Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait by John Western

Author:John Western [Western, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historical Geography
ISBN: 9781317159100
Google: DyApDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-13T16:15:31+00:00

PART 2

City of a Provisional Europe: Transnational Strasbourg?

“Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen.”

[We called for labor, and people came instead.]

(Max Frisch)

“One day an old lady in the tram glared at me and then said, ‘Go home.’ ‘I am home,’ I replied.”

(A French woman of immediate Algerian heritage, 9 May 2004)

Chapter 5

The EU’s Clever Children: Graduates of the Erasmus Program

We have just met some current leaders of the New Europe in the professional Eurocrats, nearly all of them of the generation of the Thirty Glorious Years. In this chapter we encounter their figurative children, twenty-two Strasbourg University students, all French nationals save one Pole. Sixteen of these had participated in the “Erasmus” program of EU-wide study abroad, and my motive for targeting them was to attempt to assess to what degree any “European” consciousness existed among these particular young persons. They are among the future leaders of France and Europe. They do possess an overall appreciation for the New Europe, an appreciation which however can be broken down into various facets, some of which elicit more enthusiasm than others. There is also a concern for Europe’s future, particularly an ambivalence about the future adherence of Turkey to the EU—the students are split down the middle on this issue. In that they in their cosmopolitan selves represent on the one hand the partial achievement of a New Europe, yet on the other hand not being sure what degree of cosmopolitanism is to be desired in it, they serve as a bridge between the two portions of this study. They are on the cusp of a move from the old, known Europe towards an unknowable future.

Most of the second portion of this book revolves around immigration. The reader is already aware that rich, Protestant-led, Rhineland Strasbourg has been experiencing transformation by immigration, from the Alsatian countryside and also from the rest of France. Now we are about to meet those whom I term “the invisible immigrants,” fellow-Europeans and nearly all fellow-Christians, persons who if they wish can with time meld totally into Strasbourg life. Then, however, came the darker, poorer, non-Christian folks, and when Strasburgers de souche talk of “immigration,” this is to whom they are referring: immigrants from the former French empire; then the Turks; and then people from just about everywhere.

First, however, the students, whose contribution to this entire narrative is a kind of segue. They represent the partial achievement of what the postwar pragmatic idealists called the Construction of Europe: a supranationalist one, but geographically restricted. This was meant to be how the job would look like when the Eurocrats had completed it: it was to be limited to the peoples of a world region termed Europe. But things didn’t turn out that way, and these young New Europeans eye a different Europe-in-the-making. This is one of transnationalism (at least in part), and its tincture is arguably global rather than regional. If in the nineteenth century Europe was everywhere in the world, now the world is everywhere in Europe—including in Strasbourg.

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