OPINION:Europe isn't just about bailouts – engaging with its culture will energise our own talent, writes MICHAEL CRONIN
THE CREATION of the denominated position of Minister of State for European Affairs represents a unique and historic opportunity for Ireland. However, the news in the same week that a major meeting on the future of European arts had only one Irish group present showed how significant the challenge is for the new Minister in dealing with decades of indifference to what Europe might actually mean to Irish citizens.
Garret FitzGerald spoke recently of the low standing of the Irish in the European community. He argued that the most urgent need for Irish foreign policy was the restoration of Ireland’s former position as a strong unit within Europe.
The restoration, however, demands a very different approach from the one that has until now coloured Irish perceptions and approaches. The cynical instrumentalism of the begging bowl may have served the country in the past, but it is no longer either profitable or popular.
As FitzGerald observed in his address to the foreign policy conference in UCC, the survival of a small nation depends on sensitivity to its neighbours.
But it is difficult to see where this sensitivity is going to come from if we persist in knowing so little about our European neighbours.
This includes everything from the languages they speak to the films they watch on their screens.
Ireland has been served remarkably well by organisations such as Culture Ireland and Ireland Literature Exchange, which have made significant contributions to enhancing the country’s cultural profile across the globe.
However, respect is a two-way process. No one wants to be at a party where one person gets to do all the talking, no matter how eloquent or charming. Lack of interest in others is almost invariably repaid back in the coin of indifference.
In both of the referendums on the Lisbon Treaty what was striking was the almost total absence of any invocation of the enormous cultural loss implicit in a failure to engage fully with Europe.
The emphasis was continually on what we could get from Europe (grants, business, social rights), not what we might learn from Europe. Europe was reduced to one city, Brussels, and to one dimension, assistance.
However, as a former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, once remarked about the European ideal, that it is difficult to fall in love with a market.
The one-dimensional presentation of Europe leads not to any sustainable or enduring involvement with Europe but to a form of cynical opportunism that is now unfortunately associated in the European mind with Irish attitudes to the EU. This is why the kind of pseudo-pragmatism which considers culture as peripheral to the main business of making a fast euro is so profoundly mistaken.
Ignorance breeds neither efficiency nor respect. It narrows horizons, reduces opportunities and generates hostility. As a matter of urgency, we need to think, therefore, about how we as a people can create the conditions for a genuine European reciprocity, an opening up of our lives to the languages, cultures and intellectual traditions of Europe.
In this respect, there is a whole raft of initiatives that could be taken to instil a genuine culture of reciprocity and respect.
Irish schools could be twinned linguistically with schools in other EU member states through the use of new technologies, European studies could be introduced as a subject at second level, part of the public service remit of our national broadcaster could be redefined as providing high-quality programming on other European cultures, through, for example, co-operative agreements with European broadcasters such as the Franco-German television station Arte.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland could commission programmes on new French ideas for the social economy, innovative German paradigms in green engineering, exciting Polish ideas on civil society, exploratory Estonian thinking on the musical avant garde, the list is endless.
One of the paradoxes of speaking a world language in Ireland is that it has narrowed not broadened our world view. Everything from the blueprint for public sector reform to the format of talent shows follows the time-worn path of anglophone influence.
If talk about a smart economy or knowledge society is to have any substance, it is crucial that we extend the range of our inquiry if we are not to condemn ourselves to a derivative dumb-show of imitation.
For this to happen, however, it is vital that we look to ways to make Europe’s diversity part of our lives. Unless there is this wider cultural engagement, all the anxious hectoring about involvement in the European project will bear little fruit.
Patrick Pearse, writing in 1906, argued that “Irish literature, if it is to live and grow, must get into contact on the one hand with its own past and on the other with the mind of contemporary Europe”.
If we broaden literature to include society, Pearse’s appeal has lost none of its relevance or its urgency.
As the Irish past has indeed shown, from Columbanus to Beckett, it is the engagement with the mind of contemporary Europe that has consistently energised and regenerated native ambition and talent.
The opportunity is there for the new Minister to make changes of a nature that would profoundly shape the future wellbeing of Irish citizens. Let us hope she is not found wanting.
Prof Michael Cronin is attached to the school of applied language and intercultural studies at Dublin City University. He is also humanities secretary of the Royal Irish Academy and chairman of Poetry Ireland