WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

   | Matteo de Simone. (BOLOGNA). Brussels is a cloudy city. It is quite a pity it sums up all the European spirit, and in fact it does not. Brussels, after all, is a city with its own identity and nobody pretends that it has Madrid’s sun, Prague’s beer, Rome’s history, Berlin’s youth culture or Paris’s art. With its conflict between Flemish and Walloons and the hostility against English language, paradoxically strong immigration and integration problems — commonly supposed not to be “European” features — seems to be the most relevant “European” side of Brussels.
   However, once passed the X-ray machine in the European Parliament’s check-in, one should expect to enter a place, theoretically representing EU in the whole: no longer simply in Belgium, but in a transcendental entity called European Union, where each citizen should feel recognized in. Nevertheless, strolling around the contorted hyper-modern building of the parliament, one breathes quite only a Belgian, French and German atmosphere. No, I was wrong. One hears also some Italian speeches: from cleaning staff and waiters. Slavonic ones, is no question. Fortunately, not every country claims, as France, to use its own language, but empty translation booths naturally push these state to the other side of the linguistic barrier and, consequently, far from Institutions. So no wonder if E.U. is “underreported”, as Francis Wurtz, chairman of the European United Left, complains. Like Caroll’s Alice, we are moving inside the mirror and looking back at the same things from an inverted perspective: European countries seem to be as far from Brussels as Brussels is from them. “Let’s take Italy. They are very keen on talking just about themselves” said Helmut Weixler, a Green’s spokesman. “It’s hard to talk with them about Europe when not regarding Prodi and so.”

Are they all like in a spaceship,
an elite not really caring about citizens?

   Apparently, everybody seems to have a reason to criticise E.U.: more or less legitimate national issues — like vodka — are affecting both “well integrated” states as those who are still feeling in EU’s outskirts. Just the less informed ones, as Italy, (recalling the previous example) declares themselves to be “one of the most Europeistic country”, Lorenzo Consoli, president of the Association de Presse International, said. It does not matter from which side of the mirror we look at reality: distance goes in both directions.
   Obviously Brussels is European as far as many people from all around Europe are living and working here, as nation’s representatives, but would we really call “Europe” a small privileged group, running by taxi from airport to parliament? “They all are like inside a spaceship” objects Hajo Friedrich, correspondent for the FAZ, “an elite not really caring about citizens”; they are maybe European, from that Europe written in capital letters, the Europe of Institutions, but surely not Brusselian nor european, from the real one, still living outside the “spaceship”.