Charlemagne. Culture wars

Fashionable talk of a "European culture" is pointless and may even be damaging

ASKED what he thought about western civilisation, Gandhi famously replied that he thought it would be a good idea. European leaders seem to be learning from the Mahatma. Western civilisation--or European culture, which they consider the same thing--is a good idea. And it would also be a good idea to rest the legitimacy of the European Union upon its virtues. That, at any rate, is a conclusion cropping up increasingly often in Europe's post-constitutional debate about its future.

Ideals animate every endeavour worth its salt. Robert Musil, an Austrian novelist at the turn of the 20th century, wrote that each of us has a second country in which everything we do is innocent. For Americans, that second country is an idealised America, where every child can become president and through which runs the yellow brick road. In European nations, Europe is that second country. When Franco's dictatorship fell, Spaniards shouted in the streets that "we are Europeans now." To peoples little affected by the appeals of God or country, the EU has become (to borrow a favourite phrase of Senator John McCain), "a cause greater than themselves".

But European leaders now want to go beyond idealism to assert particular qualities of Europeanness and make specific arguments about the EU. At a recent gathering of the panjandrums of politics and the arts in Salzburg, they did so by making three claims: that there is a distinctive European identity, enshrined in a common European culture; that European culture inspires people in ways that boring things such as markets and trade do not; and that a common European culture should be embodied in common European institutions, that is, in the EU. How plausible are these assertions?

In Salzburg, Dominique de Villepin, France's prime minister, used as his measure of a common cultural identity a notion borrowed from George Steiner, a polyglot professor: "Europe is made up of cafes". But as Mr Steiner himself admitted, this Europe would not include Britain, Ireland, most of the Baltics and Scandinavia--and is thus hardly a useful way of asserting a common identity in an EU of 25. Mr de Villepin decorated his address with erudite references to such cultural totems of Mitteleuropa as Gustav Klimt, Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig and Mozart (whose 250th birthday it was). All are worthy of admiration. But as a Greek writer, Petros Markaris, swiftly retorted, this ignores the cultural contributions around Europe's fringes--a pantheon without Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare or Ibsen.

The right conclusion, however, is not that people are using the wrong definitions of Europe: it is that "Europe" cannot really be defined in terms of a single culture at all. For centuries, culture has been as often a divisive as a unifying force. Half the continent is a battlefield covering the bones of those who died in defence of competing values (all those wars of religion). And a definition that embraces the whole continent--such as respect for human rights, the rule of law, care for the poor and a love of liberty (the list offered by one European commissioner)--does so only because it not distinctively European.

It is true that, compared with Americans, Europeans spend much time thinking of, talking about and subsidising their high culture. But this does not mean they are inspired by it. Like the rest of the world, Europeans' cultural references are at least as populist and American--"Desperate Housewives", "Temptation Island"--as they are high-minded and European. Proxy measures of creativity, such as patent awards, the quality of universities, the numbers of films and videos, are all strongly in America's favour. It seems extremely unlikely that cultural vitality will somehow renew European ideals about the EU. For too many, it is America that is creative and exciting, not Europe.

Even if Europe were more stirring than it is, this would still not impinge on the EU one way or the other. Concepts of pan-European identity sprang up long before there was an EU and are independent of it (Francis Bacon referred to "we Europeans" in 1623). And the EU should think long and hard before trying to co-opt high culture in order, as Jacques Delors once put it, "to give Europe a soul". The last people to try to do that on the continent were the communists of eastern Europe. As Hungary's culture minister reminded the Salzburg gathering, they did this as a substitute for democracy, not as an expression of it.

In short, each of the three claims about European culture is dubious. Even together, they hardly warrant the claim that the EU, which in the 1950s embodied hopes of peace and prosperity, can come to embody cultural aspirations half a century later.

Talking Turkey

But there is more to the debate than this. At best, talking about culture is a distraction from the harder task of economic reform. It could also become an insidious way of stopping Turkey from joining the EU (Turkey might meet the formal conditions of entry but not count as culturally European). Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC, once argued that Europe could be the front line in the stand-off between western and Islamic cultures. Yet two days of debate on European culture in Salzburg barely mentioned Islam and had nothing to say about the challenge of dealing with it, even though some Islamic countries were at the time boycotting Danish products in response to the publication in a Danish newspaper of rude cartoons about the prophet Muhammad.

Worst of all, talk of Europe's cultural distinctiveness can be a way of attacking globalisation. Indeed, for many people, that may be the whole point of the exercise. "Europe...risks losing its specific identity in the movement of globalisation," said Mr de Villepin. "If Europe becomes merely an economic project...then our Europe has no future." Perhaps he is right. But it is telling that, in the face of globalisation, European leaders instinctively resort to invoking the glories and consolations of the past.

Commentary feature in which writer says that fashionable talk of a 'European culture' is pointless and may even be damaging. Written as a response to the Austrian EU Presidency Conference, The Sound of Europe, Salzburg, January 2006.