# Transcript

Paul Lewis

Hello. My name is Paul Lewis and I’m a member of the Governing Europe course team and author of Unit 1. This tape is designed to discuss further some of the issues involved in that unit and further your understanding of a number of key questions such as questions of European identity, issues of what Europe is and what it might become at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the relationship of the different ideas of Europe to the evolving European Union. I have with me to discuss these issues Robert Bideleux Reader in Politics at the University of Swansea, Hugh Starkey who is Staff Tutor for Languages at The Open University and Mark Pittaway who is Lecturer in European Studies at the OU.

I’d like to start by asking Robert to comment or give an answer to the question initially posed by Hugh Seton-Watson, in the readings for the book we’ve just read What is Europe? Where is Europe? How do we answer that question fifteen years on from when Hugh-Seton Watson first raised it? Robert?

Robert Bideleux

In contrast to Seton-Watson who emphasises the cultural unity of Europe, I would emphasise that Europe is an idea, a concept, a state-system with an associated legal order. It lacks any kind of clear-cut criterion by which you can identify Europe as a single cultural area. Also I would stress that Europe is not a clear-cut geographical area. It lacks precise boundaries, it has always been debatable where Europe ends and where Asia starts. I would put greater emphasis on the European state system, the market associated with it, the legal order, a sort of thin set of values which is the nearest you get to a kind of cultural criterion of Europe, which Europeans share. The values placed on human rights, on democracy, on the rule of law and so on rather than cultural conceptions to do with language or ethnicity or religion. These divide Europeans rather more than they unite them. The hallmark of great civilisations is pluralism and this also carries the implication that conceptions of civilisation such as that put forward by Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations, are wholly misleading in the sense that he tries to define civilisations by a single cultural criterion rather than a plurality of cultural values and content. I’m much more inclined towards William MacNeal’s view of civilisation as areas of intense interaction, communication and trade, which is a fairly open-ended definition. Membership is defined by participation, by ability to participate. If you can subscribe to the rules of the club and the values of the club, you’re in! If you are unable to subscribe to those rules and values or you don’t want to, then you exclude yourself. I see no difficulty in admitting Morocco or Turkey at some future date Russia despite its size to an expanded European Union provided they are prepared to uphold what it stands for.

Paul Lewis

So very much a dynamic, diverse Europe emphasised there. Mark?

Mark Pittaway

We have enormous difficulty in defining Europe as a geographical area; of that I think there is no doubt. It is very difficult to define its eastern border running from the eastern Mediterranean I think, right up to the Arctic is a very fluid one.

That having been said I would defend a notion that there are certain common European experiences. There are certain common European historical experiences. Patterns of society, and cultural forms. Once again they are very problematic. A lot has to do with the way settlement patterns have developed. A lot has to do with the way dynastic states have developed and then, after 1918, the way nation states have developed in the eastern part of Europe right the way through from contemporary Eastern Europe to the countries of the former Soviet Union and to Turkey. I think it is very very important to make the point that many of us tend to automatically equate Europe with the countries of the European Community. I come to this as somebody who has spent a long time in Hungary, which has been affected by a very very different historical experience. I found in that country during my travels across the eastern part of the continent an enormous sense of cultural unity. Settlement patterns were very very similar. People’s expectations about the notion of the rule of law and the role of the state were essentially quite similar and therefore I think I’d be more inclined than Robert to think in terms of the cultural unity of Europe.

Robert Bideleux

Yes. As a linguist I have to draw attention to the fact that Europe, if it is anything, is a multilingual community and this makes a considerable contrast with say the United States of America, which is essentially a monolingual community and therefore has certain facility that is given it through its unity of language. A language is an expression of the culture and by definition Europe is multicultural, always has been through its multilingualism and should not therefore have particular difficulty in integrating new cultural forms that come in because they are merely other cultural forms that add to the multicultural nature of Europe. So I would see Europe in terms of a project and essentially something that is becoming and the basis of this Europe is a common set of principles and values which enable such a diverse set of communities to live together. And these fundamental principles and values have been written down, they are encoded in the post-war settlement particularly, we have got the European Convention on Human Rights to which virtually all of the member states of the Council of Europe, which is the forty-three countries currently subscribing to the Europe Convention on Human Rights so it is a very broad definition of Europe and the European Convention of Human Rights insists on those. I quote ‘those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world’. So Europe is a project that is based on a desire for peace, a desire for justice, based on fundamental freedoms and the European Convention also says how this is going to come about. It is based on an effective political democracy on the one hand and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which these things depend. And so Europe is a concept. It depends on its members understanding democracy and understanding human rights which is why some member states within the broader Europe are having more difficulty in coming to terms with being Europe than perhaps more established democracies. But it is amazing to see what’s happened for instance to Spain and Portugal which until the mid ‘70s were in fact fascist, far-right dictatorships, how they have democratised and become very easily assimilated within this culture of human rights.