic because they had recently been freed from the Cold War deepfreeze, were finally able to become nations (again). The postwar experiences of the Federal Republic of Germany also stirred western European hopes for the creation of post-national institutions on the continent that would finally enable it to get past the dead-end of nationally-based identities, a transition that the Germans had experienced firsthand. But the western European convergence on that post-national future evoked only shoulder shrugs in the east, where long-suppressed national identities were starting to be revived. The end of the Cold War allowed the countless corpses in the European cellar to thaw out once again. How could it have been otherwise?
There’s no such thing
And European culture? There’s no such thing. At most, it looks at the scene through a thousand eyes, like an outside observer with no reason to take sides when the European family started to renew its old quarrels. As if it were averting its eyes when the story of the European Round Table gave way to the old Brothers Grimm tale of a “magic table” that always refills itself when told to do so. It is conflict, the dishonesty and mistrust within the old European family, that is determining its existence. And so it happens that, despite the richly supplied table that continually replenishes itself and that has outlasted dark times, no remotely resilient community has emerged, not even a cultural one. At least none that would admit of a reasonable definition.
And yet any random artificial intelligence when asked: “Is there a European culture?” would simply answer “yes, there is a European culture characterized by shared history, values, traditions, and shared cultural exchange, even though Europe embraces many different cultures and languages.” Well then, perhaps there is hope after all? Everything is fine, says the AI.
But only under a couple of conditions
Europe depends on whether we take a genuine interest in one another, and whether this interest extends beyond vacations and the diverse European cuisine and selection of wines. We need to develop a thriving European public sphere, giving it its own space. And we have to talk to one another across borders even when we have not mastered the other person’s language, and even if we have to do it in bad English. Or—thank God--with ever-improving electronic translation tools that help us overcome Europe’s Babylonian linguistic confusion. Because of course, not the least of the great European misunderstandings is a linguistic one.
We have to play together, be creative beyond national boundaries, celebrating our polymorphism and cultural diversity.
We should speak up for the issues that neighboring Europeans care about, even when we don’t think that it is possible to do so.
We must protect both our data rooms and our intellectual and cultural property. We need to control the routes along which we make exchanges. We have to ensure that everything that traverses those paths is above-board and that data highwaymen don’t steal everything from us that makes us what we are.