Urve Eslas: Europe lives

Photo: Toomas Huik

In Rome, just a few hundred metres from Forum, Giuseppe is keeping his small restaurant. Giuseppe is good at the coffee cup trick: pouring it into the customer's lap, it proves to have been empty. As the visitors squeal, Giuseppe has his daily laugh. Way below the whiskers yellowish from tobacco, his pot belly displays an artwork of tomato sauce drops.

There’s a guy serving as waiter at Giuseppe’s, a refugee from Ukraine and not too fluent in the Italian tongue. Still, thinks Giuseppe, Ukraine needs supporting. To all who care to hear, Giuseppe tells about the Ukrainian, moustache a-trembling with justified pride. For the restaurant, the Ukrainian is a bit of a superstar and information channel – some do come for the sole reason of hearing Ukrainian news. Business is booming.

Just some few kilometres from Giuseppe’s, there stands a conference centre which, over the week-end, hosted European politicians and thinkers to once again try and capture that elusive European narrative. The one they keep worrying about. As shown by a pan-European study, a reason citizens don’t trust the EU is bureaucracy. What bureaucracy? they asked at the conference – anyone present who has failed to get anything done due to bureaucracy? Not a hand was raised. See, it’s a myth, they concluded: again, the people have gotten it wrong.

With this, I do not agree. If people are thinking something, it’s no use stating they are not right; rather, it ought to be asked why they think so. Seems to me, language is the reason. The EU talks to people in the language of precepts and formal notices – and, for them, this is associated with bureaucracy. A large part of the language is, for the people, incomprehensible. How do you trust a guy who makes no sense to you at all? That’s where all the other problems spring from: without language, there’s no communication, and the union keeps drifting away from its people.

Hogwash, said an Italian euro-man, the media is to blame – they haven’t presented the EU positively enough. I got the creeps a bit. In theatre, these are the moments I’m used to closing my eyes and soon it’s all over. But the Italian EU-man was not about to be over but kept telling me we have gotten comfortable in Europe with all these warless years. But Ukraine, somebody asked from the audience. What Ukraine, retorted the Italian EU-man: for a large part of Europe, the threat of Russia is a thing distant and foreign.

Thinking back to it, a day later, I wish I’d done two things: taken the Italian euro-man to Giuseppe’s restaurant; and handed him «The Friend», an essay by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In it, among other things, Mr Agamben is asking what makes a man a political being. Politics, he concludes, has started to saw the branch it is perched on: it has begun to weaken the community-relations out of which politics ought to be born. Life shared is based on language-experience, and all else comes out of that. Come to think of it, the waiter at Giuseppe’s, an Ukrainian with poor command of the Italian language, still speaks a tongue closer to that of Italians than the Italian euro-man.   

Europe does buzz quite nice and the community is rather alive. Now, let’s try and not make too much of a mockery of the living thing, with a bunch of political narratives...