With a view to writing about the coming summer, I doodled the word harbinger. Then I paused. Harbinger is a most European word. The English language takes it directly from the Anglo-Norman herbergere, from the Old French, from which in turn modern French takes its word for an inn, auberge. But Old French took the word from the Old Saxon heriberga, meaning "lodging for an army".
Two of the primary engines of European life are represented in that word, heriberga. One is the Saxon word for army, heri, which lingers on in the word "harry", as in making raids, and is plainly visible in the modern German word for army, Heer.
And berga is one of the most reassuring words in any European language. It means in its earliest known form to protect, but it has other connotations too. "Borrow" shares the same root; "borrow" once meant something in exchange for a guaranteed security. It was an early form of contract and an assurance of promise. But more obviously, berga means a protected place, and provides the roots for placenames across Europe.
Reassuring concept
And so, over much of the continental mainland, berga meant security, reflected in Strasbourg, in Edinburgh, in Petersburg and of course in the most famous burger of them all, Hamburg. It was such a reassuring concept that derivatives from it emerged even in medieval Latin, from which the word spread throughout Europe. Thus we have municipal terms such as borough and burgomeister, and through the French, both burgess, with its concept of civic duty, and bourgeois, with its implications of dependability and outward honesty, as Italian has borghese and Spanish has burgues, with all their various nuances.
Cities, armies, contracts, duty, dependability, protection: what grand notions harbour in the term "harbinger", to which of course harbour is related. And so we move on to navigation, exploration and trade, and a growing sense of what Europe is. For no other continent developed so many related concepts to the high degree that various European countries severally did. Great empires are not built simply on conquest, but on the development of law, of common understanding, of a middle class, a bourgeoisie, which provides predetermined and assured responses to the instructions of authority.
Admittedly, the extension of European rule over those who did not wish to be ruled by Europeans is one of the great crimes of European civilisation; but it was not without entirely merit, spreading concepts of law and central government, to be administered by the burgess class, and which survive today nearly everywhere. The Great War spelt the beginning of the end for the imperial conceit, but it also imposed President Wilson's preposterous simplifications about "selfdet ermination" on the fissiparous tribes of central Europe. What works well in Kansas, where the natives had been disposed of, is unlikely to be as successful in the Carpathians, where they haven't.
Best opportunities
Our histories are one thing, and they are vanishing behind us as completely as the origins of the words we speak; but there is another thing, that sense of commonality which connects European civilisations. To be sure, a single word like harbinger is a poor basis upon which to rest the notion of European unity. On the other hand, might it not contain clues about where our best opportunities lie? Might there not in the collision between the obdurate tribes of Europe and the strangely divisive yet adhesive effects of Christianity lie a basic community of values, which we all need, just as that community of values needs the support of those who share them?
Did not those greater values, through European courts, rescue us from the self-imposed iniquities of unequal pay according to sex, of the criminalisation of male homosexual deeds, of the denial of the right to legal aid, and so much more? Where would we be now, left to the daft and cowardly devices of our elected representatives and to a bench which once so fatuously denounced homosexual acts because they could spread VD?
The Europe project has moved on since then; and now we face the Nice Treaty referendum, a harbinger of a larger future, over which I have puzzled as much and as long as my poor little brain would allow me.
What lies ahead? Is it a huge and ungovernably multiethnic Europe, with Brussels its bloated, overfed heart, its coronaries thick from feasting? Do we really want the seat of our law to rest with bodies upon which we have so little influence?
Nation state
But what if those laws are good laws, better than ones of our own devising? Is the EU offering a future of in-built harmony, of guaranteed assurance, for the many nationalities and identities, Basque and Welsh, Ulster Scots and Bosnian Gypsy, Shetlander and Bavarian? Are we not looking at a way of undoing the heresy of the nation state, whose murderous Wilsonian simplicities nearly destroyed European civilisation, and which have brought us nothing but perfervid tribalism and endless war?
In, out, in out? Better in, so at least our voice may be heard. Nice is our true harbinger, a recognition of certain, unmovable geopolitical realities. After all, this is where we live, our harbour. And maybe one day, we will realise the full implications of this. To redress the Eurocentric assent to Nice, we should balance it by accepting that we are a defenceless island in the Atlantic, totally dependent upon US protection. It is time to grow up, accept our little place in the world, and join NATO, the modern heriberga.