The first time I made a concerted effort to really get the idea of Europe into focus, I was working on a radio documentary series in 2010/11 called The Art of Being Europe [1]. The producer Lyn Gallacher and I covered a lot of ground travelling the Continent, trying to evaluate the fate of ‘culture’ in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. What we were also trying to do was both more basic and yet far more complex—we were trying to understand what Europe is at its most fundamental level. It’s a rabbit hole question that in fact delivers up many Europes, so the question remained hanging somewhat.
The next time I had to engage with questions of a European definition was the following year, when I was the recipient of the German Government’s Award for Journalism in 2012. This enabled me to drill down into a more reduced sample set of identities as I travelled and gathered material for a 3-part radio series called Who Is Germany? [2]. Even there, the idea of a single thing called Germany simply fragments into many parts.
However, I did come up with what seemed to be an apt label when I innocently spoke of Europe as still exceedingly tribal. I quickly discovered that this was a serious faux pas, especially if you use the T word in the heart of European homogeneity—Brussels. In fact, everyone seems to have problem with the idea of tribalism when applied to nations within the developed world. The word has the quality of a pejorative, as it drags around the uncomfortable baggage of centuries of Western diminishment of supposedly ‘lesser’ peoples through colonial conquest. Post-Enlightenment Europe doesn’t like the term being directed back at itself, but I’m at a loss to find a more adequate shorthand for the fractious sub-strata under the collective European society.
Anthropologists and sociologists also try to avoid using the word tribal in the context of the West. But try as I might, I can’t seem to pin down whether, or not, the word is discredited in academic circles. In fact, I’ve found more evidence of a begrudging use of the term, usually attended by expansive qualifiers.
Regardless of all that, how else can you describe a region that has only enjoyed truly peaceful togetherness for only a matter of decades? Until the end of the Cold War, Europe had been the site of more continuous and convulsive shape-changing than almost any other part of the planet. Travel the length and breadth of Europe and you will encounter difference across virtually every river and mountain range. The Nation State was an attempt to wallpaper over myriad regional cultures. And the European Union was a much more ambitious effort, until now almost successful, to wallpaper over the, often violent, divisiveness of all of Europe’s competing Nation States.
So now, barely 25 years into the most recent chapter of this project of unity, Europe’s pre-existing cracks are opening along all the traditional fault-lines of difference. For me, the re-emergence of European tribalism is as alarming as it is utterly predictable.
European Union was always a somewhat cynical profit/loss equation for many Europeans. Living in London between 1990 and 1994, during the tail-end of the Thatcher years and as the Maastricht Treaty was being haggled over, I was left in no doubt that altruism was not a major player at the negotiating table. A double game was being played by most Governments—at least by most Governments that weren’t French or German. Even for me, a political Pollyanna, I knew that while the logic of such an unprecedented and region-changing agreement (with all its attendant global implications) required a large degree of unequivocal consensus, the tug-of-war between the domestic politics and any notion of the greater good had to produce pragmatic choices from anyone engaged in the process.
Regardless of this, it was appalling to see the level of self-interested cherry-picking on the part of the UK government, with regard to the number of charters and agreements it avoided signing up to. I was in no doubt that there were some aspects of this behaviour from all countries sitting at the table, and it really bothered me. It was like building a bridge with the absolute minimum number of cables and beams, and simply hoping that it wouldn’t collapse.
There was also a rather shocking level of contempt in the language used in the UK, from both media and politicians, being directed across the pond at their Continental peers who were trying to forge an agreement in relatively good faith. It revealed a fundamental and almost racist belief that ‘we’ll humour those tribes across the Channel, but really it is their problem … after all, they brought conflict to our doorstep’. In spite of this, Slovenian academic and former Yugoslavian Ambassador to Australia, Prof. Dr. Boris Cizelj views this very British posture of exceptionalism a little more kindly. For him, it reflects a certain blunt integrity.
Britain has had its ‘opt-outs’, this is at least how they look at it from Brussels point of view. But there is another thing that they have to give them credit for. Many continental countries in Europe will say ‘Yes’, but will not do it, while the British will say ‘No’, but when they say ‘Yes’, they will do it. [3]
Berlaymont, headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels. (Shirrefs)
To not acknowledge the deeply tribal nature of Europe is to miss the most basic test for structural flaws. This is not to say that tribal differences are automatically failures, but inattention to the potential for these to be breaking points is an abrogation of good ‘engineering’ practice. And sadly, EU platitudes like ‘United In Diversity’ simply sound like embarrassing fudges, glossing over much more fundamental qualities of the region that demand constant attention and care.
An organisation overburdened with economists and technocrats, some of whom operate further along the autism spectrum than is reasonable for sympathetic governance, was never a good recipe for long-term cohesion of traditionally immiscible cultures. A sensitive psycho-social approach is as crucial to this balancing act as is brilliance in economic restructuring. I will never downplay the sheer magic of harmonising the myriad different, pre-existing sovereign currencies and economic systems under the single Eurozone model. But economists are not known for their holistic embrace of wider socio-cultural ecologies. It’s for this reason that, some years after the Maastricht signing, the European Commission set up an organisation called A soul for Europe—a committee of wise owls from across the continent, given the task of adding a new cultural layer to the language of European Union. Made up of artists and filmmakers and writers and poets, it was an attempt to capture the hearts and minds of ordinary Europeans, in a way that the mechanistic political-economic jargon of the original pieces of paper never could. It was also an admission of failure to properly understand or acknowledge the many disparate tribal heartbeats of the vast region in these documents. And we may be about to find out if it was too little too late.
People simply don’t behave according to systems modelling. It was never enough to liberate the monetary systems of Europe from the past. While the logic of greater bargaining power, shared risk and mutual prosperity makes perfect sense on paper, how does that translate into a street-level reality? As the Greek people have discovered to their horror, their Governments, past and present, seem to have signed them up as underwriters of risks, the details and implications of which were never truly explained to the populace. Of course, now the individuals that put Greece in the predicament of national economic default are not the ones that are having to cover the bill. Sadly, there will be a couple of generations of Greeks who will be consigned to wash the dishes in the European kitchen for many years, simply because the larger organism called Greece couldn’t afford the meal.
But it wasn’t the students and café workers that defaulted. It was the Greek Government and the Greek banks. And if cynics suggest that the Greek people should have been more aware of their responsibilities on the wider European stage and their complicity in the actions of their Governments, banks and big businesses, they might need to reflect on how much understanding and control they believe they have of their own regional situation. Sadly, much too late, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other European ‘debt collectors’ have been shown to have effectively sacrificed Greece to appease the 19 member states of the Eurozone[4]. In the words (and elementally mixed metaphors) of Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister who tried and failed to mount a defence against the punitive policies of these European power-brokers, his country was subjected to a ‘fiscal waterboarding’ and the IMF effectively ‘immolated’ Greece on behalf of the Eurogroup[5]. For all that Yanis Varoufakis uses his blog and his profile to define his version of a devastating part of modern Greek history, the IMF’s independent report[6] would seem to vindicate his outrage and message of inequity.
This is one example of why tribalism is reasserting its influence across Europe, and in many cases across the World. Trust is at the heart of representative governance. If governments become more remote from, scornful of and reckless with the trust of the people, especially if the mechanisms of government have been ceded to centralised arenas of power and influence that don’t seem to represent the people’s best interests, all the tribal buttons get pushed. Tribalism is nothing more than collective self-preservation. If the tools of self-preservation have been taken from your grasp, vulnerabilities are exposed and the reflex is to re-arm yourself. At the very least, a strategic retreat behind the fortress walls can give the illusion of security.
This isn’t disastrous in and of itself, but it is a major problem when national governments start to harness this disquiet as a weapon. Nationalist dog-whistling has returned as a global sport in recent years. It can be the perfect ideological wedge, often favoured by power-hungry leaders, keen to divide and conquer. It has about it the added benefit of turning the abstract discontent of their constituencies away from a manipulative domestic leadership and directing the hostility toward the idea of a ‘common foe’. It’s blunt, it’s effective and it’s an easy alternative to the hard work of peaceful conciliation and cooperation with the nebulous idea of ‘the other’.
There are few more potent examples than the bewildering spectacle of the Brexit. The proponents of the campaign to ‘Leave’ the European Union played all the tribal cards imaginable. What (they said) Britons were voting on was the idea of security, based on the myriad threats from the ‘others’. The ‘others’ were either Brussels or bureaucrats or France or Germany or Europe-as-a-whole or bankers or migrants (European or otherwise, it didn’t matter) or refugees or … just about everything else that wasn’t Britain.
The area of intergroup threat theory has clear categories which neatly explain some of the different aspects of this seemingly inexplicable and, potentially, self-destructive collective behaviour. The theory[7] describes these as:
• realistic group threat
• symbolic group threats
• realistic individual threats
• symbolic individual threats
For most Britons who voted to leave the EU, the reasons would have been a mix of perceived symbolic threats—both group and individual. The symbolism was couched in received stories, full of confected half-truths about an abstract and largely mythical enemy. That’s how propaganda works, by flattering the tribe and demonising everyone else. The problem is that these sorts of elaborate but free-flowing fictions are easy and enticing. Whereas rebuttals, which attempt to refute the spectacle of fear and outrage, are generally boring and deeply unappetising. Grounding a mythology in fact and reason requires critical effort and discipline. It’s far easier to simply wallow in tales of fantastical monsters and epic foreboding, all the while being serenaded with emotive political poetry about how great but hardly done by you are … how utterly deserving but thoroughly misunderstood you and your people have been. Tribal logic persists because these widely promulgated threat scenarios work. Michel Foucault, in his ‘Introduction’ to Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, paraphrases a question from the Viennese writer Wilhelm Reich, ‘How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?’[8]. Reich embellishes this in his work The mass psychology of Fascism:
When dealing with a Copernicus, we are ready with a stake. When dealing with a politician, however, a politician who tells the people that the most incredible nonsense is true, … then millions of people lose all bounds and assert that a miracle has happened. [9]
Wilhelm Reich
The clear durability and persistence of tribalism in Europe is in no way an automatically negative trait. Tribalism is a pre-condition for any sense of belonging. It is certainly an antidote to the modern existential fear of anonymity in a modern, chaotic global society—one only needs to look at the enduring power, across all eras and cultures, of exile as a punishment. To not belong, to not have a place in some lineage of human stories and development, to not be recognised as having a legitimate place in the world of human existence, is the stuff of madness.
There were always swings and roundabouts in the playground of large-scale togetherness in Europe. Empires have ebbed and flowed for centuries, engulfing and releasing tribes and regions. Often the bonding memories tattooed on the members of an historically significant group have been the only mechanism for survival of the tribe when facing cultural or social extinction. But no culture is utterly immutable or impervious to influences that re-inscribe new symbols and stories. Each new incarnation leaves a lasting patina on its subjects, imbuing the people with qualities that combine to confuse any consistent sense of identity. In spite of this, when I spoke to the former Slovenian President Dr Danilo Türk in 2010[10] about an unusual gift of books that his country had made to the State Library of Victoria, I was curious to know why he felt that a set of books of still made sense to us as a transnational conversation. His response was simple. Slovenia is a small country within the European realm and it has little to distinguish itself other than through its culture—especially books and music.
We are people who love books, who read books. In general I’m very happy with the fact that our tradition of commitment to the book … to books continues, even in our time which is an era of computers and other devices which are not stimulating reading of books, we still do rely on books.
Dr Danilo Türk, former President of Slovenia
The other point about Slovenia is that, while political independence has been relatively short-lived and its recent, pre-independence history utterly dominated by the former Yugoslavia, most Slovenians don’t think of themselves as belonging to the Balkan collective. In order to understand the critical influences on its cultural identity, the country has always looked more north to its earlier incarnation within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and more broadly to its region of choice—Europe.
However, as with everything in that part of the World, identity in Slovenia is not quite that simple, and the tribal manifestations are not always benign. One example lies in the west of the Country, a small but significant corner of Slovenia has its own conflicted identity. The only coastal region of Slovenia is tiny, with only a few small ports, of which Portorož is the largest. But over this region is another distinct culture that overlaps part of Croatia to the south and part of Italy to the north. This is Istria, an area that traditionally defines itself much more closely with Italy, and still displays a smattering of an Italian dialect, especially the closer you get to the coast. But these days, this Italianate hybrid is much more of a palimpsest than an intact culture. There is no coherent collective sense of identity, simply because the ravages of wars, competing regimes and imposed conqueror cultures have all conspired to rob the people of their cultural certainty. Theirs is a long and complicated history that is too involved for this project, but the greatest damage started with the region’s staunch resistance to the rise of Fascism in the lead up to World War II. The people were strong and determined, but the scale of the Fascist scourge was far greater than the resistance movements could properly confront. The result, as with so many other anti-Fascist hotspots across Europe, was a devastating reign of terror and reprisals that seemed disproportionately harsh.
The Istrian flag. (Shirrefs)
However, unlike the violence meted out against the civilian population of the small Basque city of Gernika by the Spanish and German Fascists in 1937, no one noticed the pain of Istria, when so much of Europe was dealing with its own traumas. People disappeared, families were split up, suspicions grew about collaborators—at every point there were divisive forces without the recognition and unifying power of a collective tragedy. To make it worse, once General Tito liberated the country from the Nazis and the Fascists, further acts of expulsion and voluntary exile tore at the hearts of communities and families.
The result today is that the subject of Istrian identity is almost taboo. People don’t want to talk about the hurt and the loss. There is still deep intergenerational suspicion and confusion over why some family members left and others stayed and, consequently, endless debates over who endured the greatest suffering. For many people, there seems to be no pride left in the idea of being Istrian, because it’s an idea mired in pain and a desire to forget, rather than hang onto traditions.
There is another modern and controversial incarnation of tribalism in this region. Slovenia, barely a year after finally gaining independence in the aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia, engaged in what many people have referred to as a form of cultural cleansing.
It was a program that purported to remove non-Slovenians, although it managed to also target a lot of Slovenian-born people whose families had backgrounds elsewhere. Those that were caught by this legislation were referred to as The Erased and the controversies surround this law persist to the present day. In 2003 the Constitutional Court declared the law unconstitutional, but a year later, after the Government had complied with the Court’s ruling, a referendum was held which resulted in the law being reinstated. When the European Commission was asked to step in, it said that the matter was outside their jurisdiction. In 2012, a small number of plaintiffs of the estimated 25,000 total of Erased, took the matter to the European Court of Human Rights and the Grand Chamber of the Court found in their favour. However, there is little comfort for the rest and the process of challenging in this way is clearly long and difficult and, given the Slovenian intransigence on the subject, satisfactory resolution for all the Erased seems impossible.
Another feature of contemporary Slovenia, one that echoes the policy of the Erased and accentuates their post-independence cultural insularity, has been the determined hard-line stance on refugees. Not only have they stated flatly that they will not take asylum-seekers, they have effectively closed their borders to the south to prevent the passage of refugees through the country, on the way to Austria and beyond. They’re not alone. Austria has also subsequently instigated border controls to its south, reflecting a cascading renewal or partial renewal of border security across parts of Europe that was unthinkable barely two years ago. So big an issue is this for Europe, that even the most demonstrably tolerant and open country in the region, Germany has felt compelled to impose border restrictions and introduce tough and deeply divisive deportation laws. It is unsurprising that this hardening of attitudes comes in an election year for Germany, as the hitherto exemplary moral position of Angela Merkel’s government chooses instead to court more right-wing populist support. Is this tribalism winning in the heart of Europe? Or is it simply a strategic values-bypass to try to keep the EU organism breathing?
The problem began with Hungary in October 2015. The right-wing government of Viktor Orban, which had increasingly been able to thumb its nose at the EU in Brussels with impunity, announced that it would close its borders with Croatia and, subsequently with Slovenia, to stop the growing flow of refugees. The Croatian border closure was not especially controversial, but restricting access through the Slovenian border was, because both Hungary and Slovenia are part of the Schengen Zone, which is meant to guarantee free movement across member countries. Since getting into power in 2010, Viktor Orban had been ramping up the anti-minority, anti-foreigner rhetoric in Hungary—creating an impossible dilemma for the European Union. The problem for the government in Brussels was that they had no mechanism for stopping or even dissuading this sort of behaviour. The architects of European Union had never countenanced the notion that a country, once it had become part of the ‘club’, would backslide or stray from the path of perpetual democratic transcendence. Consequently, there was nothing in the EU’s arsenal that could answer Hungary’s challenges to the idea of fundamental EU values. I’ll talk more about Hungary later.
The point is that the EU’s apparent impotence set a precedent for other EU countries. Hungary seemed to have found a loophole that appealed to those at the vanguard of the growing political shift to the right that was sweeping Europe. Hungary had managed to enshrine its contempt for European ideals in law, because the government’s more than two-thirds majority unlocked the country’s constitution and allowed it to be rewritten, without fear of any effective parliamentary opposition. At the time, the right-wing parties and governments of countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria could only look on in wonder and jealousy at this Hungarian audacity, because they had none of the same freedom to redesign their legal landscapes. But two years later, the European Union is looking quite battered and both their authority and power to act have been seriously called in to question. These other countries have found their own ways to defy Brussels, while tenuously staying within the letter of European law. And so, the deep vertical cracks of history are bleeding through the wallpaper of European Union and turning the region, once again into a tribal mosaic. The edges of the pieces don’t ever fully match up and the cultural interfaces no longer pretend to be seamless.
[1] Dr Lyn Gallacher, ‘The art of being Europe’, Artworks (Australia, ABC RN, Mar./Apr. 2011) [radio program].
[2] Michael Shirrefs, ‘Who is Germany?’, Creative Instinct (Australia, ABC RN, Nov./Dec. 2012) [radio program].
[3] Prof. Dr. Boris Cizelj in conversation with Michael Shirrefs, in Dr Lyn Gallacher (producer) ‘Crisis & Creativity, Ep.3’, Earshot (Australia, ABC RN, 24 Aug. 2016) [Radio Program].
[4] Shinji Takagi et al, The IMF and the Crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal (Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, 8 July 2016)
[5] Yanis Varoufakis, ‘The IMF confesses it immolated Greece on behalf of the Eurogroup’, Yanis Varoufakis: thoughts for the post-2008 world [blog] (29 July 2016) < https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/07/29/the-imf-confesses-it-immolated-greece-on-behalf-of-the-eurogroup/> para. 10, accessed 29 July 2016
[6] Charles Wyplosz and Silvia Sgherri, The IMF’s Role in Greece in the Context of the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement, IEO Background Paper, Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, 8 The IMF’s Role in Greece in the Context of the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement, 8 July 2016
[7] Walter G. Stephan & Marisa D. Mealy, ‘Intergroup threat theory’ in Daniel J. Christie (ed.), The encyclopedia of peace psychology (1st Ed.) (UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) 561-565
[8] Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’ in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013) 2
[9] Wilhelm Reich, The mass psychology of Fascism (Toronto: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971) 206
[10] Michael Shirrefs, ‘President Danilo Türk and the Iconotheca Valvasoriana’, Artworks (Australia, ABC RN, 3 Oct. 2010) [radio program]