# Transcript

Paul Lewis

One aspect I would quite like to bring is that I quite agree that the emphasis on diversity and the principle of acceptance of diversity is terribly important but one might go a bit further and say actually Europe is so diverse it is actually very difficult to get unity. Or it has been very difficult, and one way the Europeans and Europe has done this is to identify an ‘other’ that Europeans are not historically – that was the Saracens or the Turks, the Muslims in a general sense, and during the years of the Cold War it was Russia.

Even now for many people Europe is distinct from America and essentially the Europeans often need an out-group, another whom they identify themselves in opposition to. I mean the British are rather good at this, I mean the British and the English are clearly not French! They are not German and they are not Turkish and a few of the more enthusiastic football supporters will go along with that! So I mean this is one way of getting European unity. Otherwise this diversity might be formally accepted but instinctively and in terms of personal or national identity is actually difficult to comes to grips with. I mean there’s all these more passionate emotions you know raging in people’s breasts and it is difficult to summon up that kind of identity in terms of rather abstract principles I think. How do you cope with the ‘other’ and in particular someone like Russia and Turkey who were the historic European ‘others’. You know, how do we get over this problem?

Robert Bideleux

In part through recognition that these ‘others’ have actually contributed in massive ways to European civilisation. In terms of the Renaissance for example the Moorish kingdoms in Spain and other parts of the Mediterranean region were crucial and the rediscovery of Aristotle and Greek science, the transmission of mathematics were in fact the development of mathematics and astronomy and so on and played a crucial role in the Renaissance. To those who wish to emphasis Russia’s otherness, I would emphasise against that it’s hard to think of European culture without thinking of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky and Shostakovich and Russian ballet is the greatest sort of ballet by anyone’s judgement in Europe. So Russia has made huge contributions to European culture and Turkey has contributed an awful lot too – not least gastronomically. So that even these ‘others’ that Europeans at times have defined themselves against are in many ways more part of us than them but in ways that Europeans much of the time don’t wish to recognise.

Mark Pittaway

I think you have raised two very interesting separate issues when you discuss ‘otherness’. One is about countries or societies which are only ambiguously part of Europe. We have no problem for example identifying Belgium as part of Europe but we have problems identifying Russia, some have problems identifying Romania others have problems identifying Turkey. I think the way to cope with this is to actually not attempt to define an eastern border and to recognise that contemporary Europe has been created out of an enormous flow of different peoples throughout its history. If we go back 2000 years one can see for example that the Slavs and the Magyars who populate most of eastern Europe came from Asia.

We can see much more recent migration and conversion. We had Islam in southern Spain several hundred years ago. We had an Ottoman presence in south-eastern Europe until the very beginning of this century. And we also in the post-war period have a lot of inward migration into western European states like Belgium, like the Netherlands, like France and Great Britain form colonial powers and therefore I think we ought not to exclude those elements of Europeaness that Europe has existed in a dialogue with the broader world. The second issue I’d like to address is the one about internal ‘others’. One of the very distinctive things