Not Just Wizened Old People

A question that is often directed at the European community is what does a Lithuanian farmer have to do with an Andalusian farm worker or a social welfare recipient in Manchester, and what do they have to do with a Frankfurt banker or a start-up entrepreneur in Belgrade? They have no common language, are a religioussecular patchwork, have no ‘common culture’. Such reservations tend to be subsumed by a national or local belief in commonality. In a belief that liberal hedonists can get along with evangelical fundamentalists, Bavarians with Hanseatics, East Germans with West Germans – no problem! Small communities have become no different to large nations as examples of difference in action when it comes to income and circumstances, matters of faith and beliefs, languages and dialects, customs, places of origin and social mobility.

Class situation, social and moral milieus and social structures in general often serve to distance members of a society from each other, a fact that can be hidden under a national narrative, more rarely with a generational narrative (‘68ers’) or gender solidarity (#Metoo). Internationalism or the supranational idea are seen as utopias. And yet it is national (and capitalist) realism that brings about the disasters. The mass exodus of workers from the proletarian international into opposing armies at the beginning of the First World War is a classic example, while a more recent example can be seen in the last European war in Yugoslavia, where ultra-national ethnic cleansing fantasies all but destroyed self-governing socialism, the Serbo-Croatian linguistic community and even family ties.

It is worth thinking about a European society that has emerged from its rusty containers, frayed at the edges, and starting to become increasingly similar on the inside.

Nationalist rhetoric cannot disguise the loss of control that has occurred in the nationstate; its power is an expression of this. Those who propagate the idea of ‘America first’, ‘La France d' abord’ and now ‘Austria first!’, those who erect a wall against immigrants in Budapest, Prague or Warsaw, or want to erect a wall against Latinos, are evidence that the nation state’s reserves of sovereignty have long since been exhausted. The clumsy attempts to remove the United Kingdom from its European interdependencies have resulted in a real-life experiment that is going to be costly for all concerned. World trade, mass migration and telecommunications have broken open the national container; the former holy trinity of state territory, people and power has been dissolved. Consumer capitalism, social media and popular mass culture have done the rest to alienate traditional feelings of homeland.

Jean-Claude Juncker's recent exhortations to bring European policy up to the same level as these interdependencies and disentanglements – at least to a certain degree, i.e. to not shrink the eurozone and Schengen areas but actually extend them to cover all relevant actors, demonstrate the kind of thinking that is needed in order to raise European policy to the same level that European society reached a long time ago. This also applies in principle to the European periphery, but the partnerships in the Mediterranean region are starting to flounder. These partnerships should, of course, at some point include Turkey again – once it has been freed from Erdoğan – and aim to reconcile Jews and Arabs, which could be quite tricky. It is a tragedy that such hopes are currently not even being expressed at all.

Contemporary historians and ethnologists have made reference to this Europeanisation of Europe. Wolfgang Reinhardt, a modern historian from Freiburg, has identified different ways of life in Europe, and his Berlin colleague Hartmut Kaelble referred at an early stage to the euro-typical characteristics of family structures, forms of employment and enterprise, patterns of urbanity and the welfare state, while stressing their increasing convergence.

This is not to be confused with standardisation or homogenisation and naturally includes – as is common in every society – inequality, and since 1945 a day-to-day process of pop-cultural ‘Americanisation’, together with a globalisation brought about by deregulated financial markets and virtual communication media. The big question is whether European corporate culture and the general public still have something to counterbalance this with. Of course this would be desirable and be the European cultural objective.

In contrast to what might be suggested by the particular nature of the European Union as a ‘sovereignty association with its own character’ (according to Rainer M. Lepsius, the German industrial sociologist), so without a state with inadequate democratic underpinnings, and the lack of a real ‘sense of unity’, European cultural practices that routinely transcend national borders can be identified under the ethnoscope of day-today micro-relationships. Harvard political scientist Karl W. Deutsch, originally from Prague, defined national units in classical terms by the density and proximity of transactions. These include, for example, as later suggested by macro-sociologist Steffen Mau, ‘travel activities, stays abroad, ties of friendship, partnership or family, exchange of messages, close communication across borders.’

Transactions such as these, which are not limited to trading, create resilient relationships and loyalties that in turn facilitate civic activation. Virtual networks that reach far beyond Europe, but which are particularly dense there, also make a contribution to this, along with physical mobility, of course, which has always provided Europe with a distinctive migrant background.

Transactions such as these, which are not limited to trading, create resilient relationships and loyalties that in turn facilitate civic activation.

The reaction of authoritarian nationalism, which an (ex-) chairwoman of the right-wing German party AFD did not hesitate to (appropriately) call völkisch, and which is being openly promoted by her successors, now suggests, however, that the supranational habitus is above all felt, lived and valued in higher status groups and urban milieus, while the removal of borders in the hinterland is perceived as both a burden and a threat. There, linguistic and cultural translation services are seen as an imposition, and even hipsters in Berlin or Belgrade speaking broken English are a source of some irritation. Social rifts and cultural differences, which can serve to undermine a sense of national unity, can be glaringly obvious in Europe and are therefore also perceived as a scandal because, at this level, they are completely inadequately counterbalanced by political equality (one person, one vote).

The creation of a European society from below does not prevent this. This has become clear in recent times with the extra-parliamentary and non-party mobilisation that has been seen on streets and squares and by people who have sufficient imagination to understand the consequences of various exit strategies or who can feel Europe's soul or pulse. Those who find Pulse of Europe too romantic, might read Marius Ivaškevičius’ inflammatory speech against eurosceptics (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16.2.2017) and generally take on a Maidan perspective. This is what I call a point of view that tries out a rural or urban EastCentral European perspective and then looks at the ‘West’ with the eyes of a foreigner. And it is in this way, beyond any culinary, musical and tourist convergence, that European citizenship is starting to take shape.

The vision of Jean-Claude Juncker and Angela Merkel, which once again focuses on the systematic integration of markets and security regimes, would also need to include a more emotional dimension to social integration of the type President Emmanuel Macron hinted at during his election campaign and which he fleshed out during his search for coalition partners. The most important thing to determine is whether a sustainable basis for European solidarity can develop from this, not only between nation-states who complain about having to support anti-terror activities or accepting refugees, but also between Lithuanian and Greek farmers, German and Spanish nurses or young French and Bulgarian entrepreneurs who want to participate in European conviviality beyond social and geographical boundaries.

Culture can also achieve ‘everything’, providing that European society creates arenas for interaction beyond the market and state and produces a binding understanding of the public sphere.

Here, the term ‘efforts’ refers to the process, the practice of the various arts, their discursive frameworks, their works (in the classical sense) that move, fascinate and may inspire people to change their lives. This does not mean the usual incantation of a heaven of values in Sunday sermons, which everyone can agree to and which are then denounced and betrayed on a whim for the sake of dayto-day political interests.

After many happy decades that were preceded by years of cruel barbarism, Europe as a culture, as a society and as a political alliance is once again facing a difficult test. It is surrounded by autocrats and threatened internally by authoritarian nationalism. All this takes place against the backdrop of cultural budgets that are full to overflowing, an endless series of festivals, biennials, cultural events of all kinds, publicly funded or privately sponsored, always striving for the highest standards and claiming to be in touch with the people. In his Memories of a European, Stefan Zweig, in Brazilian exile, described pre-1914 Europe, the last time this flower was fabulous, seductive and dazzling as it is today, as ‘the world of yesterday’. The next cultural upswing after the mass slaughter of the First World War was already overshadowed by the grip of totalitarian ideologies and dictatorships that almost brought Europe to its final demise in the 1940s.

Faced with this threat, it has long been possible to sum up the modus of European culture in one word: resistance!

‘What could disrupt this ascent, what could impede this impetus that constantly drew new strength from its own momentum? Never before has Europe been stronger, richer, more beautiful, never before had it believed so earnestly in an even better future, no one other than a few wizened old people complained like before about the “good old days”’, wrote Stefan Zweig before taking his own life. He is critical of his own credulity and that of his contemporaries: ‘We thought we were doing enough if we thought in European terms’. These days, it isn’t just ‘wizened old people’ who want to take an axe to Europe, it is virile potentates who can count on angry, even very young followers, who are actually in a position to bring them to power in a democratic way. Faced with this threat, it has long been possible to sum up the modus of European culture in one word: resistance!