We live in a world of constructed realities—theatrical acts of consensus where most of us agree that the suspension of disbelief in these constructs leads us from chaos to some tangible reality of order. However not everybody wants to engage in this level of group-think, and it’s the relative scale of this otherness that maintains or threatens the fragility of our functional pantomimes.
Right now the balance is shifting and we are living in a world of slippages. With alarming frequency and intensity, so many of the ‘stable’ points of our globalised world are revealing their inherent flaw and instabilities. We are starting to see an escalating withdrawal of consensus about the thought-systems that have maintained a steadying grip on our societies. Our individual senses of identity have had to rapidly expand and coalesce to survive the forces of modernity, threatening many with the prospect of anonymity and encouraging the re-emergence of an old, small-scale tribalism as a defensive reflex. Now, in this new, rapidly fragmenting environment, when all systems seem to be in a state of flux, it is very difficult to find an anchor point for any examination.
Within all this though, there is one terrarium-like, albeit vast socio-political experiment that has been the testing ground for so much of what we think of as civil society in a modern world—Europe. The European Union was initially conceived out of a survival reflex, but over time, what started off in 1951 as little more than a treaty over the trade in coal and steel, became a much more deliberate, ambitious and unprecedented exercise in finding new mechanisms for social cohesion and peaceful coexistence.
Coal and steel were never sexy selling points for the idea of regional unity, but they did give two of the most powerful regional rivals, France and Germany, reasons to talk. This stabilising core became the scaffold for a more multi-dimensional structure to be built around the languages and conversations of shared interests and needs—it ushered in a new era where the concept of the common good became more appealing than the old dialogues of difference. Above all else, in the aftermath of two catastrophic wars that had left so much of Europe in ruins, the need for new paradigms became unarguable. So, for a generation or so, belief in the powers and benefits of a unified Europe produced unparalleled triumphs of collaboration and mobility. Ideas, products and people crossed cultural boundaries in ways that were previously unimaginable, a process that seemed to change the very substance of Europe. The divided history seemed to be forever consigned to the past.
But while Europe was busy designing and maintaining aspects of its multi-dimensionality, there were other global forces at work. Europe was never completely in control of its destiny, and when the region found itself at the mercy of more global influences—corrupted money markets, foreign political instabilities and the tidal forces of multitudes escaping violence and vastly different ideological thinking—this picture of self-determination started to be questioned. On so many fronts and in so many different corners of the world, the apparent certainties of our social fabric are delaminating. The glues that were meant to be so modern and so progressive are failing not only the test of time, but also the test of human tolerances. All of a sudden, the promises of the architects of European Union seemed to have transformed from the idyllic idea of the ‘common good’ to a far more realistic incarnation—a ‘common fate’.
This philosophy of the common good was something that many of us grew up with—made evident in things like universal public health, public education, public housing, public broadcasting and the concept of a minimum wage. They are ideas that have their origins in the earliest days of the industrial revolution, as many people and organisations attempted to buttress the poor and powerless in society against the insatiable ravages of industrial expansion. The belief was that the survival of civil society depended there being minimum standards for society. It was the idea that, by elevating everyone, you elevate yourself. The idea made perfect sense for most people throughout the 20th Century, and it was out of this thinking that many layers of European Union were conceived, in order to assure people that they were included in the project.
However, over the past thirty years, something has changed—society has changed. These notions of a ‘common good’ have blurred into the something more resembling a ‘common wealth’ or a ‘common fortune’, with all the reductive linguistic implications that these philosophies are simply about material benefits and personal gain. Any thoughts of interdependency—the idea that we have some active role and responsibility for these social outcomes—has been lost. What appears to have happened is that the old social model has become commodified, the social transactions of mutual rights and responsibilities have been subsumed into a purely mercantile world. Active citizens have become much more passive customers, believing that their only responsibility to the social organism is to have sufficient balance in their bank accounts to pay for their online purchases.
In The Identity Papers, I’m investigating the forces that seem to have altered these social contracts. There are few places where these social contracts have more impact than in Europe, which seems to have been built on one set of assumptions about social values. However, as I travel around Europe there seems to be no universally held concept of the ‘common good’. If anything, people interpret this as a pejorative—some reference to social welfare. Instead of any apprehension of a collective and two-way social ecology, European attention has rapidly turned inward, as people fear disenfranchisement after the global economic meltdown. None of this is helped by the perception that fortress Europe is being overrun by the misfortunes of myriad peoples who are seen as not entitled to the region’s dwindling fortunes. Out of this comes a deep fear that European Union spells doom, as previous positive expectations transform into a sense that a common fate awaits … and that it can’t be good.