In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  ‘Jean Monnet was a unique individual. He was not a politician, nor was he a civil servant or a diplomat. He himself often said that all the positions he had occupied were ones that he had invented himself. But at the same time, even before the war, he had been one of France's most important strategic thinkers. And after the war, he was one of the most important in Europe. He reminded us again and again: once you start thinking that a peace treaty is something final, you're in trouble. Peace is a process that requires constant work. Otherwise everyone will do what comes naturally; the strong ones will exert force, the weak ones can only submit.

  ‘According to Monnet, the drama of European history, that endless series of ceasefires punctuated by wars, could only be circumvented by building something that transcended national borders.

  ‘In 1952 he became the first president of the ECSC, and I followed him there. That is how I became one of the first European officials. There were ten or twelve of us, and our offices were in the former headquarters of Luxembourg Railways. I was secretary to the High Authority of the community and had daily contact with almost all the members, as well as the top officials. In that position, I was also involved in the expansion of our little European regulatory organisation. That is how I met Winrich Behr. The first thing he said to me was: “I want you to know that I was a professional soldier throughout the war.” I said: “We're not here for the past, we're here for the future.” Later I heard that he was one of the last to be airlifted out of Stalingrad. At that time, in the detention camp at Gestel, we hoped that no German would make it out of Stalingrad alive. Now we were working together, and we remained friends all our lives.

  ‘It was hard work there in Luxembourg. Monnet was extremely inspirational, but hierarchy and official structures were not, let me put this mildly, his cup of tea. One time, after a hard-fought decision, I remember him coming into the office and saying: “The high authority has to meet again to reconsider things. Last night my driver said something we should think about. And he was right.”

  ‘In 1954, the French scuppered their own plan for a European Defence Community. That seemed like a major blow for the new European integration process. But Jean Monnet and men like the Belgian Paul Henri Spaak and the Dutch Johan Willem Beyen were soon making new plans. Those plans finally led to the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC), the forerunner of the European Union, in Rome on 25 March, 1957.

  ‘One year before that I had resigned my job at the High Authority. I began working with and for Monnet on his action committee for a United States of Europe. That committee consisted of representatives of all the major trade unions and political parties – with the exception of the communists and the Gaullists – from the six member states.

  ‘What did our committee achieve? It's hard to give a concrete answer. We definitely played a role in the turnaround by the German SPD party, which had originally opposed West Germany's integration with Western Europe. Both before and after de Gaulle's veto, the committee worked hard on the admission of the United Kingdom. And, of course, we also helped to map the route which turned the original customs union into the current EU. I still remember how Monnet came looking for me in summer 1957, out of the blue, because we had to get the monetary union rolling right then. The final decision to introduce the euro came forty years later. It was a long road indeed!

  ‘“The years of patience”, as Monnet called the 1970s in his memoirs, lasted in effect until 1985. It was then that Jacques Delors shifted the main emphasis towards actually achieving the “common market”. After all those years it had finally become clear that a common customs union – for the original EEC was little more than that – was completely insufficient for the creation of a real market. The treaties of Maastricht (1991) and Amsterdam (1997), which came later, fit within that process – and the expansion from six to fifteen member states made it all the more urgent. In the end, the Treaty of Nice (2000) was needed to prepare the organisation of the EU for the massive expansion with an additional ten member states, planned for 2004. After all, the procedures developed for the six original member states – and particularly the right of veto – could hardly keep a community of twenty-five member states going. The negotiations in Nice failed miserably, and the Union was faced with a major problem. To break through the impasse, a special European Convention was assigned to come up with a new European constitution, and that's where we find ourselves today.

  ‘I have been involved with this all my life, emotionally and intellectually. Sometimes, in a pessimistic mood, I think the EU will never be more than a European free-trade zone with a golden lining. Of course I have my moments of anxiety … But what is the alternative?

  ‘I remember a conversation I had with Monnet in his garden in Luxembourg, it must have been in late summer 1953. He had just returned from his holidays, and I had to report on the little that had happened during August. He listened patiently for a few minutes, then stopped me and said: “That's all very well, but how are we going to define our relations with America and the Soviet Union?”

  ‘Today, the issue of Europe's position in the world is once again timely. After the end of the Cold War, the world – in the technical sense – became more tightly interwoven. But the political divisiveness remains, and that produces major tensions in the long run. From the very beginning we were interested in more than just coal and steel, more than just a common market, more than an economic and monetary union, more than friendship between the participating states: it was about a revolution in international relations.

  ‘It was Thucydides who described the dealings between states as a world in which the strong do as they like, and the weak put up with what they must. Power and dominion form the basis of that system, even when a balance has been achieved within it. But neither the hegemony of a given superpower nor the attempt to prevent wars by means of a balance of power have ever led to lasting peace. The big question remains: can power be replaced as a ruling principle in international relations by justice? And how can justice, if it is not to deteriorate into mere words receive access to power? Can we, to that end, develop other forms of power, in order to establish justice between states?

  ‘Now that modern weaponry has made the danger of war even greater, this question has become even more urgent. A European fort, a sort of Switzerland on a large scale, is an illusion in today's world. The power to destroy, once the monopoly held by the state, is now in the hands of anyone who can obtain the necessary information through the Internet. The power of mass destruction, in other words, has become increasingly privatised in this world. In such a situation, can the international institutions with their joint responsibility provide justice that is accompanied by the power it needs?

  ‘For our civilisation, the ability to develop a robust international rule of law is a matter of survival. Is that a utopia? No: for half a century, Europe has been proving that it is possible.

  ‘The generation after my own, and probably later generations as well, will have to find answers to all these new questions. Peace, security and prosperity are as valuable as they are fragile. The care for their survival is something that will not let me go. Yes, of course – that has everything to do with that cold parade ground in Amersfoort.’

  Brussels still smells of coffee. In Zuidstraat I see a shop window built from brown planks, containing five rolls of tape, a lectern and an old typewriter: all of it perfectly arranged. The nearby bookshop displays albums showing pictures of the lively street life of Brussels around the year 1900, the crowds on the boulevards (the city's population then was ten times what it had been a century before), the train terminuses of North and South, the carts and carriages shuttling back and forth, day in and day out, the perpetually congested streets of the old Brussels. In Spaarzaamheidstraat I duck out of the rain, into the portico of a shelter for the homeless. One of the nuns invites me in. The transients of Brussels have wonderful stories and gestures, only a few of them lean their heads on their arms and doze off on the
tables. The shelter has no need of subsidies, the kitchen does wonderfully well with the crumbs from the city's table. ‘In a little while we'll go to the National Bank,’ one of the nuns tells me. ‘They always have at least two thermoses of soup for us, and potatoes, vegetables, meat. Eurostar, the train catering department, every day: all sorts of snacks and nice things. The Atomium organises a children's party: 200 sandwiches with luncheon meat. The patisseries: leftover pastries in abundance, enough dessert for 200 people each day. All of it left over, not needed, all for us!’

  When the rain stops, I climb Galgenheuvel, the old gallows hill. There, for more than a hundred years, the Palace of Justice has been sitting astride the working-class neighbourhood of the Marollenbuurt. The building is a single solid chunk of congealed power: enormous courtrooms, offices and archives, a dome the size of St Peter's, and out on the pavement a Christmas tree in memory of the five murdered children for whose lives no justice has yet been handed down. As soon as I enter the great hall I become an ant, a little ant-person in the face of the giant ambition of the young Belgian nation and of the architect, who slowly went mad during the building's construction.

  Brussels is not, like other cities, a place that devours its citizens. Brussels, above all, devours itself. In every city you can take a walking tour with old photographs in hand, in every city you can shout ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, but Brussels is a law unto itself. Only in heavily bombed towns does one encounter metamorphoses on such a scale. Take South Station, for example, in its decline from the exuberant neoclassical temple of 1861, via a modern Dudok-like structure in the 1930s, to the rampant complex of offices it is today. The city's main artery, Boulevard Anspach, once Vienna and Paris rolled into one, is now a bare conduit, stripped of all monumentality. Brussels has always also been adept at sophisticated self-mutilation: courtyards have been replaced by car parks, the once elegant Finistèrestraat by a concrete trough.

  No one loves this city, no one cares for her, no one takes her under his wing. The way a traumatised child continually seeks the repetition of the suffering it has undergone, so this city is always busy violating itself and giving itself away. Every attempt to put an end to the disorder results only in greater chaos. The construction of the Jonction, a sort of tunnel between North and South stations, lasted from 1911–52, continuously delayed by wars, administrative conflicts and hundreds of other adversities. For forty long years, a deep trench through the centre of town blocked all traffic between the better neighbourhoods and the commerce of the inner city.

  An entire working-class neighbourhood, Putterijwijk, was razed to build the Central Station. A huge site was excavated, then the work lay dormant for years. A highway was simply slapped down on top of the tunnel, in turn giving rise to a proliferation of office towers. The well-to-do citizenry, for whom all those boulevards were built, had long since fled to suburbia. Then NATO and the EU tore Brussels even further apart, totally uninterested in the nature or appearance of their capital, demanding only more and more office space and altitude.

  In the course of my walk I end up on Luxemburgplein, the square where the city once presented itself to travellers from Etterbeek, Charleroi and points further afield. For decades it was dominated by Leopoldswijk Station, a friendly, white, nineteenth-century building, flanked left and right by rows of cafés and little hotels with a Southern European air. But walking into the square today one sees, glistening in the afternoon sun, a vast wall of glass rising up behind the station. A few scaffolds are still standing, here and there a final cement mixer churns, but the metal detectors and security cameras are already hard at work, and suddenly one sees how dismal and small the station is in contrast to this enormity of steel and glass.

  This is Europe's brand new house of parliament. I go looking for an entrance amid the chaos. Again I am overwhelmed by the sense of my ant-ness. At the door I stop and turn around, and then I know it for sure: the forecourt of this building is clearly designed to roll on to Luxemburgplein and on into the city. And roll on it will, there can be no doubt about that. In half a year, or in five years, the little station – like cheese made from unpasteurised milk, like French bread kneaded at home, like real chocolate, untagged cows’ ears and the thousands of other things an ant-person values – will have been erased by Europe. The dark brown panelling of the passengers’ waiting room, the friendly, one-toothed woman at the sweet shop, all will be steamrollered away for good.

  Brussels is the capital of Europe, the city is officially bilingual, but anyone who thinks this creates a cosmopolitan climate is sadly mistaken. At my hotel, the only person who speaks a word of English is the African chambermaid. More than three decades after the end of the Belgian language struggle, the lingua franca in the great majority of shops is French, and most of the city's inhabitants – with the arrogance of provincial dignitaries – will speak nothing else.

  An experiment for the visitor: try, in this officially bilingual city, to speak your own language. You will be looked at like a madman. During my travels I had carried out some fieldwork-by-the-square-inch into the extent to which Europeans understand each other, a not unimportant factor for those who hope one day to form a single continental community. How many passers-by did I have to approach before finding someone who spoke a language other than their own? Lisbon, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Helsinki received excellent scores: one or two at most. Rome and Berlin: three. Paris: four (an increasing number of young French people like to speak English). Madrid and St Petersburg: six to eight. London: the same (although German is on the rise in business circles).

  The bilingual capital of Europe had an interestingly low score: three to four. And between Brussels and the rest there was another essential difference: everywhere else, despite the difficulties, there is a strong will to understand each other. But not in Brussels. This city is still dominated by a considerable reticence with regard to the phenomenon of language.

  Belgium is a special country. In the 1950s it survived a language dispute that would have plunged almost any other European country into civil war. Afterwards, Belgium was divided de jure. For the outside world the country has remained unified, a tiny nation that manoeuvres skilfully around the great fault lines between Northern and Southern Europe. And, as far as that goes, Brussels resembles Odessa: precisely because of their problematic position, the Belgians have thought harder and longer about the national and cultural borders that still separate Europeans. But this has done nothing to heal old wounds; on the contrary, they have, if anything, become deeper. Despite outward appearances, Belgium is caught up in a never-ending process of disintegration.

  In Poor Brussels, his wonderful book about the city, urban chronicler Geert van Istendael describes the true tolerance of Brussels on the basis of the daily greeting he receives from his neighbour: ‘He raises his hand, smiles politely and says: “Hello! How are you?” But in fact that's not quite how he says it. It sounds more like: “Allo! Awa you?”, because my neighbour is not only polite, he is also French-speaking. The Dutch-speaking van Istendael always returns his greeting with equal politeness: “Bonjour! Ça va?”’

  That is how Europeans from different cultural regions everywhere should deal with each other, but that is not how it goes. I take a little side trip to Sint-Joris-Weert, a red-brick village close to Leuven with a drowsy café, an agency for Het Nieuws and a set of railway tracks running right down the main street. ‘If you want to see the real language border, go and look there,’ van Istendael had said. Or, as the local baker's wife explained: here it's Flemish, on the other side of the railway bridge, in Nethen, it's French. Communication in her own shop, at least for the Walloons, is by means of mumbling and sign language. On Roodsestraat, the border actually runs down the middle of the street. I go to take a look: that means the red villa on the left speaks Flemish, the white cottage across the street speaks French, the curly kale in the garden on the right is Flemish, the willows across the way weep in French.

  There is, to the naked eye, nothi
ng remarkable about Roodsestraat. Yet it is part of the most important line of demarcation between NorthWestern and Southern Europe. ‘The language border here is centuries old, razor sharp and absolute,’ van Istendael said. On the Flemish side there are Dutch books on the shelves, the people watch the Dutch comedians Van Kooten en De Bie on television and the Flemish and Dutch news, films and political discussions. Their neighbours, eleven paces across the way, watch Mezzo, TV5 and Arte, they read Le Soir and discuss French politics and literature. They live the same lives, eat the same bread, but their world of thought is attached to a completely different cultural system.

  Every language stands for a world of its own; those worlds shift and groan, and merge only with the greatest of difficulty. The Roodsestraat in Nethen is something Eurocrats prefer not to think about.

  Chapter FIFTY-TWO

  Amsterdam

  ‘ALL THOSE PROUD WOMEN ON THEIR BICYCLES.’ ‘THE ORDERLINESS, with that thin layer of anarchism.’ ‘Not a single paving stone out of place.’ ‘The variety, the languages.’ ‘They are all so tall, especially the young people!’ ‘Those enormous, prosperous bodies one sees everywhere.’ ‘And their teeth, their teeth, so lovely and strong!’

  In the Hotel Astoria in Budapest, György Konrád had mused endlessly about faraway Amsterdam and everything that strikes a foreigner about it. He had just written an ode to that city, and he read part of it to me out loud. His Hungarian eyes saw bicycling female derrières, husky blonde mothers and children, ‘sturdy and compact, like mature cheeses’. They saw a city that stood out by virtue of its ability to be ‘an ant by day, a cricket by night’. And they saw, above all, a calm, uninhibited people. ‘The concept of the “national curse” is unknown to them. In front of them the sea, behind them dubious Europe. Germans? Russians? In whom ought they to have confidence, except in themselves?’