Late last year, while European correspondents were preoccupied with the kerfuffle that was the signing of the EU treaty I found myself as the sole UK attendee at a seminar on ‘EU citizenship’ as part of the Commission’s Youth in Action programme.
Admittedly European cooperation has kept the postwar peace but today’s Euroyouth only know about 1945 from history books. The EU’s white paper on youth was the foundation of discussions by 26 bright young things from Turkey, Malta, Spain our host nation Finland and me. We grappled with defining European values and uncovered various similarities and differences in our home situations. A Finnish government representative told us how a democracy unit had been installed as turnouts threaten to dip below 50 per cent at general election level. Conversely 90 per cent of young voters vote in Turkey. “You have everything here. There is nothing to fight for,” a (literally) Young Turk said accusingly to the Fins referring to their generous welfare state. “We vote because we are angry”. This includes anger at repeated rejection for EU membership necessitating paperwork and visa applications to participate in European gigs.
There is something of a treadmill about this type of happening, like there is with the NUS politics that certain individuals haunt for years. We’d mostly all attended this type of event before: a chicken-egg situation. Perhaps the more hard-to-reach, estate-dwelling kids should be targeted by these initiatives. But then, by definition they’re hard-to-reach. On the Euro circuit they are keen on the multiplier principle – a variant of ‘go back to your constituencies and prepare for government’.
Our lingua franca was a sort of Europeanised English, given that Esperanto the laboratory language Eurocrats once envisaged we’d all be speaking by now, never took off. As a wannabe polyglot, I think it’s regrettable that foreign languages are no longer compulsory in English schools but it’s also understandable: by default bastardised English is the 21st century mode of communication.
Several clichés like ‘youth is the key’ were repeated. But the biggest barriers identified to feeling European were localised nationalism and the perceived lack of relevance of EU institutions. From a country where, not so long ago, ‘Up yours Delors’ was the headline of our largest circulating national newspaper this rings true. Despite staying out of the single currency, the Blair government never refrained from using Europe when it suited them. Numerous achievements it trumpeted as its own originated from the EU Social Chapter, such as increased maternity and paternity benefits and the working-time directive, offering holiday pay to all.
European citizenship is something of a tricky can of worms/minefield/Pandora’s box for all its social, political and cultural dimensions. Neither of those two words figure much in most young Brits’ consciousness. Our island geography contributed to such phrases as the startlingly un-PC and thankfully now all-but-forgotten phrase “wogs start at Calais”. One seminar group urged us to go to the US if we really wanted to discover what it meant to be European. Yet language is a huge cultural binding agent and many ‘real’ British youth probably feel they have more in common with our transatlantic cousins than the geographically much-closer French.
The influential German sociologist Ulrich Beck has recently written that Europe is the ‘most misunderstood thing in the world’ and that it is not a fixed condition but ‘an open political project; highly differentiated, politically animated and flexible.’ At the start of 2008 it’ll be interesting to see where we go next in its adventure.