Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (151 page)

The association of the Russian language with Soviet occupation considerably restricted its appeal, even in countries like Czechoslovakia or Poland where linguistic contiguity made it accessible. Although citizens of the satellite states were obliged to study Russian, most people made little effort to master the language, much less speak it except when forced to do so.
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Within a few years of the fall of Communism it was already clear that one paradoxical effect of occupation by Germany and the Soviet Union had been to eradicate any sustained familiarity with their languages. In the lands that had for so long been trapped between Russia and Germany there was now only one foreign language that mattered. To be ‘European’ in eastern Europe after 1989, especially for the young, was to speak
English
.

For native German speakers in Austria, Switzerland or Germany itself, the steady provincializing of their language—to the point where even those whose own language derived closely from German, like the Dutch, no longer widely studied or understood it—was an accomplished fact and there was no point mourning the loss. In the course of the Nineties, major German firms like Siemens made a virtue of necessity and established English as their corporate working language. German politicians and business executives became notable for the ease with which they moved in anglophone circles.

The decline of French was another matter. As a language of commonplace daily use French had not played a significant role in Europe since the decline of the imperial aristocracies of the old regimes. Outside of France, only a few million Belgians, Luxemburgers and Swiss, together with pocket communities in the Italian Alps and the Spanish Pyrenees, used French as their native tongue—and many of them spoke it in dialect forms disparaged by the official guardians of the
Académie Française
. In strictly statistical terms, when compared to German—or Russian—French had long been on the European linguistic periphery.

But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been
the
language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites—and thus the
European
language
par excellence
. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French. Well into the middle years of the century, comparable assumptions were still widely made—if not quite so boldly articulated—in academies and embassies everywhere. The present author can vouch for both the necessity and the sufficiency of French as a medium of communication among students from Barcelona to Istanbul as recently as 1970.

Within thirty years all that had changed. By the year 2000, French had ceased to be a reliable medium of international communication even among élites. Only in the UK, Ireland and Romania was it the recommended choice for schoolchildren embarking on a first foreign language—everyone else learnt English. In some parts of former Habsburg Europe, French was no longer even the
second
foreign language offered in schools, having been displaced by German. ‘Francophonie’—the worldwide community of French speakers, most of them in former colonies—remained a linguistic player on the world stage; but the decline of French in its European home was beyond dispute and probably beyond retrieval as well.

Even at the European Commission in Brussels, where French had been the dominant official language in the Community’s early years and where native French speakers in the bureaucracy thus exercised a significant psychological and practical advantage, things had changed. It was not so much the accession of Britain itself that brought about the shift—the seconded civil servants from London were all fluent in French—as the arrival of Scandinavians, who were fluent in
English;
the expansion (thanks to German unification and the accession of Austria) of the German-speaking community, now shedding its post-war reticence; and the prospect of new members from the East. Despite the use of simultaneous translators (to cover the 420 possible language combinations of the 25-member Union), communication in one of the Union’s three core languages was indispensable for anyone wishing to exercise real influence on policy and its implementation. And French was now in the minority.

Unlike the Germans, however, the French authorities did not respond by switching to English in order to ensure their commercial and political effectiveness. Although more and more young French people studied English and traveled abroad in order to use it, the official position became decidedly defensive: no doubt in part because of the uncomfortable coincidence of the decline of French language usage with the diminution of the country’s international role—something the UK had been spared because Americans too spoke English.

The initial French response to intimations of linguistic diminution was to insist that others continue to speak their language: as President Georges Pompidou had put it early in the 1970s, ‘Should French ever cease to be the primary working language of Europe, then Europe itself would never be fully European’. However, it soon became clear that this was a lost cause and intellectuals and politicians opted instead for a siege mentality: if French were no longer spoken beyond the country’s borders, then at least it must have an exclusive monopoly within them. A petition signed in July 1992 by 250 prominent personalities—including the writers Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Jean Dutourd, Max Gallo and Philippe Sollers—demanded that the government require by law the exclusive use of French in conferences and meetings held on French soil, films made with French funding, etc. Otherwise, they warned, ‘les angloglottes’ will have us all speaking English ‘or rather, American’.

French governments of every political persuasion were all too happy to oblige, if only
pour le forme
. ‘A battle for French is indispensable’, declared the Socialist Minister Catherine Tasca. ‘In international organizations, in the sciences, and even on the walls of our cities’. Two years later a conservative culture minister, Jacques Toubon, took up the theme, rendering explicit what Tasca had left unstated: that the object of anxiety was not just the decline of French but also and above all the hegemony of
English
. It would be better if the French learned something else—
anything
else: ‘Why’, asked Toubon, ‘should our children learn an impoverished English—something they can anyway pick up at any age—when they should be acquiring a deeper appreciation of German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese or Russian?’

Toubon’s target—what he contemptuously dubbed the ‘mercantile English’ that was displacing French (‘the primary capital, the symbol of the dignity of the French people’)—was already moving out of reach even as he took aim. Intellectuals like Michel Serres might complain portentously that the streets of Paris during the Occupation had fewer names in German than they had today in English, but a younger generation reared on films, television shows, video games, internet sites and international pop music—and speaking a mobile French slang full of borrowed and adapted words and phrases—could not have cared less.

Legislation intended to oblige the French to speak French to one another was one thing—albeit honored largely in the breach. But the attempt to require foreign scholars, businessmen, think-tankers, lawyers, architects and everyone else to express themselves in French—or to understand it when spoken by others—anytime they gathered on French soil could only have one outcome: they would take their business and their ideas somewhere else. By the turn of the new century the truth had sunk in and most (though by no means all) French public figures and policy makers had resigned themselves to the harsh realities of twenty-first-century Europe. The new European élites, whoever they might be, did not and would not speak French: ‘Europe’ was no longer a French project.

In order to understand what sort of a place Europe was at the end of the second millennium it is tempting to trace, as we have done, its internal divisions and rifts and ruptures—echoing, unavoidably, the continent’s profoundly schismatic modern history and the incontrovertible variety of its overlapping communities, identities and histories. But Europeans’ sense of who they were and how they lived was shaped just as much by what bound them as by what divided them: and they were now bound together more closely than ever before.

The best illustration of the ‘ever-closer union’ into which Europeans had bundled themselves—or, more accurately, been bundled by their enlightened political leaders—was to be found in the ever-denser network of communications to which it gave rise. The infrastructure of intra-European transportation—bridges, tunnels, roads, trains and ferries—had expanded quite beyond recognition in the course of the last decades of the century. Europeans now had the fastest and (with the exception of the justly maligned British rail network) the safest system of railways in the world.

In a crowded continent whose relatively short distances favored ground transportation over air travel, railways were an uncontroversial object of sustained public investment. The same countries that had come together in Schengen now cooperated—with significant EU backing—to lay an extended network of improved high-speed tracks reaching from Madrid and Rome to Amsterdam and Hamburg, with plans for its further extension north into Scandinavia and eastwards through central Europe. Even in those regions and countries that might never be favored with TGV, ICE or ES trains
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, Europeans could now travel throughout their continent—not necessarily much faster than a century before but with far less impediment.

As in the nineteenth century, railway innovation in Europe came at the expense of those towns and districts not served by it, which risked losing markets and population and falling behind their more fortunate competitors. But now there was an extensive network of high-speed roads as well—and outside of the former Soviet Union, the southern Balkans and the poorest provinces of Poland and Romania, most Europeans now had access to a car. Together with hydrofoil ferries and deregulated airlines, these changes made it possible for people to live in one city, work in another and shop or play somewhere else—not always cheaply, but with unprecedented efficiency. It became quite common for young European families to contemplate living in Malmö (Sweden) and working in Copenhagen (Denmark), for example; or commuting from Freiburg (Germany) to Strasbourg (France) or even across the sea from London to Rotterdam; or from Bratislava (Slovakia) to Vienna (Austria), reviving a once-commonplace Habsburg-era link. A genuinely integrated Europe was emerging.

Increasingly mobile, Europeans now knew one another better than ever before. And they could travel and communicate on equal terms. But some Europeans remaineddecidedly more equal than others. Two and a half centuries after Voltaire drew the contrast between a Europe that ‘knows’ and a Europe that ‘waits to be known’, that distinction retained much of its force. Power, prosperity and institutions were all clustered into the continent’s far western corner. The moral geography of Europe—the Europe in Europeans’ heads—consisted of a core of ‘truly’ European states (some of them, like Sweden, geographically quite peripheral) whose constitutional, legal and cultural values were held up as the model for lesser, aspirant Europeans: seeking, as it were, to become truly themselves.
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Eastern Europeans, then, were expected to know about the West. When knowledge flowed in the opposite direction, however, it was not always in very flattering ways. It is not just that impoverished eastern and southern Europeans travelled north and west to sell their labour or their bodies. By the end of the century certain eastern European cities, having exhausted their appeal as rediscovered outposts of a lost central Europe, had begun to reposition themselves in a profitable niche market as cheap and tawdry vacation spots for down-market mass tourism from the West. Tallinn and Prague in particular established an unenviable reputation as the venue for British ‘stag flights’—low-cost package weekends for Englishmen seeking abundant alcohol and cheap sex.

Travel agents and tour organizers whose clientele would once have settled for Blackpool or (more recently) Benidorm now reported rapturous enthusiasm for the exotic treats on offer in the European east. But then the English, too, were peripheral in their way—which is why Europe remained for so many of them an exotic object. In 1991 the Sofia weekly
Kultura
asked Bulgarians to which foreign culture they felt closest: 18 percent answered ‘French’, 11 percent ‘German’ (and 15 percent ‘American’). But only 1.3 percent acknowledged feeling any closeness to ‘English culture’.

The undisputed
centre
of Europe, for all its post-unification woes, was still Germany: in population and output by far the largest state in the EU, it was the very kernel of ‘core Europe’, as every Chancellor from Adenauer to Schröder had always insisted it must be. Germany was also the only country that straddled the former divide. Thanks to unification, immigration and the arrival of the Federal government, Greater Berlin was now six times the area of Paris—a symbol of the relative standing of the Union’s two leading members. Germany dominated the European economy. It was the largest trading partner of most member-states of the EU. Two-thirds of the Union’s net income came from the Federal Republic alone. And despite being its primary paymasters—or maybe for that reason—Germans remained among the EU’s most committed citizens. German statesmen would periodicallypropose the creation of a ‘fast-track’ of states committed to a fully integrated federal Europe, only to retreat in undisguised frustration at their partners’ procrastination.

If Germany—to pursue the Voltairian image a little further—was the country that ‘knew’ Europe best, it was appropriate that at the beginning of the twenty-first century two other former imperial states should have been most insistently seeking to be ‘known’ by it. Like Germany, Russia and Turkey had once played an imperial role in European affairs. And many Russians and Turks had shared the uncomfortable fate of Europe’s ethnic German communities: displaced heirs of an autocratic power now reduced to resented and vulnerable minorities in someone else’s nation state, the tidal refuse of imperial retreat. In the late 1990s it was estimated that more than one hundred million Russians lived outside of Russia in the independent countries of eastern Europe.
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