EU 1 – My snark 0
Two hundred "normal" European citizens gathered 10 months ago to contemplate the future of the EU. All my attempts at abandoning cynicism have become acts of desperation. The citizens’ messages were to be translated into recommendations for the EU; ambassadors would defend the views in European parliament.
My condescending smirk whispers: ? all sweet and good willing people, but this is just the EU buying its indulgences in a Roman Catholic monastery overlooking Florence, NOTHING will come out of this. ? How to get rid of that voice in my head?
Enter the mighty Kalypso Nicolaidis , who is not unfamiliar with that cynical voice. In her ears it mumbles: ? who really cares ? about this ? therapy weekend at the bedside of our aging European project? ? But Kalypso fights. She starts a beautiful reverie (now dragged from behind the paywall and free to read at the European Review of Books) in which she juxtaposes a Cretan Europe with a Christian Europa, not a Europe led by men who go to church but by women who reverse the roles of Zeus and the raped Europe, women who take control – ? Most of us, man or woman, find a woman riding naked on a bull more attractive than a naked man dying naked on a cross. ?
My minds nasty little voice was silenced by Nicolaidis phantasmagoric visions of a Cretan Europe. She muses:
? With childish enthusiasm I would hark back to Europa’s land of origin, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and reverse the gaze: the EU should learn democratic lessons from others. Start by travelling across time and space to the Phoenician thalassocracy from which Zeus is supposed to have extracted Europa, and which long preceded and probably inspired the Greek Aegean islands, whose local democratic experiments in turn inspired Athens, the ancient democratic apogee, where councils of elders and assemblies of citizens deliberated over production and trade, local government and foreign alliances. ?
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Nicolaidis likes to think her musings about Cretan Europe would have landed in receptive ears, with these European citizens. And why not? What, she asks, did we hear, in the end, from these randomly chosen citizens?
Nicolaidis: ? Schematically, when asked what is to be done, many seemed, more or less, to want "more Europe" across the board, but when asked how that is to be done, they seemed to want it done closer to home in transparent, inclusive, innovative and participatory ways, leveraging digital technologies for debate across borders. Our Phoenician ancestors would have found it all pretty cool. ?
Kalypso Nicolaidis lulls my minds nasty little voice, for a while. If these European Citizens Panels provoke this, then I am game.