Translated by: Rosa Mª Sanz - rosasanz[at]gmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
The end of the political borders among countries was a crucial step in the transformation of the European Economic Community to the current European Union. Since 1993, the free movement of people, as well as some goods were free to be traded beforehand, initiated the development of the social European Union. The real encounter among Europeans was promoted by the open opportunities to study, live and work in any of the member states. The legal residence in a member state, in spite of nationality, was enough to be granted the rights as European citizen of the Union.
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The concepts of nation and mother country are very recent within European history, which is more tribal than we like to acknowledge. These concepts emerged as a result of the attempted union of folks enemies because of power and territorial tensions among the high classes of the medieval age. The modern concept of state brought the centralization of power from the old fiefdoms, previously separated by wars and political dealings. More cohesive communities were created thanks to the promotion of natural or artificial identity features: e.g. to live on the banks of the same sea or adhere to the same religion. Ensuring cohesion towards the end, a beginning diffuse, granted the construction and enactment of concepts such as homeland and state, a mixture of reality and fantasies about the essence and destiny of a people, that the new public education was responsible to spread among the masses of new generations, as a historical and enduring truth. With all this historical baggage we now try to rebuild the concept of European citizenship, in times that might require a more comprehensive and global concept of citizenship.
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While the bases of the Treaty on European Union were still being discussed, neighbours from the former Yugoslavia who had respected each other for a long time started to harden their respective languages and behaviours, making understanding harder, and even worst, considering that some spoke a purer language and were better than those who didn’t. One night of terror, the new differences unleashed rivers of blood between neighbours who had been friends, almost brothers, having shared rivers of despair or good wine in the recent past.
However, hangovers last less long than it takes a wound to become a scar, and Yugoslavia once again became a land of blood, most probably because of the doings of politicians and unscrupulous economic potencies, taking advantage of the downfall of the soviet regime that had contained the egoist and romantic nationalism of times past.
The hopes of ending with the national hatred and finding union in diversity devised by treaties such as the one in Maastricht were tainted with the biggest war in European land since Second World War, a movement against integration and for the establishment of frontiers, new identity cards, passports, visas… In a time of dreams of states, previously in war, now in peace, in a European community of regions, in an until then (artificially?) united Yugoslavia, new nations arise, along with the current paradox of the proposal of Serbia as a member of the Union, whereas a sui generis independent Kosovo begins to form.
The main doubt some of the richer members had about the adherence of my country and others to the Union was that, due to our economic situation and poorer work conditions, hordes of people, especially the young ones, would migrate to their wealthier lands in the hopes of a better occupation that would let them become Europeans entitled to full economic rights.
Reality didn’t pay any attention to these ill tidings, not even in 1986 when Spain and Portugal got in the club, nor in 2004 when some of the countries of the old area of soviet influence did, nor in 2007 with the interested entry of Romania and Bulgaria, in spite of not meeting the required convergence criteria. The truth is that all the Spaniards who had needed to migrate had already done so, or would do it whether they belonged to the Union or not, just as the Polish had gone to the United Kingdom, the Romanians to my country or the Bulgarians to my city. They didn’t appear all of a sudden one cold night back in January 2007, but rather on the opposite have been among us for years now. Along these lines, the argument of a migratory Turkish invasion in case of its acceptance in the Union doesn’t make any sense, not only based on experience, but on the reality of the vast Turkish settlement that has been living in Germany for decades.
Once again, the attempt to reduce every individual to the total of their financial wealth proves to be false, pretending that our biggest aspirations are economic, and that nobody would ever hesitate to leave their family, friends and roots in search of a better material reward. It’s not something I say, nor something claimed by statistics, it is also the thought of researchers on the phenomenon of migration, who consider that an improvement of the economic standing (unless the original conditions wouldn’t permit the basic sustenance) is the least of the motivations for someone to leave their homeland, even temporarily, to move to a different place where they would not be recognized as an equal, not even as a tourist, but rather as a scrounger guest.
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Few months after the entry of Hungary to the Union, a referendum was made by popular initiative in relation to the Hungarians living out of what were the Kingdom’s limits before First World War and the Treaty of Trianon which brought the dismemberment of two thirds of the land that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the referendum it was to be decided whether the citizens from these past territories were to be given a double nationality or not, and be considered as full right Hungarians. The consultation resulted in a scarce and insufficient participation of the voters, putting paid to the ratification of the measure approved by that voting minority.
Some think that the Hungarians despise their poorer neighbours and that the idea of fighting for the territorial restoration of the great Hungarian Kingdom is promoted in the schools. I didn’t get that impression comparing that reality with the desires of certain political parties of my country and other countries, already old in its European modernity, where there isn’t any land to recover but romantic aspirations of uprooting, based on historical circumstances from the Middle Ages, previous to the formation of the states, to justify a separatist yearning, and affirming at the same time, and out of interest, their faithful adherence to a reality even further than that of the oppressing state, as the European Union is.
About the topic and result of the referendum some told me, with amazing pragmatism: <<we have better things to worry about>>. Maybe the fear of the price these brand new compatriots would cost to the public wealth meant more than the deep nationalist feeling the Hungarian usually show. I couldn’t help but think that, as it happened in my country, the future economic swelling could make them come back to those territorial demands, rightful or not, that now worried them much less than every day’s bread, arousing new tensions between the people of the often fragmented Central Europe.
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After some years of experiencing the European dream, I like to define Spain as a little Europe of hope, in spite of some exclusive ideologies that seem to prefer the Balkan way of coexistence to the integrating Mediterranean way, which, for better or worse, has kept us united in a common way of life that I won’t call Spanish, but Mediterranean and, more specifically, Iberian.
My pale skin and way of thinking would make me go unnoticed among Germans. How can I feel identified with the cliché of my sun-bathed and salt-kissed compatriots, surrounded by palm trees, bulls, flamenco dancers and olé? These reasons, even if it may seem the opposite, are absolutely compatible with my feeling Mediterranean, with my need of the sun still warming my bones in a cold but sunny winter afternoon, something that wouldn’t happen if I were living in Germany.
Far from the simplifying clichés, the Spanish region where I live doesn’t have a Mediterranean climate nor a beach, much to my despair, what doesn’t stop me from getting angry every time a bigger number of Europeans decide to adopt nightlife as leisure alternative whereas the ordinary Spaniards, becoming more European, go to bed earlier. I miss that Spain the tourists know and that one can only live by being one of them, the Spain of hours under the sun and the murmur of the Mediterranean waves that thrill me in any of its latitudes inside and outside of Spain. “Nací en el Mediterráneo”, -I was born in the Mediterranean, as the song by the songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, a fact that is part of my imaginary and allows me to identify myself more with a mare nostrum of territories than with a certain language that, with use, will become something very different from what it currently is.
In my imaginary, not spending my teenage years on the Mediterranean sands may have had its impact, but not such a deep trauma as that lived by many of those who were forced to migrate to faraway countries for reasons of force majeure, knowing the land where they should have grown just by the stories of their parents and the visits to relatives.
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There are more reasons to find things in common between us than differences. We are the only specie of humans in the planet, and that should be enough to be equal in spite of the differences language and ideas have made on us. We should try and learn from the increasingly more plausible fact that our own specie had been the one that annihilated the other existing human species in the planet in prehistoric times, and stop once and for all to try to finish with other ethnic groups time and again.
Ultimately, if I were forced to label myself, and proclaim a national or cultural identity, I would consider myself European and, feeling as such, sometimes I feel more Spanish than before, preferring Europe if it can offer me the chance to be what I want or wanted to be. This is the Utopia I believe in, the only one I would fight for and the only one I can actually see in a clear sky horizon.
One of the facts that annoyed me the most, of my time in a different country, was how little exotic I was, due to my distant resemblance to the Spanish cliché, something that made people doubt I even was one and made me consider stamping my identity card in my forehead to show it... Had I looked more like a Latin Lover, or to the common Spanish specimen of the tourist hordes invading the centre of Budapest, I would have had more chances, as a local guide recommended, to improve my Hungarian thanks to mundane love, which in the end always finds a way to open dialogue between different languages and cultures. After all, everything Spanish was big in those lands at the time.
I fell in that enticing temptation against being receptive to diversity, when contact with other cultures lead us to reaffirm and justify our own. I panicked and went to the other side. I, who had always been contrary to any political fiefdom, became a nationalist! I got irritated every time someone asked me if I had any Hungarian ascendant, because they weren’t joking, they were terribly serious about it! Looking for a Magyar connection in my genealogic tree was a bit too much for me. I even went as far as to ask a friend to send me some clothes that would make me look Spanish, and of course I got a Spanish football selection t-shirt, which I resignedly wore a few times with no apparent result, and wondered at how much I had changed.
My fanciful dreams of being an adoptive Spaniard, not fitting with the national stereotype, eventually led me to do things like those which I used to criticize about other young people abroad: when we Spaniards don’t stop talking Spanish, for example during European exchanges, showing not only our lack of foreign language knowledge, but our unkindness towards the others. I don’t blame us for these customs, after being isolated and pleased in a now recoiling reality of not being able to leave the country and seeing foreigners with curiosity and a critical eye. We do the exact opposite with the other españolitos when we visit other regions in the piel de toro (Translator’s note: bull’s skin, an epithet for the country of Spain) that is our vast territory. In those places, they have not only different customs, but also different languages.
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Nowadays, most of the people who consider themselves to be normal, would actually like to be important; few want to go unnoticed and very few can get to understand what it means to be different, which is why it wouldn’t matter if the advantages of diversity were repeated over a thousand times, that it doesn’t necessarily imply disunity as long as we all treat each other with curiosity and respect. Nevertheless this is something easier said than done. Most people don’t dare to be different, even if they claim to be because of the different cultural coordinates they say they hoard in their brains as a consequence of their education in multicultural societies.
That which makes you singular and exotic is promoted. However, if you are exotic because of your personal or cultural baggage and not as a pose, <<you’re doomed, friend>>; you can either assimilate yourself with the rest of the respectable society, or to give vent to your differences in internet forums or becoming a fanatical reactionist opposed to everything for which you have been educated for and accepted as dogma.
The pleiad of mediocre personalities that, especially during the twentieth century, has ruled the destinies of many human groups has made the middle class believe that anyone can reach the top for the mere fact of taking part in a reality show, saying some inspired gibberish or sucking up to the powerful.
Just by belonging to a particular sect, as in the past belonging to some social class or religious belief, bestows an added value by itself, regardless of your mediocre or aristocratic worthiness. This is especially true in the case of nationalism and patriotic feelings: being autochthonous is being superior!
Whereas some would like to be exotic, as an attractive trademark in the pursuit of certain goals, many others become what in Spain is called <<ser más papistas que el Papa>> (to be more papist than the Pope). Second and third generations, the sons and grandsons of emigrants, will transform their multicultural singularity, odd in past times, attractive in a best case scenario, in a constant theme to fight, becoming the most fervent nationalist of the land that gave shelter to their parents, and thus try and become one with the rest. They will accept the ways of the society where they were born, and forget their inherited tradition, or on the opposite believe that their condition of foreigners or sons of foreigners make them superior, trying to impose the most radical ideologies of their parents, using violence if necessary, especially the young ones, by the biased manipulation of all the energy and vehemence of this phase of life.
Fascist and racist organizations are silently arming and reorganizing themselves all throughout Europe thanks to the lust for power of some and an increasing number of unemployed, uninformed and disillusioned new generations. This is a breeding ground for the young to once again become cannon fodder in future wars, while some institutions and plenty of leaders look the other way.
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How many campaigns from the Council of Europe, with their “All Different – All Equal” from the years 1995 and 2006, are necessary to start considering diversity as fundamental? Europe is the road of all new and old habitants, with different customs but the same uncertainties.
When will we stop considering as local anecdotes some facts as the murder in 2002 of a populist politician, against the Islamisation of Europe, catholic and homosexual who could have become prime minister of the Netherlands?
How many young Europeans adhering to groups of real or illusory racism and xenophobia does it take to say enough is enough!? How much political force is necessary to placate the vandalism provoked by the impotence of the French by birth but not by right, the emigrant’s sons in the society of egalité?
How many visas does one need to be considered as a citizen and not as instrument of political and economic interests?
<<This mess is a consequence of that neglect>> says the castilian adage.