BRUSSELS: The day Europe dies, according to the Brussels theatre director Thomas Bellinck, will be in 2018. Mired in the “Great Recession”, with the countries of southern Europe traumatised by a wave of “crisis suicides” and neo-fascism, separatism and nationalism on the rise in many countries, Project Europe will collapse, he says.
This is the thesis Bellinck has created for House of European History in Exile, an attempt to document the EU’s current woes by constructing a fake museum of the future to examine what went wrong. Bellinck opened the museum on Thursday — Europe Day, when the great and the good of the EU pronounce gravely on the challenges and achievements of European unity.
In Bellinck’s vision, the great exercise in compromise and the pooling of national powers has been the prevailing dynamic since the second world war.
But collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, Europe will return to type — a continent of feuding, scapegoating nation-states with new disputes along the same old fault lines. The EU, it transpires, has been an interbellum.
Bellinck unveiled House of European History in Exile in a disused former boarding school a 10-minute stroll from EU headquarters in Brussels. “It might seem very dystopian,” said Bellinck. “I actually think it’s very optimistic. I really believe in Project Europe. And this is definitely not Eurosceptic.”
Spread over three floors, the museum is all doom and gloom. That is not the director’s intention, but nor does he want to be associated with a work of euro-agitprop. You learn that by the end, 80 per cent of rules, regulations and laws in the union were made in Brussels, the body of EU law taking up 311,000 pages, double that of 2005, and weighing 1.5 tonnes.
There’s a plastic leek and a tomato informing you of the red fruit’s required diameter and the relative scale of white to green on the vegetable, plus a windscreen wiper and instructions on how fast Eurocrats have allowed it to swish.
The museum also features a mock-up of the EU’s 2012 Nobel peace prize, which appears to sum up an era in Europe “when war seemed really impossible”, albeit only if you were not from the Balkans.
There are the bits on the Berlin Wall showing Checkpoint Charlie that appear more of an advert for McDonald’s. There are complicated charts and graphs showing how EU institutions operate and decide things.
Bellinck admitted the exhibition was fiction, or maybe faction. “But there’s a very fine line between what’s credible and not,” he said. “You have to consider all the possibilities of how it could go wrong. I think we’re at a turning point, definitely.”
By arrangement with the Guardian
