Jan Morris on “EUROPE: an intimate journey”
I have admired Jan Morris’s writings ever since, as James Morris, her wonderful book on “Venice”. I recently enjoyed reading “Europe: an intimate journey”, first published in 1997, covering journeys to a host of places all across the continent in the previous fifty years.
At the start of the fifty years, she shared the British scepticism about the EU at the time….
“But almost half a century has passed since then, and I had long been seized by the grand romance of the idea, the prospect of all our peoples united in comradeship at last. I had matured from Britishness to a passionate Euro-Welshness. I was thrilled to feel, as I wandered around Europe, that the old antipathies really were fading……I flaunted a European car sticker on my car, beside the national emblem of Wales, because I had come to think that the best chance for all the peoples of Europe, for the Powers as for the impotent minorities, lay in the creation of a single confederal community, a Europe of all the regions...
“But the States stubbornly hung on. The Powers remained incorrigible. If here and there the minority nations seemed to be achieving some autonomies at last, for the most part the old sovereignties were paramount still….Party rivalries degraded and impeded everything. Above all, the dismal science had taken over…..Dull materialism had proved the most powerful ideology of them all, embourgeoisement was the general trend, and the finance ministers in the chancelleries, the bankers in their banks, the economists in their lecture halls, the corporational executives in their suites spoke for Europe more insistently than any poets, idealists, music-makers or fond romantics.
“Never mind, it was happening anyway, with or without benefit of Government. Euro-sceptics resisted in vain. It was no grand revolutionary splurge, no splash of colour, but slowly those regions really were becoming less alien to one another, learning each other’s tongues, watching each other’s TV programmes, surfing the same net. The growing power of women everywhere was breaking down the rigidities of machismo. Young people all over Europe were discarding false loyalties and national taboos. It was an irresistible organic process, beyond politics, beyond economics, beyond States or Powers, developing inescapably all across our nations. Viva Europa!”
But then Jan Morris came to visit the EU HQ in Brussels….
“I was not terribly impressed when I visited the headquarters of this movement, successor to Hitler’s Berlin, Kaiserstadt, Napoleon’s Paris, the Habsburg’s Vienna, all the way back to the Aachen of Charlemagne. The centre of the European Union turned out to be an unlovely conglomeration of buildings in a charmless quarter of Brussels….. [the Palais Berlaymont, the famous home of the European Commission was being refurbished.] It was going to cost countless billions of francs, a passer-by told me, to do the place up. ‘The price of history’, I said. ‘Yes, and who’s going to pay?’ said he.
“The Europe of the fin de siècle has at least achieved this: for the first time in the history of the continent all its States share, at least in theory, a single ideology – capitalist democracy, which has overcome theocracy, monarchy, Fascism and Communism alike to give every capital in Europe a more or less freely elected Government. This means that my final vision of Europe, though much the most promising – the most benevolent too – is easily the dullest. Officially it proceeds slowly and fitfully, by vote, debate, conference and referendum. All the other attempts to make a unity of Europe have been, one might say, aesthetic attempts: high-flown, richly coloured, inflamed with hate, violence, faith, the love of glory or illusion……Hitler’s manic dreams……Napoleon’s painterly breadth of vision….and, as for the parade of the dynasts, those hyphenated princesses and plume-helmeted archdukes, processing this way and that across Europe in an endless succession of marriages, conspiracies and family conflicts, at least in retrospect they contributed something to the gaiety of nations. Churchill called magnificently for a United States of Europe, based upon ‘the resolve of millions to do right rather than wrong’, and there was nobility too to Schuman’s original conception of a 20th century united Europe. It might have been presented at the start as a matter of coal and steel, but it was really a dream of reconciliation between those two great enemies of the Rhine, France and Germany, which would develop over the years into a far wider comity – and so it has developed too…….so inadequately represented for me on that drizzly day in Brussels.
“All the man said was Who pays?”
Keith Tunstall
