Plural Identities

Elephants and debates

I missed this debate on Britishness (the perils of having given up reading the Guardian) but Martin Kettle has summed it up nicely.  Sunny Hundal went to the debate and also was invited to one on European identity and values, sponsored by Demos and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and funded by the Ford Foundation (you can almost hear the rustle of tinfoil hats being donned by Europe's Stoppers & fellow travellers when they hear about that one).  The news releases about this from the two organisations show an inadvertent clue to one British value, modesty (sometimes false) - JPR describes Demos as "the UK's most influential thinktank" whereas Demos' version of the press release says "influential UK thinktank".  JPR reports on the debate here. 

As Sunny Hundal says, the elephant in the room is the reason these debates are happening now; because of worries about how to deal with home grown terrorists amongst a minority of young Muslim males.  Which means that, as Martin Kettle points out, other parts of the debate about British identity, such as class, tend to be ignored.

If you're in the mood for more debate on the subject, without the need to be physically present, an e-congress on Negotiating Identities is taking place in ten days, hosted by the Open University.

European identity

There was a useful summary in The Times a month ago which showed the different emphases placed by each EU member country on what yesterday's Berlin declaration should contain:

• Social Europe (economic freedoms, social rights, a constitution): Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain
• Collective security: Czech Rep, Hungary, Poland
• Future prosperity (economic benefits of a single market rather than fiscal and legal harmonisation): Denmark, Great Britain, Netherlands, Sweden
• Christian history: Italy, Ireland, Poland, Slovenia

In the end it was decided that Angela Merkel, as current President of the EU, should be the only one to sign the 2 page statement, which avoided most of the key issues.

So does this mean agreement on an European identity, a set of values, is impossible?  Or is it more practical just to be clever-clever about it and say that this very point gives Europe its identity - we agree to disagree.

Or, even more pointlessly, we could define Europe as being about a liberation from American materialism.  Pointless, not just because of the tired kneejerk anti-Americanism and lack of constructiveness that this entails, but because, as Wim Wenders has apparently pointed out at a recent conference, Europeans are pretty keen on American materialism and popular culture.

I asked a couple of fellow interculturalists at a recent SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) conference what they thought European identity was based on.  I offered the idea, which I have heard some Japanese mention, that we are a 'stone culture', as opposed to the wooden building culture of most other regions, in that we build our buildings to last, and take great care over them, repairing and renovating.  Obviously you could argue that North America may also be a stone culture, but the dimension that is European is the sheer age of many of our stone buildings.  I would add (as there are some stone cultures in Africa) that we also have a common language in our stone buildings in Europe - we can decode them.

My intercultural colleagues agreed, and it was one of them that added the point about how symbolic our buildings are, in particular how, for example, major buildings in Vienna symbolise certain periods of European thought - Renaissance, Ancient Greece and democracy, the Enlightenment etc.  We did not mean this in the sense that Ian Buruma argues against, that Enlightenment values define the soul of Europe.  As he says, there are many people around the world who share the values of free speech and scientific enquiry.  It is something to do with the notion that Europeans share a common history of thought, and how this thought is symbolised in buildings, art and literature, and that most of us, wittingly or unwittingly, recognise these symbols in our cultural surroundings.