European citizens are angry because they are encountering silence from their leaders, writes RICHARD PINE
EVERYONE IS familiar with the concept of negative equity – when your house is worth less than the size of your mortgage – and an increasing number of homeowners are suffering from it. Something similar is happening in politics: negative leadership, where the leaders are worth less than the citizens who, in theory at least, support them. If a nation is defined, or at least represented, by its leaders, most of Europe is devoid of character.
This isn’t merely a recent phenomenon. Vaclav Havel, one-time leader of the Czech Republic, remarked that there has been a European entropy over the past 150 years, resulting in “a lack of metaphysical certainties, a lack of a sense of transcendence”. I think he meant that imaginatively speaking, Europe is adrift. And our political leaders appear to be incapable of attaching us to any “certainties” other than financial bad news.
But citizens all over Europe are expressing their anger and bewilderment and encountering a political silence because no one knows how to govern effectively, how to “transcend” the entropy of the European imagination.
It has been said that a stable government is a sign that people have lost interest in being governed. If that’s the case, the political confusion in most EU states is a sign that people want to be governed, but also that they do not trust modern politicians.
Instability is everywhere: the Government’s precarious majority, the crumbling political system in Belgium and street protests in Athens are symptomatic of the need to renegotiate national identities and international relations and to re-establish a sense of direction.
Very few European leaders command respect. As a Greek journalist wrote recently: “Few of the 27 EU leaders are paragons of virtue – any group that has Silvio Berlusconi as one of its most prominent decision-makers can hardly claim the moral high ground.” Even Obama’s lustre is fading as he is confronted by America’s complexities.
Almost 40 years ago, Brian Friel said: “I see no reason why Ireland should not be ruled by its poets and dramatists.” I don’t think he was suggesting Heaney for taoiseach or Friel for tánaiste, but he was challenging a political system which at the time – 1972 – was still in the throes of clientelism, gombeenism and an incapacity to deal with fundamental questions raised by the aftermath of the arms trial and Bloody Sunday.
By 1980, Friel and Stephen Rea had formed Field Day, a theatre company and publishing house which trooped its ideas and its imaginative energies in front of its “enemies” – the governments in London, Belfast and Dublin.
Friel’s play Translations threw a gauntlet down to provoke a debate about the relation of language to meaning. How do we know if what we say is understood by the people to whom we say it? The 15 Field Day Pamphlets that followed opened up that debate into a widespread discussion of how people are to be governed – with or without consensus.
As Séamus Deane (regarded as Field Day’s “ideologue”) said at the time that distribution and sale of the pamphlets were of less importance than the fact they arrived on Margaret Thatcher’s desk and would therefore command an acknowledgment by her of their existence and of the mindset they represented.
A pamphlet or a stage performance may not be in the same league as an anarchist’s petrol bomb or the device that nearly killed the Greek minister for security on June 24th – or are they? Aren’t they all designed to achieve one common effect – to question the authority of the state as personified by its “leaders”?
In recent memory we have seen the separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the bloody disintegration of former Yugoslavia (and are still dealing with the aftermath, in political, cultural and ethnic terms).
Belgium is on the brink of collapse as the uncomfortable symbiosis of French-speaking and Dutch-speaking citizens becomes unbearable – not mainly for economic reasons but because they have different identities which the system has failed to weld into a national unity.
Nicolas Sarkozy is learning the hard way that you might take the woman out of the burqa, but you can’t necessarily take Islam out of the woman. In 1982, I was in a house in Manchester where the brother of a Muslim who killed his daughter was explaining to me why the killing should not be regarded as murder under British law: she had disobeyed her father, brought shame on her family and therefore he was entitled to take her life. “You have religion one day a week. We have our faith seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The law of Islam is superior to British law.”
There have been many such incidents since and there is nothing David Cameron can do about it because it is a cultural problem. The implosion of empire, the collision of cultures and beliefs that cannot be reconciled except by imagination. And imagination is an ingredient manifestly lacking in most politicians’ DNA.
Richard Pine lives and works in Corfu