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As I complete the final week of the 6 week FutureLearn Course on European Culture and Politics I find myself looking both forwards and backwards. Forwards to the future after the course, and backwards to what I have learned, achieved and what I did not.
The course attempts to give the student an overview of What is Europe, how it defines itself, what the EU sees as being its function and objectives, and how these attempts have succeeded and failed.
I started the course with a basic knowledge of the EU and its functions from previous studies, but soon realised how much I lacked in knowledge of the culture and history of Europe.
It became very clear that any attempt to define Europe on the basis of geography, culture, history or politics was doomed to fail because Europe is a complex and poorly construed idea, even to those who live there. It is greater than the sum of the parts and to attempt to narrow the definition down is to miss the greater picture, to understand Europe we need if anything to be stepping further back rather than peering closer in.
Having moved on from seeing Europe as a physical or cultural entity, we then looked at the EU as a political entity, but even this soon showed a problem, because the EU attempts to define itself as being a socio-cultural-political body and this broadness of its scope results in a perception that it is out of touch with the people it claims to represent.
So given that all the definitions are seemingly inadequate for the task, How does this move the debate on the future of the EU forward? We saw that there have been some promising experiments with micro-democratic structures, where a reduction in size and complexity brought forward engagement and perceived relevance. But this is hard to translate to a larger entity like the EU, unless the EU is to re-invent itself, and see it's future as being united in its desire to be dis-united. This is not quite the tautology it appears at first, by allowing the peoples of the EU countries to celebrate and excel in their unique differences, they can start to realise the dream of unity in diversity - we are all different, and this acceptance of our difference is what we have in common.
So, to go forward, the EU has to look to its past - use the strength of the individuals, and instead of trying to enforce a common standard, the EU should encourage divergence to bring a wider commonality of difference.
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