[q]A lingua franca is very different from a national language, though, and doesn't necessarily "immediately relate to culture" as anitram put it. If the increase in Europeans who speak English had come about primarily as an expression of pan-Europeanism, then maybe you could call it cultural expression, but my impression is it's pretty much entirely due to economic factors. Of course this isn't to say that multilingualism and a sturdy national identity are incompatible; obviously they aren't, but the collective self-understanding as a nation has to be there first.[/q]
But why couldn’t the use of “Euro English” be related to what might be known as European Culture? surely we can speak French to demonstrate our Frenchness – in the same manner that we have regional accents that speak to where we’re from in North America, I noticed Memphis’s accent returned with a vengeance the closer we got to Memphis itself – but when we speak with other Europeans, the default language is Euro-English? Also, couldn’t bi-tri-linguality (or however many languages … I remember the Belgians being particularly brilliant linguists) also be part of an understanding of European culture?
[q]I believe it's the case--someone please correct me if I'm wrong--that even most official EU business is conducted in multiple languages and with the aid of translators, rather than relying on English. And that the EU encourages multilingualism (or at least, the retention of Europe's major languages by their home countries) as a general policy stance.[/q]
I’m not sure – I remember, specifically, a Belgian telling me how insulting he thought it was that his son’s business affairs were conducted in English when the room was filled with people who weren’t native English speakers. At the time, this struck me as a provincial francophone attitude, but who knows if that one experience was isolated or if it is the norm.
[q]I understand what you're saying, but you have to keep in mind that you're approaching all the above situations as an American, with all the blindnesses to the other person's experience of the encounter that entails. You might personally feel very much like An Addled American Adrift In Spain when in a village in Galicia, then much more like A Confident Citizen Of The World when in Barcelona (I know that's true for me), but I'm not sure an "average" Barcelonin would see it that way, or consider themselves to have more in common with a New Yorker than a Galician. Both places are still Spain, and both have their place in the story of what it means to be Spanish.[/q]
I think that’s interesting, but perhaps this bolsters my point – one can still be Spanish as well as a Confident Citizen of the World. It’s those who grow up in the midst of contemporary cosmopolitanism who might share a culture analogous to a sort of supra-national state – precisely what Welsh is talking about. Sure, you have roots, but contemporary identity isn’t grounded in history, blood, soil, language, and religion in the way that it once was, and Welsh would view this as A Good Thing. To be less anarchist than Welsh, I think we can say that being Spanish and being a Confident Citizen of the World are not mutually exclusive. The Barcelonan can speak to his Galician cousins in one manner, the Londoners in town conducting business in another, and feel different connections to both, one neither better nor worse than the other.
I take your point about the mutual understanding of Spanishness, but I wonder just how deep that goes and if we don’t overestimate it’s importance and value, particularly to our Barcelonan Citizen of the World.
It’s interesting … let’s take a look a hyphenated American cultures. I could meet a gay boy from Oklahoma and have plenty in common. We both understand what it means to be gay, to have an understanding and a bond that transcends geography (like the geography between Galicia and Barcelona). The same way a Jew from Itta Bene is going to have immediate connections and commonalities to Jews in Brooklyn. But how far does this take us? Likewise, how far does it take the Barcelonan and the Galacian? Are these commonalities only apparent when faced with immediate, obvious difference – say, the presence of a Canadian makes the Barcelonan more Spanish and thus increase his bonds with the Galacian – and they break down over time? Ultimately, the gay boy from OK and I are going to run out of gay things to talk about, and what are we then left with? He’s rural, I’m urban, and that, to me, seems a bigger divide that shared gayness isn’t going to overcome.
[q]Same thing here really--I can feel at home in rural Mississippi in a way you probably never could, but at the end of the day we're both Americans, and not likely to be in strong disagreement about what that means...which is of course more than just life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (or McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Snapple); it's also the Pilgrims, the Boston Tea Party, Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, Tammany Hall, "War is Hell!", the Roaring 20s, the Harlem Renaissance, Little House on the Prairie, Pearl Harbor, Watergate and so on. In this sense American national identity is perhaps not so different from other varieties...what is (relatively) unique is the overall sense that the "people" at the center of this story are not and never have been a "people" by virtue of blood. [/q]
True, but I wonder how strong these ties really are. I’ve heard it said that American-style flag-on-you-sleeve style patriotism – how we cheer after the national anthem at a ball game, how it’s perfectly fine to be so “rah-rah” about the US, all this satirized in
Team America, World Police with the song “America, Fuck Yeah!” – is actually necessary for any sense of cultural unity, that we need these overt displays of patriotism, and fidelity to national myths, in order to keep what is actually a very, very fragmented country together. One of the reasons why mass culture is so successful in the US is because the average American needs such a mass culture precisely to assist in the creation of a national identity since there really hasn’t been one created by history. Just as American citizenship is participatory by nature, so is the creation of a broadly understood American identity – what we’re purchasing is a placement of ourselves in a national story that doesn’t implicitly include us. We have to actively place ourselves in that narrative.
[q]As for the the North-South divide, that really is a uniquely profound one by American standards, because those differences, albeit in an earlier form, actually led outright to war. Which tends to be remembered from a Northern POV as a question of having defended, and bettered, a "We" that was meant to be...whereas among white Southerners, broadly speaking--especially rural ones, and especially in the Deep South--there remains a good deal of lasting bitterness, particularly over Reconstruction, which of course black Southerners have in turn paid a high price for...economically, politically, socially. Yes, there's also the religious identity differences and so forth, but these are so intertwined with that sense of alienation, and the insularity it nurtures, that it's impossible to fully disentangle them.[/q]
Very interesting – I might forward this paragraph to Memphis.
[q]I agree that ever-closer political and economic ties are probably inevitable...just not sure about the social and cultural ones. Yeah you can go to pretty much any major Western European city now and figure out without assistance how to use the metro, where to buy a coffee-and-pastry versus a full meal, where to find a kiosk that sells phone cards, etc., but I'm not sure how significant these similarities are in the big picture. I'd also question whether the rise of the US to superpower status isn't an even more powerful incentive towards unity than the rise of India and China. And in any case, I'd hate to see a European unity grounded primarily in an Us Against The World mentality--as I've said before, I fear that Israeli identity for one is grounded far too heavily in precisely that, and it makes for volatile stuff.[/q]
Yes, agreed about the US – I sort of assume that US-as-sole-superpower has been the driving force for European unification for years now, and I think China and India are simply going to augment this as Europe is going to have to compete with these economies of billions.
Well, in the current absence of any European voices, let me refer to an article I read years ago in the NYT Magazine from years ago – from 10/13/2002, titled “What is a European.” It said the same thing you have (and I agree) about how you could drop me off in nearly any European city and I could get myself a coffee, bread, a newspaper and a train ticket without much of a problem. I think some of it warrants reposting right now – it’s subscription only, so I’ve dug it up on Nexis, but here’s some interesting quotes:
[q] The French, on the whole, make more assertive claims to a European identity. My French publisher said, when asked: "Naturally, I am first a European. And within that, I am French." I live in southern France in the summer. A lady I meet regularly on a mountainside, tending a goat and some chickens, said: "Of course I feel myself European. With all these agreements we now have." When I pressed her on what that meant, she said, "Je suis du type Europeen." She spread her arms toward the four corners of the globe. "You have Africa, and Asia -- and over there you have America -- and here, we are European." It was interesting that she saw Americans as a single -- non-European -- "type." [/q]
[q] From another point of view, Italy feels very distant from the centers of European power. I was discussing the increasing split between the north and south of that (in European terms) recently unified country, on a boat crossing from Capri to Naples. I said to the group of Italian journalists and university teachers I was with that perhaps Europe would provide a place in which intense local identities could co-exist more easily than in nation-states. I mentioned British hopes for separate parliaments in Scotland and Northern Ireland, co-existing within a European economy and community. I mentioned the new confidence of the once-oppressed Catalans in Spain. The Italians smiled into the Mediterranean sunlight at my naivete. "The people here know and care nothing about Europe," they said. "They hate the people in the next village. Europe is nothing." [/q]
[q] I asked Norwegians whether they felt they were Europeans. Their answers varied. No, said some; we are on the geographical edge; we are separate and independent and different. One said passionately that after hearing George Bush's speech -- those who are not with us are against us -- she was sure for the first time that Norway should join the E.U., in order to oppose such dangerous and belligerent ideas. Another said that he had traveled last summer across the battlefields of the First World War, and having seen the devastation knew that Norway should join the union in order to prevent such a horror from ever happening again. All, without exception, said thoughtfully that they did not really feel European but that they did feel Scandinavian. They belonged with other Scandinavians. The Danes said the same -- they felt that the European Union was necessary and useful, but their extended identity was Scandinavian. [/q]
[q] There was only one thing all the Europeans I talked to had in common. They would all say, "When I am in America, I know I am European." In Europe they notice local differences, but seen from the distance of the States, it is suddenly the whole state of being European that grips them. One person said to me, "I thought I knew from books and television what the American way of life was, but when you are in it you realize you don't understand it at all." This feeling isn't necessarily, or even mostly, antagonistic. America has the fascination of the Other. I don't think European perceptions of America are helped by the ubiquitous presence of dubbed American soaps and B movies on European television. American mouths moving in American shapes and producing French sounds in French voices are cultural zombies, and misleading.
An American recently said to me at a German reception that she hadn't even noticed that she had a "nationality" until she came to Europe. There are two (at least) ways of looking at that. One is that for most Americans the natural way to be is to be American, and they are surprised to find Europeans are different, and have complex ways of looking at their own identities. The other is that in the United States family origins -- Italian, Irish, Jewish, Hispanic -- are subsumed in a deliberately chosen new identity, without being lost. I don't think the Europeans, any of them, even the most enthusiastic for political union, will ever subsume their origins in a new national identity as Americans naturally do. [/q]
[q] I asked him if it was easier for members of smaller countries to feel "European," and he answered that he thought this was so. "Smaller nations have much less difficulty with the 'high politics' aspects of Europe and have less identity bound up with foreign policy, defense and even the currency." He then made what he said was the "basic point." "Being European is a supplementary identity, which does not aspire to be the dominant identity for anybody. This is the whole point and attractiveness of it in a world where identity politics not to mention ethno-politics have done and are doing enormous harm." [/q]
if you can't tell, i do find Europe fascinating -- every once in a while, i get consumed by a desire to live there again ...