Are We a European People?

One strong objection to European integration is the alleged nonexistence of a demos, of a European people. We are told that people are national or regional, but the idea of a European people would be an illusion or a makeshift. Constructing a Union on the basis of illusion would further weaken or erase local cultures and ways of life, downgrading them to folklore.

The French are good at portraying this scenario, which echoes French history. Before the French Revolution, the people of Gascony, Provence, or Burgundy did not share much in common, not even a national language, as French was only the language of the elite. The intellectuals of the time, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, convinced the bourgeoisie of the existence of a French nation. The Revolution, through Barère and Abbé Grégoire, tried to promote linguistic unification, but it took the generalization of compulsory schooling by Jules Ferry in the late 19th century to impose, partly by coercion, the use of French language to the whole people: kids would be punished if speaking dialect on the playground. Regional cultures were largely destroyed as an aftermath of the Revolution, only to survive on the fringe of the territory, in Alsace, Savoy, or Nice, or in former French colonies abandoned before or immediately after the Revolution, such as Quebec, Acadia, or Louisiana. No wonder French people resent the emergence of a broader culture largely connected with the new transnational language, associated with an ancestral enemy, and wrongly fear that English may be imposed upon them to eliminate French, just like they imposed the usage of French and eliminated first Latin and then regional languages.

Other European nations have a different experience. The unification of Germany, though violently oppressive at times, ended up to be respectful of regional identities. Today, Germany is a peaceful federation of largely integrated states that yet keep their education system, and sometimes local languages, such as in the South. South Germans are naturally bilingual. My wife spoke Swabian at home, on the market, and on school grounds, and high German in class, with the administration or with Germans of the outside. To date, the Bayerischer Rundfunk produces countless programs and series in the Bavarian language. To these people, accepting English as an additional language to communicate with the non-German speaking world is no trauma but additional enrichment. The same can be noted in Italy or in Spain, though these countries have been slower at using English. The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries are examples of large users of the English language, because they are smaller and few speak their language. They derive much prosperity from the use of English, which has not killed or weakened national language and cultures.

The European elites have long developed a European culture, and could claim from the Middle-Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment to be European citizens. What is new, is that the European dimension, often combined with global culture, a point I will discuss some other time, is now accessible and shared by many. The development of the Erasmus program, to which I contributed when a professor in Lyon, is shaping a new identity. Young people cross the European borders and have grown ignoring the past existence of border controls in much of Europe. Whether the culture they share is properly European will be discussed further on that blog, but the fact is that these people have added to their local and national identity a broader one making them feel European and sometimes even citizens of the world, before claiming a national identity. Listen to these young Londoners taking the street after the Brexit referendum and claiming to be more European than British. This does not mean that all the Brits think that way, but this is a widespread development, that was barely in the making at the time when the European integration was launched, soon after the end of a very destructive war.

Who would imagine the French and the German going at war? Already in the early 1980s, my marrying a German woman did not cause eyebrows to be raised, except in a few bourgeois households in Lyon were some aging ladies complained: “don’t we have good looking young ladies in our circles, why looking that far?” Well, more and more young Europeans look elsewhere for jobs and partners, and it has become natural to them. Young educated people feel at home all over Europe, from Prague to Dublin and from Stockholm to Palermo. They are as European as the French were French at the time of the Revolution, as the Germans were German and the Italians were Italian at the time of national unification. Peoples are not static; they are in the making.

The European dimension just happens to be an additional identity layer: we got used to the reference to the European Union on our traveling passports. It comes in addition to the country we are from and does not remove anything of who we are. We are European in addition. The whole idea of a federation is to allow different people who share a common identity to live and prosper together.