by Maarten Mourik (1924-2013)
Sources of civilization
If you take the cultural map of Europe before you, you see a sampling of cultural communities, larger and smaller. That picture illustrates at the same time the most characteristic feature of European civilization: its multiformity within a certain unity. This in turn is the result of the ever-changing fusion of Judeo-Christian religious thought, of Greco-Hellenistic philosophies and ideas about man, society, the state, the sciences and the arts, and of Roman political and legal concepts and practices. Almost never in the search for the sources of European “civilization” are deeper layers than the three just mentioned tapped. I believe, however, that in order to understand the history of European civilization, an even deeper substratum must not be left out: our Celtic and Germanic pre-Christian history in Western and Central Europe, and the Nordic and Asian antecedents in Eastern Europe. Almost nothing has been written about these, but this does not mean that this history has been completely erased. In folk beliefs, sagas and legends, folklore not only, but also in legal concepts, those underpinnings still live on. My grandmother, who lived from the middle of the last century to the middle of this one, was a devout Christian. At the same time, she was full of stories about witches and wizards and did not go to sleep until she had placed a huge iron key on the large States Bible that lay beside her bed. Only then was she well protected in her sleep.
I also think that in explaining the barbari eruptions that have occurred in our century, the aforementioned pre-Christian cultural “carpet pad” should not be overlooked.
Some terms
Before I develop my argument further, I think it would be useful for me to suggest some definitions. They are not foolproof but have the advantage of any definition that they prevent us from talking past each other. First in there is the concept of culture. This is often used in a narrower sense as: the fine arts, both creative and performing, i.e. sculpture and painting, graphic arts, theater, literature, music, dance, architecture, film and video film.
A somewhat broader definition of culture includes education in all its branches, the sciences and the media. The broadest definition of culture is the so-called anthropological: it is everything a cultural community thinks and does and owns, its structures in all areas of society and the way decision-making processes take place within them, the mentality from which it acts. Culture in each of these three mentioned gradations, I use as a value-free concept. When I assign value to culture, I use the word civilization. The culture of the Nazis, that of the Stalin era, can be called neutral culture, but when value criteria are applied, one quickly comes to the conclusion that this is not civilization, but barbarism.
This brings us to another key concept, namely: cultural identity. Identity is a relative concept: someone or something has identity only in relation to another or something else. If you or I were alone in the world, we would have no identity, at least no human identity. Identity is everything in which one is different from the other. It could therefore be said that one can determine the identity of a cultural community by projecting its culture, in the broadest sense of the word – as indicated in the previous six paragraphs – against the culture – in the same sense – of other cultural communities. All the points that do not coincide in that projection provide the grid of one’s identity.
There is a lot of talk about “European culture.” In my mind’s arsenal, that term does not appear. Europe has a wide range of cultures: local, regional, national, supra-regional and supra-national.
All together they contribute to European civilization. Its essential characteristic is, as has been said, pluriformity. It is from the coexistence of a large number of cultures in a certain geographical area, from the mutual fertilization and influence of those cultures, also from their rubbing against each other and clashing with each other, that European civilization has arisen. To paraphrase a well-known French saying: du choc des cultures jaillit la civilisation. Once again, it is the pluriformity of European cultures, of the various European identities, that has given European civilization its inner strength, its radiating power. It is this that has ensured that today, when we speak of Western civilization, we are talking about a civilization that is in fact an expanded European civilization.
If we consider pluralism as the great, powerful engine of European civilization, it immediately and logically follows – it is therefore a main thesis of my argument – that loss of cultural identity is loss of pluralism, and therefore an impoverishment of European civilization. For this reason alone, any effort to preserve cultural identity is justified. One might call this an objective reason. Subjective and no less important, of course, is the mental confusion and impoverishment that occur when a cultural community loses its cultural identity, or parts of it. We can observe this “in vitro” from the crisis in all cultural communities in Central and Eastern Europe. They suffer the consequences of loss – to a greater or lesser extent – of cultural identity during a long period of the political, economic, but above all cultural oppression. In the process, not only the victims have suffered damage to their cultural souls, but also the oppressors themselves.
The political map
If we compare the cultural map of Europe with the political map, we see that cultural and political borders rarely coincide. It has been calculated that in the Europe from the Irish west coast to the Urals, no less than forty percent of all cultural communities do not have their own state borders. Sometimes they are isolated in a larger cultural community that is at the same time a state unit: Friesland, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Brittany, Alsace, Corsica, and a large number of cultural communities in the Soviet Union. Sometimes they are closely related to the majority, also national, cultural community in a neighboring country, such as the Hungarians in Romania and in the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Turks in Bulgaria. Then again, a cultural community is spread across two or more national states. This is the case with the Dutch, which is spread over the Netherlands, in which it is also a national majority culture, Belgium, in which it is autonomous in a federated state system, and northwestern France, in which, after nearly three-quarters of a century of deliberate subordination by the central government, it has only a greatly weakened presence. Other examples of cultures present in more than statehood are the Catalan and the Basque. The latter are clearly minority cultures. There are still many variations on the theme of cultural and state borders, such as, for example, the Swiss situation: three major European cultures, plus a not insignificant regional culture, the Raeto-Romanic – the latter also occurs in the Tyrol -, divided into 26 cantons and half-cantons; all under an unmistakable national roof, the Swiss. We will return to this structure later because of its exemplary effect on the European Community.
If the picture of cultural society in Western Europe is already complicated, it is even more complicated in Central and Eastern Europe. State formation there after World War I rests on the self-determination var ethnic and cultural communities promoted by U.S. President Wilson, but only the larger ones have benefited. Numerous smaller communities, both ethnic and cultural, were more or less forcibly linked to, or subsumed by, larger ones. Serious frictions and, in the Balkans, armed conflicts, were the result. The reordering imposed by Nazi Germany only sharpened the antagonisms. The political restructurings carried out after 1945 under the auspices of Moscow by the respective communist regimes took little or no account of ethnic or cultural boundaries. Indeed, Communist doctrine held that ethnic and cultural particularism could only delay the advent of the global salvation state. Only class identity prevailed.
How artificial the imposed unity was, and how poorly it was endured, the developments in Central and Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Soviet bloc prove. The Soviet Union itself underwent strong centrifugal forces; not only peripheral cultural and ethnic communities, but even the core country of Russia escaped centralist pressures. The same is true of the “Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia.” This conglomerate of peoples and nations, cultural majorities and minorities in varying compositions, is at the time of writing even closer to disintegration than the Soviet Union. But even a country like the Czech and Slovak Republic must pull out all the stops to avoid disintegration as a result of deep Slovak discontent over what it experiences as political, economic and cultural disadvantage. For let us emphatically note here, that it is only rarely discontent in the cultural sphere alone. Slovenia wants to leave because economically it gives more to the federation than it gets back from it.
Slovakia, on the other hand, is economically backward and therefore wants more control. Catalonia and the Basque Country base their demands for further autonomy not least on the fact that zii are important pillars of the Spanish economy. (The Frisian voice for more cultural autonomy would certainly be even louder if Friesland’s economy were one of the strongest in the Netherlands.) Still, it is ultimately ethnic and/or cultural identity that makes a given region resist the state center.
Larger and smaller cultures
And yet – the cultural history proves it – out of this bayside of cultural communities, and to this we may include local and regional cultures, – yet out of this the Europesa civilization grew, step by step, despite sometimes smaller, sometimes catastrophic relapses into barbarism.
If the pluriformity of European cultures, large and small, has been, and still is, the driving force of European civilization, then it follows unquestionably that the loss of this pluriformity is tantamount to a loss of “driving power” for that civilization. Moreover, when we assume the qualitative equivalence of cultures – and we must do so on the basis of the facts, for how else could we explain the great contribution of smaller cultures such as the Dutch, Danish, Irish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech and Slovak? – if we assume qualitative equivalence, then every effort should be made to maintain and promote that plurality. Then the larger cultures in particular should undertake to help positively discriminate against the smaller ones that are oppressed. But that is not how things are in reality. What is the actual position of the smaller cultural communities? Let us first look at the weakest among them, namely those communities that are so-called minority cultures in a state unit where another culture is cultivated as a national unitary culture. There, outright oppression can take place, as experienced by the Turks in Bulgaria. Or covert oppression, in its effect no less destructive. As the cultural minorities in France have experienced for centuries. As early as 1539, French was imposed as a unified language.’ Better but still unsatisfactory, is the position of minority cultures that have gained partial autonomy: the Frisians, the Catalans, the Basques, the Hungarians in Romania. We already note – we will come back to this – that the position of smaller, non-state cultural communities is only truly satisfactory in a federal context that fully upholds the principle of cultural autonomy for the partial cultures. As in Switzerland, the Federal Republic and recently, in Belgium.
Discriminatory factors
But even when the pressure from the national center is removed, the position of smaller cultural communities will remain far from optimal. This is mainly due to two discriminatory factors that exert an adverse influence even bii a formal status of the communities concerned that leaves nothing to be desired. They are factors related to relative size. These factors operate wherever smaller cultural communities coexist with larger ones. They also apply, it should be emphasized, to those smaller cultural communities that do live within their own national boundaries: such as, for example, the (Northern) Dutch, the Danish, the Greek, the Portuguese, the Hungarian, the Polish, but perhaps also the Italian and the Spanish. Indeed, the principle equivalence noted above of all cultural communities in the qualitative sense, does not apply in the quantitative plane. And that is simply the context in which larger and smaller cultural communities interact. In that context, “small is beautiful” does not apply. For two reasons it does not.
The first of these two factors that plays a negative role in this is economic in nature. This is a simple phenomenon in economics, a basic fact in the market economy: those who produce for a small(er) market have higher unit costs than those who work for a large(er) market. With a simple illustration: the Dutch publisher has smaller sales and therefore higher unit production costs than his French, German, let alone English colleagues. Their market includes not only the in itself much more numerous home population, but also the millions outside their own borders who also understand and read French, German, English, Spanish, and so on. The English-language book effortlessly finds an almost worldwide market. If Dutch publishers want to market their products abroad, then on top of the already high direct production costs come the costs of translation or summaries; how else would publishers know what kind of meat they are getting. Mutatis mutandis, the disadvantages I have just mentioned apply to all language-related cultural products: not only to literature but also to academic publishing, to film, television programs and other audiovisual products, to theater and cabaret. Examples are there for the taking.
And then the second “pressure factor,” the psychological one. Do not think that this is a theoretical construct. In my more than forty-year diplomatic career, I have often, all too often, encountered it. It is the phenomenon of the condescension, disdain, indifference or even contempt that representatives of larger cultural communities have for smaller communities. It is an almost automatic psychological mechanism. It implies that even the small are guilty of it toward the even smaller. To stay right at home: the “Hollanders” versus the Frisians. And also much of the irritation between the Netherlands and the Flemish Community can, in my opinion, be traced back to belatedness and indifference of many northerners toward their southern neighbors.
But it is certain that wii, in the North and the South, suffer from the operation of this psychic mechanism as it manifests itself in third parties. Let me limit myself to a few, almost stereotypical, examples. There is the German, and there are many, who believes that our language is a dialect of his language. And then we can be happy, because not long ago a German advocate of Dutch told us that many of ziin compatriots believe that our language is a “waste product” of theirs. And what to say of those Frenchmen who, either in official or personal capacities, declare that Dutch is not a cultural language. It goes without saying that when large numbers of inhabitants of the peoples surrounding us are of the opinion that our language should not be taken seriously, they extend that judgment to our literature. The numbers confirm this. The knowledge of our literature in the large countries surrounding us is considerably lower than that of the Scandinavian literatures, even though the Scandinavian countries together account for only three-quarters of the Dutch-speaking population.
With the outlined disadvantageous position in the force field of European cultural relations, due to market-technical and psychological factors, we as a smaller cultural community have long been living with. And perhaps we could muddle on like this were it not for an even greater threat to our cultural identity.
The European Community and Culture
What I am referring to are the consequences of the integration process taking place in the European Community (EC). As is well known, the European Community is primarily, in its conception and objectives, an economic organization on a federal basis. To the concept of federation and its counterpart confederation, I will return. We note first of all, and this is a crucial observation, that the treaties on which the EC is based, that of Paris of 1951, the so-called Coal and Steel Treaty, and that of Rome of 1957 on Euratom and the European Economic Community, deal exclusively with economic cooperation. In this area, the EC is striving for a European economic union, for which the common internal market, to be achieved by 1993, is an important intermediate stage. The next important stage on the road to economic union, is monetary union, which will allow for a common monetary and financial policy. That monetary union is now only in its early stages. Even before the end of 1991, a so-called Intergovernmental Conference IGC) of EC countries will have to take decisions regarding the possibilities and problems of a comprehensive monetary union. At the same time, another such Intergovernmental Conference is taking place, and its subject matter goes far beyond economic cooperation, however important it may be.
The subject of that second conference is: political union, that is, acting outwardly as a political unit. In other words, establishing a common foreign policy. This endeavor does not come out of the blue.
For a long time the governments of the EC countries have tried, with varying degrees of success, to adopt common foreign policy positions. Until 1985, this cooperation was entirely informal. In that year, the aforementioned European treaties were supplemented and further interpreted by the so-called “European Act” (Acte Unique). This Act not only established that decision-making would henceforth in principle take place by qualified majority, and somewhat expanded the (limited) powers of the European Parliament, but also formalized the aforementioned “European Political Cooperation.” The next step should be political union. Needless to say, this political union is a necessary complement to the economic union; one cannot have a common economic policy in the long run if one does not also unify one’s foreign policy. The pursuit of political union adds a new, non-economic, dimension to the process of European integration.
But more is happening: in the socio-economic field, efforts are being made to achieve a far-reaching “facilitation” of policies. A draft “Social Charter” is already on the table. Fiscal coordination is also receiving a lot of attention.
A very important non-economic development in the EC context is the breaking of the taboo that until recently lay on the question of a common defense policy. The Gulf War has also made this issue negotiable in the EC.
All these developments testify to an extremely important dynamic of the European integration process in a particular direction, that of a federation or federal state. What is a federation? Briefly, a federation is an international-law form of cooperation between originally sovereign units – states, provinces, regions, cantons or whatever they may be called – which have transferred the bulk of their sovereignty – to the most important exception, I will return to in a moment – to a new central government. Веstanding federations include: those already mentioned, the Federal Republic, Belgium and Switzerland, as well as Canada and the United States. In name, the now-defunct Soviet Union and disintegrating Yugoslavia were also federations. In fact, in those countries federal principles were negated by monolithic central (party) rule.
And what is a confederation? The other Dutch word for confederation is statenbond. As this word indicates, the bond there is much looser than in a federation. There is only a central cooperative body, but no new central government. The transfer of sovereign powers is voluntary, and, unlike in a federation, can be revoked. Total withdrawal is also possible, something the federation does not allow.
Return to the EC. We noted that the European Community is in the process of broadening and accelerating federalization. At the same time, we have to note that every existing federation has two important elements, to which no attention is paid in the EC context. Both are fundamental to the proper functioning of a federal system. First, there is no constitutional body in the EC whose task is to represent the specific interests of its constituent parts. I mean the body called “Senate” in the United States, “Federal Council” in the Federal Republic. The European Council of Ministers cannot qualify as such. Its members can and do represent sectional interests, but are at the same time the “government” of the Community. Conflicts of interest are therefore the order of the day; just think of agricultural policy. Added to all this is the fact that the existing parliamentary body, the European Parliament, has so few powers that there is talk of a “democratic hole”.
But from the point of view of cultural coexistence in the European Community, a second gap in the EC system weighs even more heavily.
I mean the fact that not, as has been the case in every existing federation from its inception, culture has been expressly excluded from the powers of the new central federal authority. In the Federal Republic, the federal states, in Switzerland the cantons, in Canada the provinces, in the United States the “states” and in Belgium the Communities have retained or acquired their cultural sovereignty. This own sovereignty is not only rightly claimed, but is essential to the functioning of a federation.
The lack of analogous regulation in the EC means that the different cultures in the Community are outlawed. And who abuses this is the European Commission, the executive body of the Community with the right of initiative.
Of course, only regulations based on the aforementioned Paris and Rome Conventions are available to the Commission.
Alpha and Omega of these treaties is the promotion of free competition, iuncto the prohibition of discriminatory treatment of the nationals of EC countries throughout the EC territory.
The non-existence of cultural regulations has not so far prevented the European Commission from interfering in the culture of the member states. The procedure it follows is that it transforms an essentially cultural problem into an economic one, and then applies EC economic rules to it. Notorious examples zlin its appropriation of the issue of fixed book prices; for it prohibited cartels, for culture, especially that of the smaller countries, a matter of life and death for quality publishing, both of literature and of scientific work.
Another hold-up by the Commission is its examination of the “legality” of public subsidies for cultural activities. Should these be banned in their present form as being of a discriminatory nature, subsidies should either be abolished or open to all EC nationals. It does not take much imagination to imagine the catastrophic consequences for one’s own culture in either case. Another notorious example of cultural interference on the part of the European Commission based on economic regulations is the early 1989 directive for cross-border television, which was labeled an economic service.
Since then, commercial television makers have had a powerful weapon in their battles with public broadcasting systems. Only Denmark had the courage to say that, in its view, television was first and foremost culture.
But it is not only culture in the narrower sense that will come under pressure. How will our social legislation, which is at the highest level in the EC, fare? Will we have to downgrade it? Or our environmental policy? Or our minorities policy, our admissions policy? Our drug policy?
The situation outlined, which – it should be emphasized – is particularly burdensome for smaller cultural communities, leaves only one conclusion: the Rome Treaties should be supplemented as soon as possible in the sense of granting full cultural autonomy to the member states, or, in other words, sole responsibility for maintaining and activating their cultural identity.
This means that, in any case, the Member States remain entirely responsible for their domestic and foreign cultural policies. The latter, of course, must not conflict with the Community’s foreign policy. It further implies their autonomy in the fields of education policy, science policy and media policy. To this end, it will have to be established, among other things, that cultural goods and services have a sui generis character, and are therefore not subject to EC economic regulations. Such an extension of the Treaties of Rome need not imply that European bodies should not deal with culture at all.
But only when expressly authorized to do so by the Member States, and only then again when there is an identifiable Community interest at stake. The so-called principle of subsidiarity applies here, i.e. the Community may only carry out those tasks which the Member States, alone or in association, cannot carry out themselves. One thinks of projects such as the existing Erasmus programme or the Lingua programme.
Full cultural autonomy, preserving cultural pluralism, should also be granted within the EC to the so-called minority cultures, to the Frisian, the Scottish, the Breton and the Catalan, to name but a few cultures from a rich diversity. Such autonomy should also exist at the regional and local level.
The rest of Europe
If the European Community grew into a true federation, the problems of the smaller cultures within its borders would be largely solved, although positive discrimination in their favor would always be needed to overcome their market weakness. Thus they would need access to funds formed solely for them to bring their language-related products to foreign markets at competitive prices.
But what can we do for the smaller cultures outside the EC? I believe that European cultural relations with and between countries and regions outside the EC would be served by a European Cultural Charter, which would lay down rules for cultural dealings with each other. In which rights, especially those of the small(er)s, and obligations, especially those of the big(er)s, would be defined. Such a Charter would also have to be based on the cultural autonomy of all, larger and smaller, local, regional, national and supra-national cultural communities, and aimed at the preservation and activation of cultural identity and thus of cultural pluralism. Such a Charter should therefore enshrine the right to culture as a fundamental right. That right is still not accepted under international law. Such a Charter should further put a stop to the cultural expansionism of the great ones, who are already ready to regain their former positions in Central Europe. As a coordinator of this broad European cultural exchange, and as a supervisor of the implementation of the provisions of a European Cultural Charter, the Council of Europe, based in Strasbourg for forty years, which has great experience in cultural cooperation in the Western European context, and to which Central and Eastern European countries that are developing into true democracies also have access as members, witness the recent accession of Hungary and the Czechoslovak Republic, would be most appropriate.
This would require better cooperation between the EC bodies and the Council of Europe. This has so far been too much characterized by conflicts of competence, official jealousy, and especially by a disdainful attitude on the part of the Brussels-based European Commission.
A future Europe that would live together, co-exist, in this way would be a Europe of regions, of cultural regions that is. The time seems ripe for it. Interest in local and regional culture is growing everywhere. I think this has something to do, especially in the European Community, with the disappearance of national borders, and the increase in economic scale that this will promote even more. Surely it must frighten the European citizen, whom politicians so often talk about as a pet peeve, when he considers that above the national central government, which is already often so distant and so anonymous, there will soon be at an even greater distance an even more nameless bureaucracy, which will regulate his or her life in every detail. I believe that that citizen will need his or her immediate local or regional cultural nest warmth, so as not to start suffering from EC square fear. In striving for a Europe of the regions, the Netherlands and the Flemish Community should work closely together. After all, they would eventually form the Dutch region in that Europe!
It is my sincere conviction that general acceptance of the principles outlined above, which should be codified in a European Cultural Charter, would also take the sting out of the many conflicts brought about by the elimination of imposed state and cultural coercive systems in Central and Eastern Europe.
Ideally, I envision a great European Confederation, based on equality and autonomy of the respective cultural communities. That would mean a “pacification” between Czechs and Slovaks, Romanians and Hungarians, but also between Moscow and the Ukraine, Paris and the Basque country, London and Wales, The Hague and Friesland. A true Pax Europaea.
Callantsoog, February 1991
1 By the ordinance of Villers-Cotterets. Similar regulations were issued in England in 1535 and in Spain in 1566, and in 1716 for the compulsory use of Spanish in Catalonia.
