Dutch-Italian writer Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer recalled this story during the conference on “Culture, Heritage and Identity in Europe,” which I organized in April as president of the EU Culture Council. And however historically dubious the tale may be, the fact that we retell it again and again to convince ourselves of the value and worth of culture, speaks for itself.
At the end of the day, when all the economic, technocratic and political arguments for European construction have been made, we ask ourselves: When push comes to shove, is this what we will be fighting for? The answer is probably no.
Even the late Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission and a great advocate for European integration, noted that one doesn’t fall in love with an internal market, a euro symbol or any other piece of legislation. There must be something more — something that unites us all, however diverse the peoples of the Continent are. And we all know that there is.
As an economic and political structure, the EU’s constructed upon rather technocratic foundations. And though extremely effective in their execution, EU policies never seem to spark much enthusiasm from their millions of beneficiaries. On the contrary, the bloc can hope for popular apathy at best, outright hostility at worst. And yet, the majority of Europeans identify themselves as just that: European.
There is a European identity that crosses borders. An identity that expresses itself in hundreds of distinct cultures, that transcends the boundaries of time and space and connects every European — from Ireland and the British Isles to the trenches of Ukraine, from the ancient times until today.
Europe isn’t just the haphazard result of a chain of historical coincidences. I firmly believe that underneath the European ideal lies a metacultural framework, which arose out of three foundational traditions that, over time, resulted in what we now call a European culture.