Amid doubt on Europe’s future, some seek common past
By Paul Taylor
BRUSSELS: As the European Union agonizes over its uncertain future after French and Dutch voters rejected its constitution, a dedicated band of historians is trying to unite Europe by giving it a common past. When the EU celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding Treaty of Rome in 2007, the Museum of Europe will open its doors at the foot of the European Parliament building in Brussels.
The aim, according to Antoinette Spaak, president of the “Association Musee de l’Europe” and daughter of one of the EU’s founding fathers, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, is to highlight “a shared history for a common future”.
In the wake of the traumatic “No” votes to the EU charter, the need to reconnect citizens with the European ideal by reminding them of their common roots and values has never been more urgent, she said.
“The people, especially our young people, have lost the historical thread of European construction. They don’t remember the great European adventure of my generation,” said Spaak, 77, a former European Parliament member.
The project, which has just received a decisive financial boost from the Belgian government, aims to give a more tangible embodiment of European history and culture than the anonymous concrete-and-glass buildings which are the only visible manifestations of the EU in the Belgian capital.
The European Parliament receives some 300,000 visitors a year, but all they see is an empty chamber and vast corridors.
The didactic project is as politically ambitious as it is historically audacious, since the organisers aim to reinterpret 3,000 years of European history through the prism of “the historical logic of the unification process of Europe”.
AGES OF UNITY: “It’s clear this is an activist museum, not a propaganda museum but one that aims to help advance this great idea,” said Benoit Remiche, the association’s secretary-general.
The challenge is to show how national identities forged in blood have been transformed into a common identity through shared values and mutual economic interest.
“It won’t be easy to translate this concept in such a way that the relationship between diversity and unity comes to the fore,” historian Ute Frevert wrote in the weekly Die Zeit.
Gone are traditional periods such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution.
The “scientific scenario” repaints history with a broad brush into three ages of unification — the age of Christendom, the Enlightenment and post-war European integration — and two periods of division — the wars of religion and wars of ideology.
The non-profit association was founded in 1997 and has organised debates, conferences and temporary exhibitions since 1999 to test and refine its reinterpretation of the past.
Greater emphasis has been given as a result of these debates to the Greek and Roman cultural roots of Europe, and to the importance of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity in shaping southeastern Europe.
But the basic thesis remains that despite centuries of war and barbarism, Europe was twice unified, first through faith and the spread of Christianity with its monasteries and universities, then through the spread of liberal, secular humanism from the 18th century.
The first period of unity, to be illustrated by a giant stained-glass map of Christian Europe, was brought to an end by the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion that tore Europe asunder for 100 years from the mid-16th century.
The second period of unification spans the Enlightenment philosophers, the Industrial Revolution, the pioneers of science and the great universal exhibitions of the 19th century.
It ends abruptly with the descent into World War One and the rise of communism and fascism.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: This part of the historical narrative is more controversial, since the scenario minimises the historical fractures wrought by the French Revolution, Napoleon’s wars of conquest, and the colonial rivalries and conflicts among the European powers.
The museum will depict the 19th century wars of national unification as a common stage in European development rather than just a forging of national identity in the blood of fellow Europeans.
The most politicized part is post-war unification, which the organizers acknowledge is intended to showcase the achievements of European integration and highlight the lesson of history that a “happy end” cannot be taken for granted.
French and Dutch voters have just underlined that point, but Spaak is not yet ready to consign the constitution agreed by EU leaders in 2004 to history. Nor is she willing to give Euroscepticism a corner in the museum.
“Anti-Europeans get so much space in the media. It’s too much to ask that they should get a room in my museum,” she said.
Housed in a new wing of the European Parliament now under construction, the museum will feature a permanent exhibit without any expensive collection of paintings or artefacts, and temporary exhibitions on different historical themes.
The scientific committee, headed by Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian, is an international who’s who of eminent historians and museum directors who have worked on similar projects in Germany, France, Denmark and Israel.
Without art treasures, the organizers aim to tell the story of Europe through a mixture of high technology — a map room and a Union history timetable like an airport departure board — and giving visitors a sense of being actors in European history, for example in an interactive conference room.—Reuters
