The idea of a common European culture need not be a threat to nationalidentity but a source of strength, writes Enda O'Doherty in the final part of his reflection on European identity
There are competing ideas of where the borders should be drawn of that region we call Central Europe and the Germans Mitteleuropa. Historically it is an area chiefly composed of smaller nations which have from time to time been eaten up by their larger neighbours, notably Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary.
Before 1919-20 large swathes of it were ruled over by the Habsburgs, a territory that included all or part of 12 currently independent states, from Ukraine to Italy. During the Cold War it was the in-between land which was not allowed to be part of the democratic and capitalist west, but did not feel it belonged to the Soviet east. To be truthful, most in the west at the time called it Eastern Europe, and if we have now changed the terminology that is largely in deference to the wishes of those who live there.
Whatever Mitteleuropa may have represented politically, artistically it was a breeding ground of excellence to rival Europe's traditional cultural capital, Paris. Austria, and in particular Vienna, the dominant city of European music through classicism, romanticism and modernism, has been the home of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg, Webern and Berg.
Hungary has provided Liszt, Bartok and Kodaly, the Czech lands Smetana and Dvorak, Poland Chopin and Szymanowski. In literature there have been Musil and Roth, Kafka, Kraus, Hasek, Capek, Skvorecky, Kundera, Havel, Kertesz and Milosz; in painting Klimt and Schiele; in psychoanalysis Freud, Adler and Reich.
During the second World War and the communist period which followed many of the links on which this culture had depended were broken. Vienna, a metropolis not just of Germans but also of Jews, Slavs and Magyars, was cut off from the talents and energies of immigrants from the lands to its north, south and east.
The Jews had been all but wiped out in most of Central Europe except Hungary and Bulgaria; long-established communities of Germans were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Dresden, Prague, Budapest and Warsaw freedom of expression disappeared as much for writers and intellectuals as for politicians.
While the communist state awarded status and security to the "loyal" intellectual, the dissident lived with insecurity and earned his own status by telling uncomfortable truths about society.
If western intellectuals now showed less enthusiasm for "Europe" than had their immediate post-war predecessors this was certainly not the case east of the Elbe, where the titles of the leading dissidents' books and essays, Waiting for Europe, Return to Europe, Café Europa, suggested a longing for return to a spiritual paradise from which they had been unjustly excluded.
The "return" of Mitteleuropa and its public intellectuals to Europe through their membership of the EU is unlikely to bring any earthly paradise. It may well, however, lead to a significant injection of originality, variety and seriousness into the cultural affairs of the old continent.
Already new links are being made and networks set up, principally through the cultural organs of the German and Austrian governments and the activities of foundations funded by the philanthropist George Soros.
One such exemplary initiative is the Goethe Institut-funded Kafka, a distinguished literary-intellectual quarterly published simultaneously in German, Polish, Hungarian and Czech/Slovak.
With the Union's institution- and constitution-building programme increasingly marked by stalemate and failure, it could be time to add a new dimension to Europe before the idea's attractions begin to fade even for its most committed supporters.
The aim of "creating a European identity" is often represented by the Europhobic as a sinister or totalitarian enterprise. Yet potentially it is the opposite.
Identities are neither natural nor immutable entities, any more than are nations (the world lived without the latter for a very long time). As Cavour, one of the architects of Italian unification, remarked: "We have made Italy, gentlemen. Now let us make Italians."
The failure in Central Europe of parties of the nationalist right in a series of referendums on EU membership this year suggests an ideology that is past its zenith (the new right-wing populism in western Europe, based on self-interest, racial prejudice and ignorance, is a separate phenomenon).
People will for the foreseeable future, of course, continue to feel Spanish or German (insofar as they do not feel Galician or Bavarian), but there is reason to believe many of them are also prepared to feel just a little European and might feel more so if those guiding the project could give them reason to.
The key to such a development is culture, the diversity of culture which Europe naturally enjoys and the culture of diversity it should politically embrace.
Austria-Hungary, according to Milan Kundera, was a territory which allowed a maximum of difference in a minimum of space (as opposed to Russia, which was the opposite). The central European countries today, where a functional trilingualism is the aim for many, still offer that diversity and an exciting laboratory in which to test new means to pursue cultural enrichment, co-operation and exchange.
Diversity in the cultural context is not a mere synonym for national difference, however. Europe, shaped by many common influences - Christianity, Enlightenment, liberalism, communism - is not a mere aggregation of separate cultural entities, nor does every cultural expression have a nationality. Encouragingly, national cultural institutes are now taking a broader view and no longer simply pursue a traditional agenda of linguistic expansionism.
Cultural promotion is now as often as not bilateral or multilateral and may include, for example, joint projects by the Alliance Française and Goethe Institut.
Nineteenth century America offered its citizens the opportunity of absorption into the whole, e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Twenty-first-century Europe might profitably adjust the terms to work for, not a single European culture, but the ideal of many in one. If the Commission, at this moment of renewed crisis, requires a big idea, it need look no further. Man doth not live by inter-governmental conference alone.
- Series concluded