Europe is lost

Got up at 5 a.m. Brussels time.... Sad for my uncle and for the last time I leave Brussels as a member of the EU!” read my friend’s Whatsapp message. His uncle had passed away two days before and my friend had left the Belgian capital and heart of Europe in time to make it to the funeral.

By the time this article is posted the United Kingdom will no longer be a part of the European Union, but that’s still in the future as I write this and the closer the hour (11pm Friday 31st January 2020) comes, the further my heart sinks. My memory throws up some rhymes:

“Europe is lost, America lost, London lost Still we are clamouring victory?All that is meaningless rules?We have learned nothing from history The people are dead in their lifetimes...”

Rapper/poet Kate Tempest wrote the lines in the torrent of pure disgust that is the track “Europe is Lost” a protest song for the decade, reflecting the disenchantment of ordinary people with government. They seem apt in the wake of the shambolic scenes at the European Parliament on Wednesday that will live on in video clips on social media for ever, history in the making.

The afternoon of the 29th was the last time the UK’s Members of European Parliament would sit there. The MEPs were to vote on the terms of the UK’s departure from the EU. It was a formality since the UK’s own Houses of Parliament had approved the deal earlier in January. Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit steering group coordinator, said it was “sad to see a nation leaving, a great nation that has given us all so much economically, culturally, politically, even its own blood in two world wars. It’s sad to see a country leaving that twice liberated us, twice gave its own blood.” He voiced the existential anxiety now facing Europe. “I think in this debate we cannot escape a key question, how could this happen? How is it possible that more than 40 years after an enormous majority voted to enter into the European family ... they decided to leave this European project.”

By an overwhelming majority, the chamber voted in favour of the Brexit deal: 621 to 49. After the result was displayed on screens, many MEPs stood up, linked arms and sang the song from Scotland that English speakers around the world over know as the song to bid farewell to the old year and welcome the next orbit round the sun. “Auld Lang Syne” bids us not to forget old friends and times gone by, and live in the hope of raising “the cup of kindness” together again.

Among 73 British MEPs in the room is the firebrand populist leader of the Brexit party, Nigel Farage who bore no cup of kindness, but together with his supporters waved mini Union Jack flags in jubilation and defiance of parliament rules that ban flags in the chamber. “Once we have left we are never coming back and the rest is detail,” he declared in response to those MEPs who had expressed the hope that the UK may one day return to the European union. His microphone was unceremoniously cut off, as the Deputy Speaker Mairead McGuinness told him: “Sit down, put your flags away – you’re leaving, take them with you if you’re leaving now. Goodbye.” None of it referred to the real experienced needs of the people.

Every ending is also a beginning, and so the UK begins a new relationship with Europe. The media here are asking people to answer questions like “Are you ready for Brexit?” and “What will you be doing on Brexit day?” To be honest, I don’t really know what I’ll be doing because it’s not clear what I should be preparing for. What seems strangest of all these days is that it’s not actually clear what the full extent of the impact of leaving the European Union will be. This is truly uncharted territory.

So much for the UK relationship with Europe, but even within the UK alone, communities are deeply divided. On the very same day of the European Parliament’s vote, Scotland’s parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of holding its own referendum to leave the United Kingdom, possibly in the second half of 2020, because Scottish voters are strongly against leaving the EU. This week’s momentous events mark a pause between turbulence that is known and turbulence that isn’t.

“All of the blood that was bled for these cities to grow? All of the bodies that fell??The roots that were dug from the earth??So these games could be played?

I see it tonight in the stains on my hands

We are lost?We are lost?We are lost?And still nothing Will stop Nothing pauses”

The friend I mentioned who left Brussels for the last time as a citizen of the EU, goes back and forth to Europe at least once a month, working on building peace around the world with support from partners in government and civil society. His organisation, Conciliation Resources, works on the peace processes in the Philippines, Colombia, Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia and Kashmir. Working together is a pre-requisite of resilient peace everywhere in the world, small wonder that there is a sense of loss and grief in Europe for those who have understood this fundamental truth that bound Europe together after the devastation and holocausts of World War Two.

Division in Europe reveals a disturbing weakness in the fabric of the so-called international community, like a dropped stitch that could cause further unravelling. Certainly it will be a long and hard task to re-imagine ways in which the forces currently pulling people apart with opposing visions of the world can again be knit together with the same singleness of purpose on so many different levels, if indeed it ever happens.

Farage repeated once again in this final speech “we love Europe, we just hate the European Union” making it clear he would continue to work to prevent the UK ever returning. The problem is that by leaving, the UK has distanced itself firmly from Europe itself.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union, ended her speech giving voice to Europeans’ sense of loss as she addressed the people of the UK. Quoting English novelist and poet George Eliot, she said: ”‘Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depth of love,’ we will always love you and we will never be far, long live Europe.”