Europe is the future
Jul. 25th, 2006 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus032c is a magazine based in Berlin. The summer 2006 issue is entitled "Europe Endless: The propaganda campaign for an old new continent", and it's fantastically interesting and inspiring. The subject: nothing less than the future of Europe. The issue contains visuals by Lucy McKenzie, Rem Koolhaas, and Matthew Barney, as well as interviews with Linder and David Adjaye, and ruminations on the work of 13 Japanese photographers snapping their 
impressions of Europe. But the theoretical meat (and some dynamite) lies in a core of articles, interviews and transcribed lectures by Navid Kermani, Tony Judt and Mark Leonard. I thought I'd gloss some of the arguments these thinkers are making, because this is important stuff. And because I'm, personally, very proud to be a European.
Historian Tony Judt: "There is this sense now that America is no longer a model society... From World War II until 1989, the US was unique because it was the most powerful country in the world. But also it had passed its power through all these international institutions beginning with the UN, the IMF, what was going to become the WTO, the World Bank... America and international governance were somehow mixed up together in people's minds. The United States has incredibly stupidly insisted on separating those in the public image so that it is now against all these international agencies... with the result, I think, that America's much weaker and its legitimacy is much reduced... America is the true third world country, in a way, with a fantastically wealthy, skilled, educated, powerful elite and a desperately, increasingly poor, medically undercovered, badly educated, increasingly ignorant and unskilled mass working population."
Mark Leonard says that, far from being in "crisis", as journalists like to say, the EU is effecting a sneaky -- and extraordinary -- sort of triumph:
"When we stop looking at the world through American eyes we can see that many of the elements of European weakness are in fact facets of this extraordinary... transformative power... The rise of the European Union is the first time in history that a great power has arisen without provoking other countries to unite against it. What's extraordinary about the EU (unlike the British Empire, the French and Spanish Empires, the Germans and Japanese in the 20th century -- or even America today) is that the more powerful the European Union becomes the longer the list of countries that want to join it. It's a magnetic force that people want to unite with rather than balance against."
The EU is passive aggressive, Leonard continues; it doesn't invade anyone. The worst thing it can do is refuse to let other nations join it, cut them off. Regime change is being effected on a scale never seen before in human history, but without a shot being fired. There are 450 million citizens in the EU, but another 1.5 billion in 80 countries "umbilically linked" to the EUzone by trade. Columbia can never join the US, but Serbia can join Europe. The difference is legal frameworks, Europe's secret weapon:
"Each country that joins the EU has to absorb 80,000 pages of laws in 31 volumes that govern everything from gay rights to food safety." Turkey, enticed by the prospect of joining, has already abolished the death penalty and given minority kurds their own TV stations. And this European model is influencing other regions, like East Asia, Latin America, Africa. Even the Arab League is looking at ways to make an Arabic version of the EU. For this reason, Leonard thinks we'll see "a new European century".
Navid Kermani is also looking at the EU's vitality at its periphery. "Whoever wants to discover how valuable this overly bureaucratic, apathetic, fat, indecisive body known as the European Union actually is need only travel to where it stops," he says. And so he speaks to Moroccans who have tried to enter the Eurozone by boat. Have they considered that they might die in the attempt? "Sure... but it's not any worse than life here... The Europeans think all Arabs are suicide bombers. Yes, they're right, all of us here are suicide bombers," joke the Moroccans. "The paradise we're giving our lives up for is called Schengen."
impressions of Europe. But the theoretical meat (and some dynamite) lies in a core of articles, interviews and transcribed lectures by Navid Kermani, Tony Judt and Mark Leonard. I thought I'd gloss some of the arguments these thinkers are making, because this is important stuff. And because I'm, personally, very proud to be a European.Historian Tony Judt: "There is this sense now that America is no longer a model society... From World War II until 1989, the US was unique because it was the most powerful country in the world. But also it had passed its power through all these international institutions beginning with the UN, the IMF, what was going to become the WTO, the World Bank... America and international governance were somehow mixed up together in people's minds. The United States has incredibly stupidly insisted on separating those in the public image so that it is now against all these international agencies... with the result, I think, that America's much weaker and its legitimacy is much reduced... America is the true third world country, in a way, with a fantastically wealthy, skilled, educated, powerful elite and a desperately, increasingly poor, medically undercovered, badly educated, increasingly ignorant and unskilled mass working population."
Mark Leonard says that, far from being in "crisis", as journalists like to say, the EU is effecting a sneaky -- and extraordinary -- sort of triumph:
"When we stop looking at the world through American eyes we can see that many of the elements of European weakness are in fact facets of this extraordinary... transformative power... The rise of the European Union is the first time in history that a great power has arisen without provoking other countries to unite against it. What's extraordinary about the EU (unlike the British Empire, the French and Spanish Empires, the Germans and Japanese in the 20th century -- or even America today) is that the more powerful the European Union becomes the longer the list of countries that want to join it. It's a magnetic force that people want to unite with rather than balance against."
The EU is passive aggressive, Leonard continues; it doesn't invade anyone. The worst thing it can do is refuse to let other nations join it, cut them off. Regime change is being effected on a scale never seen before in human history, but without a shot being fired. There are 450 million citizens in the EU, but another 1.5 billion in 80 countries "umbilically linked" to the EUzone by trade. Columbia can never join the US, but Serbia can join Europe. The difference is legal frameworks, Europe's secret weapon:
"Each country that joins the EU has to absorb 80,000 pages of laws in 31 volumes that govern everything from gay rights to food safety." Turkey, enticed by the prospect of joining, has already abolished the death penalty and given minority kurds their own TV stations. And this European model is influencing other regions, like East Asia, Latin America, Africa. Even the Arab League is looking at ways to make an Arabic version of the EU. For this reason, Leonard thinks we'll see "a new European century".
Navid Kermani is also looking at the EU's vitality at its periphery. "Whoever wants to discover how valuable this overly bureaucratic, apathetic, fat, indecisive body known as the European Union actually is need only travel to where it stops," he says. And so he speaks to Moroccans who have tried to enter the Eurozone by boat. Have they considered that they might die in the attempt? "Sure... but it's not any worse than life here... The Europeans think all Arabs are suicide bombers. Yes, they're right, all of us here are suicide bombers," joke the Moroccans. "The paradise we're giving our lives up for is called Schengen."
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 08:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 08:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 09:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 10:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 10:46 am (UTC)lets say you live or grew up in a specific town in scotland. so you feel like a resident of that town if you compare yourself to a resident of a different scottish town. at them same time you are a scot if you're talking to someone from, lets say france. and it goes on like that...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 11:00 am (UTC)That's going a bit far. America is mostly middle-class. There are poor people, sure, but they aren't the vast majority as Judt suggests. He's exaggerating to make a point.
I do like your post, though, and agree with most of it. And the addition of the EU to the world stage doesn't have to be a bad thing for America, certainly. The more the merrier - especially if "more" means peaceful and liberal.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 11:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 11:25 am (UTC)I have a cunning way to resolve that glocal question. I'm from the East Coast of Scotland (school in Edinburgh, university in Aberdeen), and whereas the Glaswegians tend to look culturally to America, the East Coast is more European. Edinburgh is "the Athens of the North", home of Eastward-looking bands like Josef K, and so on.
As soon as the visa barriers in Europe came down, I was out of the UK, off to live in Paris. Later, living in New York, I became (quite happily) part of that city's "Eurotrash". (The Bar I used to drink in, run by Eurotrash, had a jokey sign up saying "No Eurotrash served".)
Now, living in Berlin, I feel again this secondary identity of Europeanness becoming a primary identity. I hardly ever go to Scotland, and I'm not living in "Germany".
Oddly enough, the place I feel most Scottish is Japan. Because there I'm a foreigner, and when people ask what sort of jin I am I say "Scotlando-jin". I don't even know how to say "European" in Japanese, and it would certainly seem too vague an answer to give a Japanese person: Watashi-wa Europa-jin!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 11:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-07-25 11:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 11:50 am (UTC)hahaha. so true
My dad is one of those types, we moved to a hectare of wilderness on the most rural, large island in the pacific, 3000 miles away from everything and he quotes John Locke.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 11:54 am (UTC)Japan 90.0%
Sweden 79.0
Norway 73.4
Germany 70.1
Switzerland 67.2
Netherlands 62.5
Canada 58.5
United Kingdom 58.5
United States 53.7
Go America!
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/8Comparison.htm
New New World Order
Date: 2006-07-25 12:16 pm (UTC)I would like to re-instate 3 beats to the bar as the norm rather than the exception and live in a New New World Order of Melody, Harmony and Mutual Illumination.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 12:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 12:46 pm (UTC)I remember an old friend of mine, of Southern Italian decent and fluent with that accent, went to Italy to work ... and he was blocked because of his slight mixed Southern and American accent (they requested American English only in that case).
The same goes with France ... even French-born people who develop some sort of quirk in their accent from living abroad, they experience cultural blockages. Because of a slight accent. Social problems. Germany you can't *ever* become a true member of their society unless you were born and raised in Germany as an ethnic German (no matter what "good" relations say between Germans and Turks).
Europe is as anti-international and anti-globalist as it gets - it refuses cultural change, and won't let others join in. It'd be nice to have more power sharing going on in the world (to you know, actually stop uniliateral invasions), but Europe is so far from that role it's crazy
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-25 01:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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