-
Christopher Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Cataluña
Belgium,
it's reported, is the only EU country permitted to offer asylum to
citizens of other member states. One wonders why. Anyway, as a result
Sr Puigdemont and his colleagues have been arrested and released,
pending consideration of their request for political asylum. Happily
for them, the process could stretch beyond the December elections.
And might well result in Sr P being returned to power as head of
another nationalist coalition, despite his living in exile. Stranger
things have happened at sea. From where I'm posting this blog, as it
happens.
Life
in Spain
In
the UK, it's reported today that at least some GPs will soon start
listening to their patients via smartphone videos. As for Spain, it's
reported here that: Spain
has an overall doctor shortage, and yet thousands of qualified medics
are leaving the country as they cannot get a job at home. So,
I guess
it's possible this expedient will be tabled in Spain when the
national Ministress of Health meets with regional health ministers
this week to discuss the shortage of GPs throughout the country. En
passant, now that it's being babysat by Madrid, Cataluña won't have
a representative there for the first time.
The UK:
Talking of healthcare, I won't bore you with the details but I do
have to say that, while everyone involved in my recent experience
with the NHS there was very pleasant, I was struck by examples of
inefficiency and waste of money. Of course, every government in 70
years has been well aware of this but none has yet found a remedy. OK, one
example:-
Me:
Why
are you taking my blood pressure when the admitting doctor took it 20
minutes ago?
Triage
Nurse: Oh, we use a different system to them.
The EU
and Cataluña:
How can Europe celebrate ex-colonial cultures but despise the Catalans?
It is incoherent and dangerous: See the article at the end of this post . .
The
USA: President Fart says the latest massacre
there is not a 'guns situation' but a 'mental health situation'. It's
not a crossbow, knife or poisoned dart situation either. More of a
'mental defective with remarkably easy access to guns' situation.
Which he surely knows but prefers to ignore.
Finally
. . . My Quit the
Plastic campaign .
. .
- Stop using soap in a plastic bottle. At least when I'm a guest . . . .
Today's
Cartoon:-
Talking of healthcare . . .
 |
"I can help but first you must admit you have a problem!"
|
THE ARTICLE
How can Europe celebrate ex-colonial cultures but despise the Catalans?
It is incoherent and dangerous: Janet Daly
There are two wildly contradictory conceptions of Europe that manage to
co-exist in current political fashion. The first, of which we hear
much, is of the continent’s quite recent incarnation as an
enlightened over-arching organisation: a liberal confederation of
member states which transcends the old evils of nationalism and
enmity, and actively repudiates its imperial past.
This is, of course, the official Brussels doctrine subscribed to by most
British Remainers. The New Europe is seen as the embodiment of a
progressive ideal.
Those who wish to declare independence from it, such as the British, or
from one of its member states – such as the Catalonians – are
throwbacks to a benighted (and dangerous) age in which quaint
loyalties to ancient national identities divided the continent.
The other, a minority but very influential, view is that Europe as a
historical entity remains a pernicious, oppressive cultural hegemony,
snuffing out interest and a proper degree of respect for all those
intellectual accomplishments cultivated by the former colonised races
which it still implicitly regards as inferior.
So, there it is: either Europe is an unmitigated force for good,
spreading tolerance and social progress across old boundaries. Or
else it is a vile nest of unrepentant elitists whose educational
institutions breed contempt for black and ethnic communities and
which must therefore be forcibly “de-colonised” to purge their
racist attitudes.
Bizarrely, these two views are very often held by the same people – or at
least the same sort of people.
So, pride in your historical identity, and the determination to
preserve it, is perfectly acceptable when claimed on behalf of
ex-colonial peoples, but it is unacceptable when it is asserted by
Europeans who believe that their traditional self-determination is
being trampled by the dominance of supra-national EU institutions (in
the case of Britain) or by the overweening government of an EU member
state (in the case of Catalonia).
As Spain was convulsed over its battle with the Catalan independence
forces, the Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy made a statement
which got so precisely to the heart of this that it is worth quoting
in full: “The thing that Catalans need protecting from is not what
they’re calling Spanish imperialism, but a minority who, in an
intolerant way, declare themselves the owners of Catalonia and
consider as exclusive a history, culture and feelings that are the
heritage of the community.”
That, indeed, is the question: who owns your culture and your history? If
you insist that you have a right to preserve it and to pass it on to
future generations intact, as you have known and practised it within
your borders, does that make you a nativist bigot or worse, a racial
purist?
There are some perverse consequences of this odd tendency to embrace two
mutually exclusive positions at the same time: it has been the
orthodoxy for some years in Left-liberal circles to advocate the
return of cultural artefacts to their country of origin instead of
holding them in “imperialist” European museums.
This argument seems to accept the “de-colonising” version of Europe as
a rapacious transgressor against the historical identities of other
peoples. But shouldn’t the believer in a cosmopolitan,
post-nationalist world be in favour of museums which honour all
cultures and allow comparative study of their works?
If you are a liberal internationalist, why favour a kind of cultural
ethnic cleansing in which everything has to be sent back to where it
started?
This is all very confusing.
That both of these ideas of Europe can be presented with equal force under
the banner of metropolitan liberalism is evidence of either moral
incoherence or profound intellectual dishonesty. Or maybe both –
since the latter serves the purposes of the former.
To attack British universities for teaching a Eurocentric curriculum –
a proposition which is, at least, being considered in serious
academic circles – should be an uncomfortable fit with the
reverence for Europe as the enlightened leader of a new world order
which is certainly the prevailing view in our universities.
Rejecting European domination is an automatic good if you are descended from
people who were once under its imperial rule but bad if you see
yourself as subject to its new kind of excessive power. In Barcelona,
the Europe Union can justify almost any degree of authoritarian
action (up to and including state violence) in shutting down a claim
of “nationalist” identity.
But when British academics are described as racist for concentrating
their teaching on the European corpus, such comments are treated with
respect rather than instantly repudiated by university authorities as
might well have been the case. (Note: in my 25 years in university
life and my continuing relationship with a Cambridge college to which
I am a regular visitor, I have never met a racist academic.
There is only one thread of consistency running through all this: the
perennial guilt and self-loathing which is Europe’s inescapable
burden from its 19th and 20th century past.
Nations which once hated one another must have peace, unity and cooperation
enforced upon them. But the peoples that they exploited are owed
endless contrition – even if it is largely meaningless.
This not a
political philosophy, it is a mass neurosis: an endless acting out of
futile amends and apology.
But ironically, the New Europe, for all
its idealised talk, is as arrogantly self-regarding as ever.
It may have renounced the old forms of imperialism but its
self-aggrandising spread to the East and its persistent overtures to
countries like Ukraine have arguably justified Russia’s revanchist
revival.
So lacking in self-awareness are the spokesmen for this incoherent,
illiberal mess that they are stumbling into a new wave of precisely
the nationalist resentment and anger that they dread.
There is only one thread of consistency running through all this: the perennial guilt and self-loathing which is Europe’s inescapable
Me: As I have always said, the EU must surely one day collapse under the weight of its internal incongruities.
No comments:
Post a Comment