If Europe were a person, he'd send her to a psychologist. So says the Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi, and I think he has a point. Why is this 50-year-old feeling so depressed? As with many people who feel depressed, the objective circumstances don't justify the subjective feelings. She is rather successful, comfortably off, generally liked by her friends and loved by her family, yet she feels bad about herself, racked with self-doubt, not to say angst. A dose of cognitive behaviour therapy is urgently called for. And here, at the latest, this metaphor has to end. For Europe is not a woman but nearly 500 million men, women and children inside today's European Union; and closer to 750 million if you add the Europeans and maybe-Europeans outside the EU, including those in Ukraine, Russia and Turkey.
To some extent, we can measure the state of mind of these half a billion individual people through opinion polls, focus groups, website comment threads and the like. A recent Financial Times poll conducted in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain revealed that even in these leading, prosperous countries of the EU, 44% of those asked thought that life in their country had got worse since it joined the EU. Asked "What do you most associate with the EU?", 31% said the single market, followed by 20% who answered bureaucracy. As many (7%) mentioned inequality as mentioned peace.
The latest sampling of the EU's own Eurobarometer poll found that just over half those asked (in all member states plus a few candidate countries) felt their country's membership of the union was (or would be) a good thing, and just under half had a positive image of the union. Europeans who comment on these issues on Europe's leading websites, such as those of the BBC and the Guardian, are vociferously divided. So are the people I meet and talk to in different walks of life all over Europe.
Painting with a very broad brush, one might suggest that positive and negative views of the EU are split roughly 50-50. This doesn't mean that half the union's citizens are wholeheartedly for it and half against. Many, if not most, Europeans are divided in their own feelings: Hans in Hamburg is two-thirds for and one-third against, while Milada in Prague is two-thirds against and one-third for.
So the challenge for the European leaders who gather in Berlin this weekend, and for those of us generally supportive of the European project, is this: how do we influence this complex, volatile condition of 500 million minds? How do we make Europe feel better about itself? Some politicians and observers give the Nike answer: just do it. The key, they say, is delivery. If Europeans are morose about Europe, then it's for good reasons. If our citizens associate the EU with bureaucracy, that's because it's too bureaucratic. If the EU and its member states can create more jobs, reduce inequality, invest in research and development and combat climate change, then more Europeans will feel better about it. Actions, not words, are what is needed.
It's hard to argue with this. The ratio of deeds to words in the EU is alarmingly low. And this analysis is certainly more persuasive than the Panglossian view one sometimes hears from officials in Brussels that the problem is really one of presentation. All the EU needs is better PR. In other words: if only the poor, benighted populace could truly understand what a wonderful job we, the European elites, are doing for them. But in truth, deeds and words, policy and communications, and, as Karl Marx would have put it, being and consciousness, simply cannot be divorced in this way.
Even when you have discounted heavily for the complacency of the Eurocrats, it remains true that many Europeans do not fully appreciate how much of what makes their lives more agreeable - the ability to live, work and travel wherever you like in Europe, cheap flights, cleaner air and beaches, football teams with players like Thierry Henry, not to mention peace and freedom - can be ascribed at least partly, and sometimes directly, to the EU. The reality is better than the perception.
Turning it the other way round, European leaders miss a lot by not listening carefully enough to what Europeans say matters to them. I've made a little experiment of my own in this respect over the last few months, with a website (europeanstory.net) on which people can respond to a proposal for a new European narrative, told in terms of our progress (or lack of it) from very different pasts towards six shared goals: freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity. I've been working on this with a lively, multilingual group of European students at Oxford, and we've set up an online facility for people to vote for their top two goals.
So far, freedom comes out way ahead of all the other goals. The subject of freedom also keeps cropping up in the posts on the web. Yet if you look at the Financial Times poll, freedom does not feature at all among the things people associate with the EU. I conclude that leaders have so far failed to tell the narrative of the EU at all persuasively as a story of the spread of freedom. It's also already clear from the debate that we need to add a seventh common European goal, concerning the environment.
What we have here is more than just a problem of communication in both directions, explaining and listening. It's also about the lack of a European public sphere. Europeans read different newspapers and watch different television channels, usually in different languages. The only publications all may have read are American ones. There are virtually no pan-European media. Just getting a proposal like the new European story out into the many languages of Europe is a full-time job.
The common language of trans-European web debates on sites such as opendemocracy.net and signandsight.com (motto: "Let's talk European") is English - and that's a major limitation. On europeanstory.net someone actually posted a comment in Portuguese, to which others responded: "The Alta Vista translation of the Portuguese suggests that you think that ..."; and: "Sadly I don't understand Portuguese very well. But what I was able to understand from your article was interesting :-)." The polite but silently despairing smiley says it all. The resulting conversation is as erratic as that of starter-level language-school pupils after a few drinks in a pub.
And there is no shared theatre of European politics. Each country has its own drama of national politics: here the Gordon and Tony show, there the Silvio and Romano show. We all, in our separate European languages, watch the melodrama of American politics with rapt attention. We follow with mild interest the operetta of a few major European states: the current French presidential election, for example. But there is no unfolding theatre of European politics, which we all follow together. (The words Brussels and theatre do not naturally combine.) So the European Union at 50 does not merely need a better story to tell. It also needs to work out who, in what language, through what media, will tell it.
Timothy Garton Ash