I’ve been boning up on my revolutionary history lately with a great account of the wildest European year of the nineteenth century: 1848.

There were attempted revolutions nearly everywhere in Europe, from France to Romania. It was the year of the Communist Manifesto. It was the most important year in the abolition of serfdom.
And yet, most of the revolutions failed, with for the most part, after a “Springtime of Peoples” and riotous summers, the monarchs holding on to power and ultimately prevailing.

Author Peter Rapport does a really good job of holding the myriad simultaneous uprisings together in one unified narration. At first glance, the Parisian events have nothing to do with the Prussian war in Denmark, or the Neopolitan supression of Sicilian organized crime, or the Romanian peasant revolt against Hungarian landlords. But Rapport pulls it off.

Structuring the story in seasons—the Red Summer, the Counter-Revolutionary Autumn, etc.—Rapport can dart between hotspots in such a way that he can show commonalities across the continent, while returning to the same subplots and characters lets him go deeper in the particular places. It works.

Rapport expresses sadness that democracy by and large failed in 1848, a victim of popular (and justified) fears the revolutions would go too far (meaning Communist). Because although most of 1848’s revolutionaries were aware of simultaneous events around Europe, they were in the first instance local affairs. The common engine of revolution was consciousness-raising of local identities against distant and absolute rulers, with the exception of France—where a republic was replaced with a dictatorship.

It was this local consciousness, the Springtime of Peoples, that was certainly the most ominous development, as the communists at this point were bumbling idiots. But human flourishing was envisioned in ethnic terms, and the bloody wars and genocides of Europe’s awful 20th century are present here. Rapport never lets the spectre of genocide slip from view.

The president of Estonia spoke recently at Turku University in Finland, on the issue of geography and identity. Drawing on the re-understanding of nationhood that has emerged in the last twenty years, which focuses on the social construction of nationhood—and, accordingly, its imaginary existence—Toomas Hendrik Ilves suggests the hardly controversial solution that “we should consider ourselves Europeans.”

Since European in this line of thinking is innocent as a lamb and incapable of hurting its neighbors around the world, he’s really saying “let us be citizens of the world.”

It’s been said endlessly, but Ilves adds a twist: regional geography. The Baltics, to which three countries he adds a fourth—that of his audience, Finland—have been subjects of various empires and foreign rulers for the last millennium, and have accordingly an important contribution to bring to the discussion of European identity: the Baltic Sea as a mare nostrum, as a European lake:

Today we can discern or imagine several competing or even co-existing concepts and theories regarding our region. The traditional view (if I can use that term for something with such a short history) distinguishes between the Nordic and Baltic countries, a distinction that itself is barely 70 years old. Another sees Balto-scandia as single space, as I would argue it was before the arrival of imperial rule from East and West. We have a northern dimension in the European Union and we will see under the Swedish presidency in the second half of this year a Baltic Sea Strategy that will recognize the Baltic Sea littoral as what it fundamentally and by and large is: an EU lake, a mare nostrum.

The very term mare nostrum ("our sea"), which describes the Roman view of the Mediterranean as a lake of Roman imperial dominion, shows how transitory our regional mental geography can be. Today, discussions of Northern Africa as a home of European civilisation would strike us as odd. Yet what would European civilisation be without St Augustine's De Civitate Dei? St Augustine was born and lived and did his seminal work in what today is Algeria. Yet today, in the European Union, we have something called the Barcelona Process, which is supposed to bring Northern Africa – the Southern Littoral of the Roman's mare nostrum – closer to the European Union. But also not too much closer, for today, the region is considered to be non-European. Yet St Augustine of Hippo lies at the core of what we consider Europe to be.

So, too, during the Cold War mental geography underwent a dramatic shift. In his classic essay from the early 1980s, "The Idea of Central Europe", Milan Kundera expressed his exasperation that in the post-war era, Vienna was considered a bastion and reigning capital of western civilisation, while Prague, the home of Franz Kafka and long-time home of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, two hundred kilometres to the West of Vienna, had quickly become a symbol of the grey and listless totalitarian East. Just as happened to Estonia, to Poland, to Hungary, countries once a part of European civilisation that found themselves in a matter of just a few years, thrust into an altogether different civilisation, as so brilliantly described by Nobel prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz in his book The Captive Mind.

More Germans moved overseas last year than repatriated. This reports a Swiss newspaper.
In several 19th Century waves, hundreds of thousands of Germans left their homes for better lives in other countries, especially in North and South America and Australia and, after the German Imperial expansion into Africa, into today’s Tanzania.

It has been argued that part of the motive for obtaining colonies in the first place—never really part of German tradition—was a felt need to retain emigrants within the internal economy of the German empire.

From the vantage of today’s wealthy Germany, the economic engine of Europe, it’s hard to remember the brutal poverty in 19th century Germany, not entirely unlike that in today’s Africa. Germans were starving to death.

That’s why the very news of German emigration is eye-popping. The article doesn’t explain who these people are or why they’re moving. Without knowing better I’d guess a high number would be retirees moving to Italy or Spain, now part of Schengen’s borderless Europe. I’ve heard tell of German communities in Goa, India, serviced by German doctors and dentists.

Germans have a long-established culture of roaming and distance tourism; they gave us the word Wanderlust, after all. Still, it’s remarkable when a people loses interest in living at home.

Writing in Mittelweg (in German), German Sociologist Theresa Wobbe takes a look at an important change in the process of European integration: gone are the days in which poorer members of the European Union and its predecessors were built into equal participants. The philosophy was that a continent of highly developed nations would serve everyone on the continent, so the rich countries taxed themselves for the purpose of building up the poor countries.

And it’s worked, most notably in countries on Europe’s geographical periphery, like Ireland, Latvia, and Portugal. Economically backward countries are now able to stand on their own two feet.

But a subtle change in values is emerging, Wobbe says; perhaps it’s a consequence of the success of the policies: we’re no longer talking about building a community of nations; we’re now talking about building a European society.

The difference is a lowering of national and regional identities in favor of creating a new sense of European –ness. The trick is that this is not merely nationalism at a higher scale: the purpose is to create a bigger internal market. That is, rather than building up (relatively poor) Slovakia so that the now (relatively) rich Slovakia may help everyone else prosper, we’re now talking about turning Slovaks into better consumers of the European market.

The key here is that the new, supranational scale of Europe/European Union no longer has as a goal a guarantee of continent-wide political access to a continent-wide citizenship; rather: it’s about continent-wide equality of economic opportunity.

If that’s the case, if Wobbe is right, what we’re seeing here is a new form of society-building, one in which identities and loyalties are entirely stripped of place—of geographical belonging. Slovaks aren’t wished to be the best Slovaks possible; rather Slovaks are wished to be just as economically productive as anyone else.

I was listening to an interview on the economy on a Swiss radio podcast and heard a comment that really smacked in the gut:

Swiss employment law makes layoffs easier than in EU nations; not surprisingly, layoffs are on the rise there. In this interview, the moderator asked for a definition of "mass layoffs", asking the interviewee, "is this more than an American problem"?

ugh.

Quite coincidentally, I’ve come upon two different social twists on Adolf Hitler’s legacy, each of which is quite fascinating in its own right, but amazing when taken together.

And it really is coincidence: Hitler’s Beneficiaries, by Götz Ali—which I’ll review tomorrow—came to me by accident. I’d ordered from the library another book by the same scholar, and the wrong one came, which I read anyway. And Children of a Vanished World, a collection of photographs by Roman Vishniac, was handed to me on vacation by my mother, who in turn (I believe) had found it on some giveaway table.

The former discusses the German poverty ended by Hitler (via the Nazi welfare state); the latter the Eastern European Jewish poverty he murdered.

Children of a Vanished World is a collection of several dozen photographs of Jewish children from Poland to the Ukraine, in the late 1930s. The pictures are accompanied by Yiddish playground songs and their English translations.

The Dove

The dove flew
Over all the world
And saw a lovely land
But the land was locked
And the key was broken
One, two, three
Out you go.

Roman Vishniac was brought into the region 1935 by a Jewish charity, who was already worried about the future of the communities with the saber-rattling coming from Germany. And it was just in time: the negatives had to be smuggled out of the country, and starting in 1939, Nazis overran Eastern Europe, and would later initiate a genocide of these communities—hence this Vanished World.

The history is not new to me. What really sticks in the throat here is the quiet, and somewhat self-contained poverty of these communities. These were hardly the international conspirator bogeymen obsessed over by the Nazis and today’s anti-Semites.

The haunting question, and one pages through this book is: which of these children survived?

Again, these were impoverished communities. It’s a recurring human tendency to try to eliminate poverty by getting rid of the poor (or at least getting them out of sight), and the whole story makes me rethink the holocaust. Why were rank-and-file Germans willing to participate in this mass-murder? In part, people have argued over and over again, because of the dehumanizing anti-Jewish propaganda bubbling out of Nazi headquarters, depicting Jews as rats and similar.

I am certain that’s part of the truth. But what about the fact that the Jews they encountered in Eastern Europe were hungry, with shabby clothes and broken teeth? It’s easier to be hard toward the homeless—we all know that. So—and this is the question I’m left with—was Jewish poverty a part of the holocaust motivation?

Photo: credit the International Center for Photography.

Berliners recently held a referendum on making religious education compulsory in public schools, as opposed to the “ethics” classes currently required.

The referendum failed. Berliners want to maintain their unique separation of church and school, shared in Germany only by one other state, Bremen.

That much is less notable to me, who attended mandatory religion classes in high school in Switzerland (and found the classes ecumenical to the point where they might as well be secular ethics—we talked mostly about pollution), than the demographics of the vote: it broke down neatly along lines of the old Berlin Wall.

Those from the old communist side voted overwhelmingly against religious instruction, while those living in the West leaned in favor. In the east, people had grown up taking socialist civics classes, and preferred against bringing the churches into the mix.

Does that mean the East Berliners want less religion? Probably not. As I’ve recently realized, the religious life in Communist East Germany was far from withering; there was, in fact, a vigorous church with youth movements, continually brushing up against the limits of state tolerance; East German Protestant churches, I’ve been told, were much more vital than those of other protestants in communist Europe.

It’s as if Rodney King had been beaten by Black Panthers inside the LAPD: a change in the perpetrator’s identity changes everything about our understanding of the incident.

It was forty-two years ago today, on June second 1967, in West Berlin. Unarmed, unthreatening literature student Benno Ohnesorg was participating in his first protest (against the Iranian Shah’s visit), and was shot dead by a West Berlin cop named Karl-Heinz Kurras.

Kurras was found innocent in court, but the case galvanized student protest in West Germany. An entire generation, born post-war and raised in the shadows of the Iron Curtain, suddenly came to view their own government as fascist and bad.

Last week, forty years later, archivists going through the files of the East German secret police, discovered that Kurras was a spy.

While further research has failed to demonstrate that he was acting on orders, the symbolism of the story is incredibly troubling. Ohnesorg has been canonized (to the right: see this monument to him, image from Wikipedia) by the left as an innocent victim (that much is certain, in any case) of an irreparably brutal government.

In the short run, the late sixties and seventies, the murder was fuel for significant protest (including leftist terror) and wide-ranging soul-searching in the West, to the point that Germany went on the path to becoming the popularly left-leaning place it is today, with a gut-level distrust of Western powers.

Meanwhile, the story begs the question of memory: for those for whom Ohnesorg's death was a cornerstone to much of their values and moral decisions for forty-two years. Now what?

Muslims in Europe are less happy, more likely to support their government, and more likely to have significant relations with people of other faiths—than their non-Muslim countrymen and –women.

This according to a new study released by Gallup, drawing on research previously done during their global survey of Muslims.

What’s really interesting to me, navel-gazing American that I am, is that when respondents from the United States and Canada were included for comparison, North Americans came off as far more likely than their European counterparts to agree that they’ve learned something from people of another faith in the last year.

That part made me proud, I must say. Over the 20-plus years I’ve been watching Europe, this may be the first time I’ve seen pollsters add a challenging question (that of learning from someone in the last year) to the usual, bland, tolerance questions, which always strike me as condescending.

Upon the conclusion of Big Meetings for Big Bureaucrats in Leuven, Belgium last week, where the Bologna Process was to be pushed along, I was reading the GlobalHigherEd blog for a response.

The Bologna Process is, basically, the alignment of higher education standards in 46 mostly-European countries; the idea is to create a European interior market for university degrees. The subtext, always lingering, is the apparent global success of US-American universities, relative to European ones.

Writing in GlobalHigherEd, Peter Jones (University of Bristol, UK) comments on the lack of legitimacy to the student delegation at Leuven, claiming the European Students Union (ESU) to have a breathtaking "acquiescence with the Bologna scripts," as evidenced by a lack of criticism of the process.

The ESU would not be the first representative body to be taken up by bureaucratic and careerist agendas and seduced by proximity to forums of power and influence.

But to the meat here: Jones then offers some suggestions for rallying points for opposition to Bologna, wishing the ESU would voice these concerns. First pointing out that the ESU views mobility (meaning the ability to transfer between universities within the entire system) “as an unalloyed good”, he quotes from their position paper:

[Mobility’s] benefits for students, academics, institutions and society as a whole are undisputed. Xenophobia exists and becomes especially evident in the event of an economic crisis such as the one we are currently facing. Mobility will require openness and will contribute to a more tolerant European society…

Jones then proposes his main objection:

In fact of course mobility is a far more problematic issue than this. The ESU does recognise the dangers of the commodification of higher education, the promotion of brain drain and the creation of a higher education market but seems to see these as somehow side-effects rather than of the essence of the Bologna Process. The ESU both opposes making a market out of higher education and actively calls for the process which is contributing to it to be extended and implemented.

Never mind the disingenuousness of a researcher at a British University—beneficiaries of brain drain if there ever were any—Jones’ critique is deep and important. It’s basically the question of whether good local education might be squelched in the effort to be global.

Expanding further, this seems to be the same question of whether local or transnational is more capable of germinating vision.