Europe

EUROPE

Is Europe a success? Of course. Europe is not the euro, or finance. Europe is one of the great cultural experiments or adventures or undertakings in all of what we humans call time.

Americans have long—and loudly—celebrated the alleged “cultural experiment” that brought the United States into existence. But that wasn’t a cultural experiment, except that it was built on annihilating Native Americans, destroying their advanced civilisation, and importing Africans as slaves.

In 1952, the high school debate topic was the success or failure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. My debating partner was a girl named Evalyn Hosterman. Instead of defending NATO—it was, after all, nothing more than a military alliance—we argued that our human future on this planet should be a United Nations future. There is nothing in my life that I am more proud of than our seventeen year-old boldness and idealism.

The United Nations has had very little success, of course, in promoting civilisation, largely because of America’s absolute disagreement with the ideals of the United Nations. I suspect that the whole world knew, in 1947, that the United States would control, direct, and limit the United States. And by 1950, an alternative was being proposed—remarkably, from Britain—which in time would become the European Union.

The European Coal and Steel Union became the European Economic Community, which became the European Community,, and then the European Union. As late as 2005, the liberal National Public Radio in the United States still occasionally referred to the European Union as the “Common Market.” Of course: officially, the United States only understands two things: war, and what is called “economics.”

America thinks the idea of Europe is a failure. But then the United States didn’t understand what the European Economic Community was: couldn’t, because in Amereica, “economics” has to do with money, and the ideal of getting rich. The European Economic Community was two things that the United States couldn’t understand: a community, instead of what the Americans call a competition, and a real economy.

Economics is by definition social, not competitive: since the ancient Greeks created the word, it has to do with how we live together. It is a culture word. And the United States is is neither an economy or a culture. It is a me-first, screw-your-neighbor, win-win-win mock-society.

To be sure, the European Union has its faults: it is by no means perfect. But it is maybe the closest we humans have come to perfection thus far in our history.

Part of my pleasure with being a European is in collecting examples of our successes. Let me give you three small ones.

I teach at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany. Last winter term we had an “Irish Semester” in the English department. In December three students in English and a doctoral student in physics decided to collect Christmas presents for poor children in Dublin. They contacted the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Dublin, who agreed to deliver the presents, and DHL, which volunteered to deliver the presents to Dublin. In six days the students collected, boxed, and wrapped 131 ten-to-twenty euro presents and sent them off. Michael Tighe, our St. Vincent de Paul contact, wrote: “You wonderful kindness made me feel like a real European. Gifts like these are the European Union.”

In June of 2011, Klaus Schappert, the physicist—who is also the founding president of the German Charles Dickens Gesellschaft—decided that this year he wanted to collect 2,000 Christmas presents for orphaned or poor children in Romania. The project is called Action Oliver, after Dickens’s novel. And the project’s chief patron is the current head of the Dickens family, Mark Charles Dickens. I mentioned his project to the Vice-President for Europe at the university, Professor Patricia Oster-Stierle; her response was that of course the whole university should be involved in Action Oliver, and she would strongly recommend it to her colleagues in other German universities. “We are all Europeans!” you know.

And then, in July, I flew back to the United States for a Dickens symposium. I looked at the dinner menu card on my Air France flight. Everyone knows how intensely proud France and the French are of their cuisine. But our menu on Air France 322 from Paris to Boston was an Italian menu. And it was accompanied by a wonderful explanatory note: our meal was “selected by Air France to celebrate its partnering with Alitalia.” (“Partnering” is a generous word: Air France saved Alitalia.)

Our menu included a salad with mozarella cheese, lasagne, a generous portion of ripe Bel Paese, two lovely amaretti biscuits, and a Sicilian lemon tart for dessert. Only the bread and the wine were French.

Europe works. It is a success: a cultural success. We Germans share borders with nine countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Poland. We are very much in Europe. My university is not a German university, but—since its founding in the early 1950s—a European university: we are both the Universität des Saarlandes and the Université des Saarlandes. And given the history of the region, that duality is appropriate.

We have a French-German high school in Saarbrücken, and a popular park that is partly in Germany, and partly in France. And both Deutsch Bahn and SNCF—the German and French national railways—operate the high-speed trains that run from Frankfurt to Saarbrücken to Paris: sometimes you ride the French TGV, sometimes the German ICE.
There is a hill just outside Saarbrücken, overlooking the Saar river and the peaceful, green German and French countryside. It is a park, dedicated to the 12,000 young Frenchmen and the 10,000 young Germans who died there one Thursday afternoon in the 1880s. There is an obelisk memorialising the young Frenchmen who were killed that day, and about twenty yards away a column memorialising the your Germans who were killed. And there is a third monument: a not very large stone cube, surrounded by some light blue gravel. The brass plaque on the top is engraved, simply, “Never Again.”

This is the European Union. This is Europe. And in December, when Klaus Schappert’s Action Oliver sends 2,000 Christmas boxes to children in Romania who have never in their lives received a present, he will have made Europe again a bit larger, a bit more inclusive. And we won’t forget those Irish children, either. They aren’t only Irish; they are Europeans, as far as we are concerned. And that means something: there is an important principle involved.

Europe is not money-based, or power-based. It is based in the ideals of culture and real economics. Starting with little things like Christmas presents for poor children in Dublin and in Rumania, and an Italian dinner on Air France, maybe we will change—