Last set of pictures from the Festival of Europe, by Melinda McCarthy.
Archive for March, 2007
More pictures from last night’s event
Published March 29, 2007 Festival of Europe , Pictures Leave a Comment
A European identity or a European project?
Published March 29, 2007 media , openDemocracy Leave a Commentby Maira Bartoloni, cafebabel.com
Last Sunday’s conference took off with some fundamental question for the case of European Identity: what does it mean to be an European? How do you define a common European space and European common values?
That’s how Maurice Fraser, teacher at LSE who also edited the book Europe: the Next Fifty Years, introduced the evening’s ‘first grade’ panel: Kalypso Nicoladis, Director of the European Study Centre at the University of Oxford, Calin Cotoi, a sociologist at the University of Bucharest and Charles Grant, Director of the Centre For European reforms.
Common values, common identity: a dangerous territory with fragile boundaries. As Maurice Fraser pointed out in his introduction, is not just a matter of people coming from very different nations with distinctive culture within the community but also of singular families or individuals that come from mixed backgrounds, European and not. Colin Cotoi rightly argued that it is almost impossible to find treads shared by all European and not by non-European. And he made a fundamental point: since identity is needed as a glue to create the sense of belonging without which conflict and chaos would arise, also the idea of ‘the others’ is compulsory to define us against them. But how can this be possible in a society so diverse and mixed in itself? And how can we avoid exclusion in our own community and the evil consequences of that?
As to confirm this, when Kalypso Nicoladis asked the public how many people where 100 percent from one place, only few hands raised. And even to that, she pointed out that ‘you might have born like that, but your ideas and experience might be mixed.’ Especially today when new generation take the free movement of people around Europe as granted and therefore move.
And here comes the central, cardinal question: are we European? Why?
According to Kalypso, maybe because we choose to be and therefore we need to understand the way in which our story is changing to keep us together in our communal differences.
And what do we represent for the rest of the world?
Europe could be a laboratory to create a model which can be global but we need to be careful in the will to export our model: it is a big responsibility and, as Kalypso pointed out, the greatest challenge is to figure out how to play this responsible role of a global model.
Talking about identity and Europe as a model we cannot forget the issue of enlargement. Charles Grant proclaimed himself as committed to a larger Europe; a community able to spread prosperity peace and democracy around.
He added that countries are easier to control when they are inside the union even though their approach to democracy is different, or is understood on a different level. Of course advantages cannot exist without disadvantages. An enlarged community is stretched to countries with distinctive histories, which can make it harder for the decision makers to forge a common approach and common policies.
Thus comes again the need for a shared identity; the more we understand our common values the easier would be to make the process of enlargement work.
What are we looking for then?
I agree with Calypso on the fact that we do not necessarily need a European Identity but we should work towards a European project. Common traits are impossible to find but I believe that common project is a synonymous to common values; the community, the ‘us’, is made of people that through different means (the London Festival of Europe is one of many examples) is trying to create something that we all share and that makes us all citizens of the same enlarged country, cultivating the ground for this project to grow up strongly and with deep, firm roots.
Last week-end the Festival of Europe held its 8th event titled “Europe: land of the setting sun?”.
(Pictures are, as always, by Melinda McCarthy. Click thumbnails to enlarge.)
by Luigi Galimberti Faussone (Festival’s organising committee)
Last Thursday at the Foreign Press Association in London, I had the chance to chair the debate “Turkey in Europe” as part of the London Festival of Europe, with the participation of Michael Lake (former EU Ambassador to Turkey), Fadi Hakura (Chatham House), Mehmet Ugur (Greenwich University), and Lasse Ellegaard (Politikien).
Such a distinguished panel contributed to the debate with knowledged and accurate contributions, as I did expect. Yet I was particularly surprised of what has been left unsaid. All the speakers shared the underlying assumption that Turkey is acceptable to the European Union only when it imitates and replicates the latter’s political and economic structures. Turkey must become more “EU-ropean” if it wants its dreams of accession, which date back since having obtained the associate membership to the EEC (European Economic Community) in 1963 and even before, to turn into reality. This judgement, which is perfectly understandable form an institutional point of view, carried however an ethical value.
Turkey is “good” only when it is not Turkey anymore. The globalisation process – especially in economic terms – has to be passively accepted by Turkey as an inherently good phenomenon. At a micro-economic level, the proliferation of high-street areas, shopping malls, and restaurant chains in both large and small cities (e.g. Istanbul, Ankara, Bodrum, etc.) seems to be accepted as a sign of progress and development. Quoting one of the speakers, Turkey is ready to join Europe because of its “giant bridges, banks, supermarkets, night clubs, casinos and, of course, bars”. If that is what we call the European project…
Where is culture? Where are the people that lose from globalisation? Where is history? We cannot conceive Turkey only as a pro-Western secularised country that tries to forget its own past. Turkey is the heir of the millenary and glorious Ottoman Empire, whose traces can still be found both in the streets of its cities and in the hearts and minds of many of its inhabitants.
Are not we, Europeans, and the EU, trying to impose our model on a country which could probably gain more in developing its own model? Without doubts, Turkey must be praised for the reforms of the last decade, both economic (GDP growth) and social (improvement of human rights). All these, as democratic Europeans, we cannot but welcome. Yet Turkey is different from most of the EU countries, but no more than England to Poland, Bulgaria to Italy. Cannot we accept Turkey, as a Muslim, less globalized, country into the EU, without attempting to transform it into something that it will never become?
Must the social, political, and economic homogenization be intrinsically linked to the European Union?
Note from Jessica Reed: Happy anniversary day, Europe! As I am live-blogging the European Citizens Consultations from York for openDemocracy, blog entries from the London festival of Europe keep pouring in… Enjoy!
By Laura Eid, member of cafebabel.com
The Festival’s fourth event on ‘European Social Models’ hosted by the London School of Economics gathered a colourful panel composed of Patrick Diamond, Director of Policy Network, Katinka Barysch, Head Economist at the Centre of European Reform and Michel Goyer, Lecturer in Comparative Governance at Warwick Business School.
Diamond kicked off the talk by arguing that for Europe’s achievements of peace and prosperity to flourish and be taken further, a new mission for Europe based on Social Justice, equality and solidarity was needed. Thus whilst Diamond contended that no single European social model existed, the values upon which Europe’s identity is built, responsibility for each other, regulation of markets to correct market failures, and redistribution to support society’s weakest, have shaped our social norms and the wider European culture.
Recognizing this, European unity was being put at risk by differences in national experiences of social justice. Whilst Nordic states and Britain, he argued, have succeeded in bridging equity and efficiency within their social models, social justice deficits in terms of access to employment, security against social risk and fairness between generations, were prevalent, most notably in France and Germany.
How to make this social mission for Europe turn into reality then? An advocate of a new social justice charter to which EU member would subscribe to, Diamond praised the benefits of peer review to determine the effectiveness of public expenditure and thus improve its efficiency. What Europe really needed was to set for itself new priorities amongst which building up its research and development and investment in human capital. Indeed, being complacent about high unemployment would only plant the seeds of discontent, populism and a rejection of Europe.
Katinka Barysch’s expertise on central and eastern European states perfectly further illustrated Diamond’s conclusion. Whilst most citizens associate the EU’s eastward enlargement with unfair competition, threats of job relocation and downward spiralling of work standards, for Barysch such fears are irrational. Rather than threatening member states’ social models, enlargement, by allowing the EU to maintain its competitiveness on the global scale, is a means to generate further economic growth and thus maintain its high social standards. Furthermore, Barysch brushed aside stereotypes of new member states’ ‘ultra-liberal’ social models by pointing to Poland’s high labour taxes and to Estonia’s wide-encompassing corporate tax rate which although flat draws more revenue than Germany’s. Thus rather than scorning the new entrants’ social models, learning from them would be the way forward for Europe, she argued.
The conference’s last speaker, Michel Goyer, turned our attention back to the old member states and to a problem often untouched by academia, namely the integration of Muslim populations in European economies. Experience is varied across Europe with Germany and France being the worst players. Whilst the discrimination of Muslims in the workplace is not necessarily a case of an inadequate national integration strategy, Goyer highlighted the importance of the type of capitalisms, educational systems, the responsibility of human resource managers and the rigidity of labour markets to account for this phenomenon. Solutions to tackle this issue should also be country-specific and positive steps had already been taken in France with quota intakes of pupils from ‘banlieues’ in ‘Grandes Ecoles’ such as Sciences Po.
by Amin Samman
This was not the title of last night’s discussion at the LSE. One could be forgiven, however, for thinking that it was. This is because the notion of the ‘social’ spent much of the evening framed in terms of welfare, taxation and employment policy. To be sure, work is social life and Europe has spent much of the 20th century responding to the exigencies of liberalism – but does this really warrant boiling ‘European Social Models’ down to their barest economic bones?
As the speakers made their presentations, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander. It was as if we were in throat of an historical wormhole; the legacy of parliamentary socialism and the welfare state seemed to be fusing with the detached and hyper-developed language of contemporary economic science, enveloping prudent policy-making in a new progressive light. Institutional complementarity, it seemed, was the key to retaining a civilised capitalism: it would allow us to combat the unemployment of latter-day Keynesianism and once more overcome the trade-off between efficiency and equity. But beneath this all lay a very suspicious yardstick – ‘performance’ – which effectively cast the polity as a national firm in the global marketplace. It was as if we were being told: ‘choices on the margin there may be, but a social model cannot survive if it doesn’t keep it’s economic house in order’. Katinka Barysch (CER) chose to focus on the contribution that Eastward-enlargement could make to the region’s competitiveness. Michael Goyer (Warwick University) instead honed in on the implications of employment protection legislation for migrant workers. But what both effectively did was naturalise our present situation; they told us the choices on offer given the constraints imposed by our institutional landscape. What really was lacking was an acknowledgement that we made those institutions – material as they now seem – and that how we respond to new trends and events is political (and not merely technocratic). To be fair, Patrick Diamond (Policy Network) did look out to the horizon, identifying knowledge-intensive industry as both a challenge and an opportunity.
Needless to say, the floor debate that followed was ‘vibrant’. My favourite contributor was the Leninist sitting behind me – whose frequent interruptions only intensified my spatio-temporal confusion!
Following yesterday’s post, here are more pictures from Kylie-Rose Douglas (as always, click to get bigger version):
