It's all kicking off in Europe
An alternative account of the European project. And a prize-winning story about power
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Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story. The podcast follows at the w/e.
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– Rashmee
The Big Story:
The 27-country European Union (EU) has elected a new parliament that shows the bloc’s evolution – from post-national liberal project to an entity that includes many insular political forces.
The election ended days before the Euro 2024 football tournament kick off in Germany.
Meanwhile, Italy hosts the annual summit of G7 industrial countries in Fasano, an Adriatic coastal town that dates back to Greco-Roman times and was mentioned by the poet Horace in 38 BC.
This Week, Those Books:
A bold examination of the EU as a way to erase European countries’ difficult past.
A story about a destructive love affair intersects with key moments of European history.
Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project
By: Hans Kundnani
Publisher: Hurst
Year: 2023
My rating: Thought-provoking
This is an unusual book by an unusual writer. Hans Kundnani, the British-born-and-bred son of Indian and Dutch parents, voted against Brexit but remains unconvinced the European project is an “expression of cosmopolitanism”. Pointing to its hostility to immigrants and Islam, he writes that most people think the EU stands for diversity and inclusion and opposes nationalism and racism. However, it may be better understood “as an expression of regionalism, which is analogous to nationalism”, but on a larger, continental scale. Kundnani says that European integration after World War II helped the former colonialists join together to continue to project power on the global stage. Serving as “a vehicle for imperial amnesia”, the EU has enabled European countries to collectively gloss over their history. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, they even hailed their new civilising role in the world by integrating central and eastern European countries in the bloc.
That said, Europe remains “a closed system” with an identity based on a “self-contained… linear story, going from ancient Greece and Rome through Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and finally to the EU”. This erases the interconnections with other histories and parts of the world, such as Africa and Asia.
Kundnani damns the EU with faint praise, saying that while it isn’t inherently or structurally a cosmopolitan project, it does “have objectives or policies that can be understood as cosmopolitan”.
A provocative book that offers an alternative explanation of ever-closer European union.
Choice quotes:
“That European identity is closer to national identities than to the idea of cosmopolitanism can be seen clearly by thinking about what it means to say ‘I am European’…you are saying that you are a citizen of a particular region—and one that has a particular history and relationship with the rest of the world. Thus, although ‘pro-Europeans’ tend to think of European identity as being inclusive, it is in another sense exclusive”.
“[Hannah Arendt wrote]: The trouble with many European intellectuals…is that…[it is] only too easy to apply their former nationalism to a larger structure and become as narrowly and chauvinistically European as they were formerly German, Italian, or French”.
“Stuart Hall writes that identities are ‘constructed through difference: they are what they are because of all the things they are not, because of what they lack’. This is especially true for Europe, which ‘has constantly, at different times, in different ways, and in relation to different others, tried to establish what it is – its identity – by symbolically marking its difference from them”.
Kairos
By: Jenny Erpenbeck (author), Michael Hofmann (translator)
Publisher: Granta Books
Year: 2023
My rating: Bleakly beautiful
This book is ostensibly about a doomed love affair but it also threads another story – about the power balance in relationships, notably between a country and its citizens.
The basic plot is simply told. Katharina, 19, and Hans, 53, are citizens of communist East Germany, a state that is collapsing by the time they meet in 1986. Falling in love – or lust – they tell themselves it is a romance for the ages. Overcoming the physical barriers to a relationship – it is hard even to meet because Hans is married and has a son – they manage to find moments of bliss. But when Katharina briefly strays and Hans finds out, he becomes violent and controlling and she, submissive and suffering. Eventually, the Berlin Wall falls, their relationship starts to change and Katharina is able to move on in some way.
The novel, which begins with Katharina receiving a box of papers from the recently deceased Hans, looks back at her youth and a country that no longer exists (but which is now a symbol of successful European integration).
Last month, Kairos became the first German novel to win the International Booker Prize for translated fiction.
Choice quotes:
“Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner”.
“There’s a sign in front of the old man that reads in wobbly handwriting: I AM HUNGRY…Theoretically, Katharina knows they have beggars like this in the West, but it’s nothing like seeing them with your own eyes...Bah, says [Uncle] Manfred, lazy is what they are…”
“Only the strong can take upon themselves the guilt for a newborn society that proves defective”.
The Backstory:
Far-right parties, which are largely hostile to climate-friendly and multi-cultural policies, increased their share of seats to a quarter of the European parliament – up from a fifth in 2019. Almost all these seat gains occurred in three of Europe’s largest countries – France, Germany and Italy.
The EU parliament, the world’s only directly elected transnational assembly, is not the bloc’s main institution but approves its budget and helps set the legislative agenda.
This election had an unusually engaged turnout1 of more than half the EU’s 370 million eligible voters.
In their grading2 of the EU parliamentary election according to criteria and methodology used for polls in other parts of the world, European election experts and NGOs said “acts of violence” were a “pronounced sign of a growing societal polarisation”.
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Preliminary statement by Election-Watch.EU