Europe's New Myth of Origins
Film review: The Spanish Apartmentby Paul Grant
L'Auberge Espagnole is light-hearted film of college students from all across Europe trying to share an apartment in Barcelona, Spain, while pursuing advanced degrees at the University. These students are members of Erasmus, a European study-abroad ("abroad" meaning within Europe) program, the purpose of which is to facilitate cultural exchange and encounters.
Erasmus takes its name from a renaissance intellectual who edited a new Greek edition of the Bible, which shattered conceptual frameworks surrounding divine revelation. The presence of an alternate version of scripture paved the way for vernacular Bible translations (as one disgruntled Catholic of the day grumbled, "Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched"). Erasmus was thus a proto-European: his vision of Europe was not of Roman Empire restored, but of a diversity of peoples, unified in their faith.
The students in L'Auberge Espagnole are living out a different dream,
at once a bigger and a smaller dream. This is more than a multinational co-op.
The students are becoming Europeans. They start the film as French, Danish,
Italian, Belgian, Spanish, German and English, and are gradually transforming
into a new people. They are growing in the riches of diverse human experience.
There are few more transforming moments in life than cross-cultural learning.
From eating breakfast, to telling jokes, to making friends, and pursuing the
sacred, cross-cultural life hones one's vision, challenges one's assumptions,
and generally spawns creativity.
Europe is integrating politically and economically. The experiment that started
as a device to forever handicap the Germans from warfare has grown vastly bigger
and deeper. A new people are being imagined into existence. And a new national
myth is needed to accommodate this house of cards, lest it disintegrate again.
In other words, economic integration will only last unless it is matched by
cultural transformation.
Official pronouncements by the European Union to the contrary, a "United States of Europe" is indeed at the back of everyone's mind. Most Europeans do not wish to build such an animal - preferring instead a model of tight financial and infrastructural integration combined with cultural preservation. Most disagreements in Brussels find their roots in varying understandings of this cultural patrimony.
A character in Oscar Wilde's "A Portrait of Dorian Gray" was asked, "What are you?" and gives an obnoxious reply: "To define is to limit." This much is true: to define is to limit. The people of Europe are currently struggling over the definition - and thus the limits - of their Union. "What is Europe?" "Who are Europeans?" These questions are being debated at all levels of European society. After all, "Where are we going?" cannot be answered without a workable understanding of "we".
The European Union is a project of integration and unification built upon a myth of history. By "myth" I do not mean a false historical vision, but a guiding historical understanding whose truth is not necessary. The European experience is as varied as any: Sweden, Hungary and France alone represent stunning diversity. But the creation of a national myth of origins allows one to develop a continent-wide identity.
Possible myths for Europe's origins include: Greco-Roman heritage; Christian roots; recovery from the ashes of war; the age of Enlightenment and more. All these myths are articles of faith, when contrasted with the more accurate historical outline of a divided and divisive Europe. They also define - and thus limit - the future of Europe. Reference to a Christian legacy, for instance, can concievably define Muslim Turkey as non-Europe. Similarly, emphasis on Greco-Roman heritage becomes a little silly when Finland and Estonia are included in the Union, but not Libya.
The fact of the matter is, the more one looks at history, the harder time one has defining a common European myth. But a myth must absolutely be devised, in the reckoning of euro-visionaries, lest we go back to the bad old days.
L'Auberge Espagnole represents a snapshot in time, heralding the coming-of-age of a generation of adults shaped more by European integration (the Berlin Wall fell when they were in elementary school) than by the Cold War. They are being groomed to run Europe after the current generation retires. Their ownership of Euro-mythology is thus of tantamount importance, like any cultural traditions.
But the Euro-mythology is as shallow as oil floating on top of a sea of water: it goes only as deep as debauchery, anhistorical nihilism and negative definition. The highlight of comradery among the students is a night of drunken carousing, and a cover-up scheme hiding one student's promiscuity.
The students' other unifying experience is contempt for an American tourist, who is depicted in the usual characatures. This is negative definition (the students' disunity is painted-over by reference to a greater disuniting factor: an obnoxious American), and is an extremely lousy way to build a new civilization.
The great unspoken in this story is history. The students live in a Europe of a perpetual "now", neither coming from anywhere nor going anywhere. The future is terrifying to the students because it symbolizes lives of labor and finance and pension-planning and meaningless toil for a corporation. Such a malaise is not remarkable in itself. It's been seen in Europe for over a century, occasionally splashing over to the New World (for example, in the punk rock invasion of the seventies).
What is significant in L'Auberge Espagnole is not the absence of a future, but the absence of a history. In a film about European integration, only one historical moment appears. A professor of economics refuses to lecture in Castillian Spanish, to the frustration of the pan-European students who don't care to learn the Catalan of Barcelona. This professor is thus reliving the Spanish dictatorship of Franco, who oppressed the Catalan tongue. An opportunity for cultural enrichment is thus squandered. The professor looks decidedly old-world, and the students look hypocritical.
Furthermore, no discussion is made of WWII, or of the delicate process of European political integration culminating in the EU. The Cold War is absent, as is the outside world (excepting the American tourist and an African immigrant). The EU itself is only a shadow figure, there in the background but stuffy and inconsequential for real life.
The students in L'Auberge Espagnole are atoms floating through space. The message of the film is "We don't know what European integration is, or why it's happening, but it's happening nonetheless." This hopelessness may be more intellectually honest than other dominant myths of the day, such as American security or China rising. But it is hopelessness masked in negative nationalism.
Europe is a tremendous continent, filled with brilliant people, colorful culture and a great and honorable legacy of faith. May we pray for Christ to redeem the future and the memory of this place. With the expansion of the Union to 25 nations, it may well be morning in Europe.
discuss
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