EU: A laissez-faire approach to culture by EU leaders has its dangers, writes Enda O'Doherty
Writing to David Hume in 1768, Denis Diderot congratulated the Scots philosopher on being, like himself, not a man who could be tied down to any nationality but rather "a citizen of the great city of the world".
Noble sentiments, then and now. Yet in spite of globalisation in business and the growing importance of a vast number of multinational bodies, the nation state is still largely the prism through which the ordinary European sees and understands the world. The sophisticated cosmopolitanism espoused by the most enlightened spirits of the 18th century certainly still exists, but it is sparsely distributed outside the educated, cultured and well paid elites, the kind of people, in the words of the historian Anthony Pagden, "who sit at the front in aeroplanes". For the ordinary European Joe, Giuseppe or Josefa those who live on the other side of the mountains are still foreigners, at best essentially different from us, at worst a threat to our interests and our sovereignty.
With the European train apparently stalled after last year's referendum failures in France and Holland, the Austrian presidency invited some of the union's leading political and cultural figures to a conference at the weekend to explore possible ways forward and to muse on European identity, values and culture. And since the presidency coincided with the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, it was decided to hold the event in Salzburg, his native city, thus providing both speakers and attendant journalists with a raft of convenient metaphors of melody, harmony and concord, or alternatively dissonance, din and wrong notes.
Regrettably, when Eurocrats speak of culture one is almost always immediately aware of their unease and discomfort. Certainly they know it is a good thing, but they also seem to be unsure of what it is or what it is for. Normally it seems to be understood as a synonym for "the arts", that is to say a recreation or ornament, the icing on the cake of the bourgeois good life. So we are treated to windy perorations about "the Europe of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe" , though these icons would seem to have little to contribute to our current debates on social Europe versus dynamic Europe, deepening versus widening, idealism versus pragmatism.
If culture is not the arts then what is it? We could start with what it is not. It is not a brand. It is not about prestige events, marketing or "showcasing". It is not Mozart the wunderkind, the boy genius who composed effortlessly and gave us Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and that lovely tune from Elvira Madigan. That is, it is not kitsch, though we should not be too sniffy about the Austrians, being well capable of working the same shoddy alchemy with our own cultural tradition - it is ironic that Mozart and Joyce, two artists who were hopeless with money, should latterly have filled the pockets of so many hard-nosed philistines.
Culture is, as its Latin root suggests, about growth and change and typically emerges through the intersection of innovation and tradition. But rather than attempting to define, which is to say narrow, our understanding of what it is, it is surely better to consider the many things it can be and the many forms it can take: national culture, popular culture, folk culture, high culture, low culture and, yes, European culture, a reservoir of "the best which has been thought and said" in the history of European creativity, accessible, with some effort, to us all.
A laissez-faire approach to culture by our European leaders also has its dangers, for there is another culture which is increasingly dominant, particularly in the English-speaking world but not only there, the culture, or anti-culture, of Mr Murdoch and his ilk, which, as the worst that can be thought or said, is virtually the antithesis of Malcolm Arnold's definition cited above.
The custodians of the European project may feel that in this period of crisis and pessimism there are political as well as spiritual benefits to be derived from promoting an appreciation of the richness and complexity of the cultural heritage of our 25 nations. They may also have noticed that the proprietors and managers of the popular press, with their increasingly uniform menu of drivel and spite, are unfriendly to almost all of Europe's political goals and purposes. If so, it is indeed time for them to promote European culture, and not just as decoration.