What exactly is Europe?

Being the president of the European Innovation, Technology and Science Center Foundation (EITSC), allow me today to entertain you not about corruption and compliance management but look at a changing Europe:

‘What exactly is Europe’, asked a 15-year old high-school student in a European Studies class. ‘Isn’t it anything between Russia and Iceland?’, offered a classmate. ‘Russia isn’t Europe’, interrupted a third. ‘Britain is not really Europe either. They are more like Americans’, added a fourth.

The European Flag itself – 12 stars over a blue border – is an equal source of local confusion. The stars? Are they not representing 12 European countries? No, wait, there are 28 countries (before Brexit happens) in the European Union. Well, the stars no longer correspond with the number of countries.

Sometimes I feel, Europe is still trying to find itself. Europe is faced with angst about its identity and place in the world.

At the moment, the EU seems to have plenty issues at its fringes, especially when it comes to migration policies and right-wing nationalism of member states and member states that want to move away from democracy.

Simply defining the word Europe is a chore. For geographers, Europe is a region of 36 countries, bordered by Iceland in the west, Turkey in the south, Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east and the Arctic Ocean in the north. Politicians say, it’s a community. In the world of giant trade blocks where size matters, Europe is a huge merger.

Indeed, the region is closer to Winston Churchill’s vision of a United States of Europe than ever before. Language remains a huge barrier. While the young are increasingly multilingual, more than half of the Europeans still can’t have a conservation in another language.

During recent discussions in Europe, somebody said: ‘Europe wasn’t founded in Rome, but on Freud’s couch in Vienna: Germans want to forget Hitler, the French want to control the Germans, the Spanish want to forget Franco and the Italians wat any government but their own. I don’t want to talk about where the Hungarians are heading.

A key dialogue in this cross-national border therapy session is between some Europeans who want to discard, prune of judiciously package their culture and others are clinging furiously – some would say defensively – to every tiny detail of customs, quirk and attitude that defines them.

Why am I writing this? On the one side I am unsettled by the disturbing changes in Europe and on the other I am having difficulties with the debate on federalism in the Philippines. Why cut a country that has been together for such a long time into pieces and eventually face some of the above, with some federal states moving in different directions than others.

I have always been of the opinion that the Local Government Code in the Philippines is a good basis to further expand the tasks of the provinces and regions, cities and municipalities.

Comments are more than welcome – contact me at schumacher@eitsc.com