Whoever writes a book in a fluid political situation is writing on an icefloe. When the book goes to press the writer is slowly drifting away, aware that elsewhere the frenzy of politicians, rating agencies, protests, populists, austerity programs and macchiavellian manipulations is going on at full speed. Musing on his piece of drifting ice, carried away from actuality by the slow current of memory, he remembers a moment in 1993, when he was asked to read a text on Europe in the Munich Philharmonie, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Ricardo Chailly behind him, who would play “Zarathustra” after his reading. He chose the form of three small fables. These were the pre-Euro days, the embryo was already there and called Ecu. Twenty years later they seem to have a rather melancholy, and, who knows, prophetic hue.
On the Spanish island where I live, every village has a festival for its patron saint in the summer. Young men and women, the village priest and the marquis ride on black horses through the village streets. They wear bicorn hats and white trousers and resemble people from a different era. These festivals must have their origins in ancient pagan rituals. They signify a farewell to the summer and herald the arrival of a winter that was often long and hard on these islands. The boat to the mainland used to sail only once a week and took at least fourteen hours to make the crossing. Most of the inhabitants never left the island; a sense of that isolation still remains in the character of the people and the wildness of their celebrations. The horses march to the rhythm of a stirring tune, always the same. The young people of the village perform a daring dance with the horses, which rear up and walk on their hind legs, and the riders have to dodge the human dancers as the horses descend. This pandemonium lasts three days before the festival is concluded with a large fireworks display. People come from all the other villages, and an orgy of glitter and noise explodes into the sky, enough to drive away the evil spirits for another year.
Everyone agreed that the firework display was not as good this time, which they saw as the result of both the economic crisis and the weather, regarding the crisis as a kind of natural phenomenon. The weather remained dry, but there was a strong wind, and so, just as the fireworks were writing the European circle of stars in the night sky, a gust tore the twelve stars apart, scattering them across the heavens, where, as fireworks do, they glowed briefly before merging with the darkness of the night in a rhetorical gesture of climatic coincidence.
“There goes Europe,” I heard someone say behind me, and it felt as though that one little sentence and those few stars, now descending in a rain of ash, had intended to say something similar, to express something about the disappointment, the fear, the bitterness, the impotence, the indifference, the aversion that have come to accompany the sacred word “Europe,” whether we like it or not.
Where has Europe gone? Where has it disappeared to? Who has stolen it away?
Let me tell you three little fables. They do not entirely hold water—fables never do—but their simplicity is more suitable for communicating what I wish to say than political lectures ex cathedra, which are neither my style nor my domain.
In a large club, which is elegant but somewhat dilapidated, the kind of place one might see in London, all the European currencies were gathered together. Every day, their temperatures were measured in a side room of the club and the results were posted outside, for the stock markets, banks and speculators to see. It should come as no surprise that, in spite of their names, they were all men. I do not know if you have a mental image of what the Mark or the Guilder might look like, but in comparison to the Drachma and the Escudo, or the Dinar, not to mention the Leu or the Zloty, the two of them look prosperously, even outrageously, healthy.
“They’re just a couple of show-offs,” said the Pound to the French Franc, who had been trying to attract the Mark’s attention for some time. The Franc did not reply, but stood up because he could see the Rouble heading towards him.
“I always said it would come to nothing,” mumbled the Pound, but the Guilder, who had heard him, replied, “You’ve done your best to make sure of that!”
The Peseta was not too happy either. “First they said we could join in,” he said to the Lira, “and then suddenly we weren’t good enough. You try so hard for all those years and you believe every word they say, and then suddenly they tell you that you haven’t saved enough and that maybe, if you behave yourself, you can come back in a few years’ time.”
“It’s all a question of priorities,” muttered the Lira, who was rather preoccupied with trying to fend off the Albanian Lek while also coming up with something intelligent to say to the Mark.
Just then, the door flew open and a young man in a tracksuit came running in.
“Oh, God, that’s all we need,” sighed the Pound to the Swiss Franc. “The thought of having to slum it with that newcomer, that upstart!”
The Ecu—because that is who it was—appeared not to have heard this remark, because he gave the Pound a resounding slap on the shoulder and shouted, “So, old chap, how it’s going? A bit better? And Mrs. Thatcher, how’s she doing?” before running straight on to the Mark and the Guilder, who seemed to be expecting him.
“Could I have a word with the two of you?” said the Ecu. “I just met the Dollar and the Yen at McDonald’s and they said . . .”
The others did not hear the rest, because at that moment the Forint summoned up all of his courage and went over and tapped the Ecu on the shoulder. “Do you have a moment?” he asked. The Ecu looked at the Mark, then at his watch and said, “Sorry, mate, not right now. Leave a message with my secretary.”
At around the same time, at Vienna’s Arsenal, where the Museum of Military History is located, the old European battles were holding their annual reunion. Everyone was there, from the Battle of Thermopylae to Lepanto, the Relief of Leiden and the Battle of the Somme, Stalingrad and the Battle of the Bulge. The atmosphere was pleasant. The gentlemen—battles are also men—were poring over a map of the former Yugoslavia and busily moving flags of different colors around.
“I told you,” said Monte Cassino to Austerlitz, “Europe is still Europe, and if that lot are left to their own devices, it will remain Europe for a long time to come.”
“The crazy thing is,” said Waterloo to Arnhem, “that it’s Sarajevo again. You didn’t see that coming either, did you? Just take a look at the map they’re concocting. Balfour and Palestine have nothing on it!”
“No, one really needs the British for such things,” said Trafalgar proudly.
“Don’t forget the Germans,” said Verdun. “If they hadn’t recognized Croatia so quickly, it would never have become such a heap of rubble!”
“They thought they were ready,” said Troy to Hastings. “It’s the same mistake every time: not taking the human element into account.”
“Exactly,” agreed Poitiers and Saguntum. “What is lacking is historical awareness. If people try to live without memories, they’re sure to end up with us. Now, would anyone care for another port?”
Around fifty years ago, there was a young composer living in France. One night he dreamed that he had been asked to write the anthem for the new Europe. The happiness he felt was the kind that exists only in dreams, just as it is only in dreams that we can fly. And so he flew, soaring above the snowy plains of Finland, the lofty peaks of the Tatra Mountains, along the fjords of Norway and across the flat country of Holland. He gazed out over the charms of Umbria and the lagoon of Venice and swooped over the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, along the red walls of the Kremlin, and followed the banks of the Tagus through Spain and Portugal. As he flew, he heard the sound of his song, which he sang without words, and with the clarity of dreams he knew his composition would resolve all differences, and that the melody would lose nothing of the greatness of the past, yet also nothing of the bitterness, encompassing the inventions and the battles, the words of Socrates and the poems of Ovid, the writings of Rousseau and the songs of Mahler, the painter of The Night Watch and the organist from Leipzig, the library of Erasmus and the memory of Goethe. The abbeys and cathedrals would appear in his anthem, along with the hammer blows of Wittenberg, the synagogue of Amsterdam and the pilgrimage to Santiago, the burning of the heretics and the braying of the dictator, the whispers of Romeo and the wit of Sancho Panza, the psalms of Cluny and the guitar of Seville, the hell and the heaven of a past that would seem endless, its underlying theme formed by the millions of conversations that had ever taken place in this continent, the singsong of the languages of the four corners of the world, the scattered words, forever forgotten and forever remembered, the lamentations of the camps, the euphoria of liberation, the whiplash of judgment, and the song of the lonely vagabond on the country lane. As he heard those individual sounds, he sang in his dream the song that they would all combine to form and he wrote the notes for the instruments; there would be thirty-one of them, one for every country in his continent, because he had no time for the twelve-tone scale of politics.
The day came when his song was to be played for the first time. Slowly, silently, he walked to his music stand, looked at the members of the orchestra, and raised his baton. Then he gave the signal for the first note. What happened next must have made him scream out loud in his dream. It was a miserable cacophony that ended in stunned silence after just a few bars . . . With the implacable logic of dreams, he knew what had happened. The musicians had not played the new song, but had all embarked upon their own national anthems: Deutschland über Alles mixing with La Marseillaise, God Save the Queen rubbing shoulders with the La Brabançonne—and all of this was multiplied by thirty-one.
As I said, fables are simple; they do not express a truth, but a feeling. Where is the Europe we dreamed about for so long? Where has it gone? Who has stolen it away? Was it the Serbians? Was it the speculators? Was it the Danes with their “no” vote? Was it the French farmers? The Polish steelworkers? The Spanish fishermen? The powerless politicians with their empty words? The dead of Sarajevo? The minorities? The neo-fascists? The East German unemployed? The Bundesbank? The British Eurosceptics?
Where is Europe now? Is it in Brussels or is it in London? Is it in Athens or is it in Kosovo? If it still exists somewhere, we would like to have it back, not the Europe of the market and the walls, but the Europe that belongs to the countries of Europe, to all of the European countries.
A German philosopher, Helmuth Plessner, once wrote a book called Die verspätete Nation (The Belated Nation). That was in the 1930s, and nobody listened to him at the time. Europe really must be returned to us before “belated” becomes “never.”