Europe: We should remain

I’m a Europhile

Having lived on mainland Europe for almost 13 years, there is no doubt that I am much of a Europhile. It did take a while before I could bring myself to think of living and working outside the UK.

My first foray outside the UK was in 1992 when I visited the Netherlands, it was a bus trip that included a ferry ride to the north of France, through Belgium and up to Amsterdam. I felt lost, but it was somewhat an enlightening experience.

Then in 1995, I flew out to Berlin and with that began my love for mainland Europe, soon with my partner it was Paris a few times and Barcelona. In 1999, having acquired a strange fear of flying, this affecting someone who first flew at 5 between continents and into my teens flew a number of times in Nigeria, I went on a tour.

The Imperial Tour

I booked what was the Imperial Tour [The Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium to be completed in 2 months.] from Liverpool Street Station, it was one of those crazy ‘have a credit card, will travel’ adventures that I planned within 10 hours and was a ferry ride to the Hook of Holland and over 3 weeks I was in the cities of Amsterdam, Hannover, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, and Brussels.

Earlier in the year, a 7-year relationship had ended and with that was the exploration of possible job opportunities on mainland Europe, I concentrated on Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, I interviewed in Germany, but eventually, the best offer came from the Netherlands in May 2000 and I left for a new life and experience.

Life in the Netherlands was laid-back, the quality of life was high and there was means to extend travel to Portugal, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and further afield.

We have our identity

The ties with the UK were still strong, but with each election season came a spot of bother, the growing Euroscepticism that threatened my status in Europe, you just didn’t know what to expect.

Having returned to the UK for almost 4 years, I am no less a Europhile and my love from Europe is borne of deeper consideration than the political talking points of immigration, economy or sovereignty.

The Netherlands is by many factors a smaller country compared to the UK, yet I never felt the Dutch were losing their identity nor sovereignty from being in the midst and centre of the European project.

What gets to me is this incipient exceptionalism exhibited by the #BREXIT camp and sometimes in the #BREMAIN camp that suggests the United Kingdom has no control of its borders, can’t make their own laws, are being held back by Europe and many other supercilious and superior sounding arguments as if Europe is an imposition by the other 27 members of the union.

We’ve done ourselves in

Herein, is our problem, we are in a group that we have railed and carped about since the times of Margaret Thatcher, a setup that requires agreement and consensus, but we send people whose starting point is to antagonise rather than negotiate and we expect to win the argument when there is a difference.

In my view, we have a place at the table, but we have the worst representatives at the table, for instance, we have the highest number of representatives in Europe from Ukip, we are constantly in some sort of détente and suspicion thereby having none of the engagement that can carry anything even if well-reasoned in our favour.

We have become a nuisance in Europe and then expect a better deal from Europe, we are the cause of our own European handicap in the main, the rest is a matter of consequence.

We are not superior

I feel quite threatened by the prospect of #BREXIT because we are not necessarily better or superior to our other 27 partners in the scheme and the people who front the somewhat isolationist stance have not promoted any new thinking of a great future beyond denying, debunking and rubbishing the ideas and advice of others.

The thought of the UK cast adrift in the hands of an untrammelled Tory leadership whose austerity and government ideas have brought many into mystery. The whole concept of cutting costs by surreptitiously granting autonomy to schools and hospital trusts, thereby shifting responsibility elsewhere and burdening the setups without adequate means.

We belong in Europe

The laws and directives are not made with us excluded, they arrive because we are not participating enthusiastically enough. I do not believe the money that comes back from Europe will go back into the services that are under strain.

We live in a more tightly integrated world, I think we need to belong to global and regional blocs for us to project strength and clout, we belong in Europe and that is where we should remain.

Enough animosity between black and white Africans

The whites of Africa

I could imagine the unspoken unease created by the blog I wrote [1] a few weeks ago highlighting the reality of white Africans and the fact that whilst colour remains a predominant quality of differentiation it is not the only prerequisite to being African.

Obviously, to go on and aver that white Africans could be more African than certain of the darker pigmentation with an African heritage was a truth that many might not accept but the truth and the facts are beyond dispute.

The death of Eugene Terreblanche [2] of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) in South Africa brings to the fore the concerns about whites and their true place in Africa.

A voice regardless

There is no doubt that Mr. Terreblanche represented a throwback to the unpalatable realities of colonialism and apartheid; but naturally every incumbent sense of privilege and power always fights to retain influence, the morality of that undertaking is subject to debate and reason usually by the unaffected than by the impacted.

Time and history however made the cause and purpose of the AWB irrelevant as an instrument of insurgency but never as a political pressure group for the rights of the people it portended to uphold – in South Africa of today they need to and deserve to have a voice.

It is unfortunate as we read that the murder of Mr. Terreblanche was as a result of what we might call a business dispute; workers had not been paid wages for a period of time for whatever reasons and they decided to settle the dispute by hacking him to death.

Just not on

It is no way to settle disputes and for those who feel they have been dispossessed, disadvantaged, displaced, denied or misrepresented, there should be structures in place for them to seek justice and fairness without resorting to atrocious crimes – that is brought about politically by the work of visionary and principled leadership.

That act is as heinous as it is barbaric and is comparable to other violent deaths of white inhabitants of Africa and dare I say, Dian Fossey [3], one might be tempted to view these “chop to death” acts as really beyond the pale, of an other world and most probably perpetrated by Africans.

The real issue boils down to the kind of war-mongering rhetoric that people in leadership are supposed to be wiser to curtail and condemn in entirety.

Unfortunately, the language of the Neanderthal flows like poetry from leaders all around, in Sudan, it was President Omar al-Bashir [4] threatening to “cut off their fingers and crush them under our shoes” just three weeks ago. You can find no civility in that as a response to the call for free, fair and just elections for a transitional democracy.

We are beyond liberation talk

South Africa is a new pluralistic democracy, it does have a liberation history but that is history, there are elements of history that might need righting for these times but that is to learn the lessons of the past for a better today and future.

Indeed the history of absurd treaties with chiefs that crept to dispossession in time, wars fought with superior weapons, enslavement, segregation, collusion with kith and kin to defraud and emasculate others as well as land grabs still have their scars but we cannot today repeat the same mistakes with the hope that two wrongs will make things right without us all suffering all the more for it. (Zimbabwe)

The rallying cry of South Africans must be brotherhood for all races in a common cause of their country just as it should be for all nations in Africa regardless of their diversity.

To resort to the congregational call of the face-painted leopard-skin wearing caricature that thumps to the song and dance of the weapon for the annihilation of another man as a voice of unity just draws a big dividing gulf between the diversities of Africa and it is hardly traditional nor cultural.

Separate from the atrocious

Those who offer platitudes in sentiment justifying the baying for blood and thereby inciting the blood-thirsty ignoramus to commit crimes must be held legally accountable as both are accessories to crime and instigators to unwarranted violence, the protagonists must never be allowed to escape their responsibility by absolving themselves from acts of others they have encouraged.

We cannot continue to embrace the plunder of life and property with mediaeval propensity when we could better seize the age of enlightenment that came with the renaissance.

All murders must exact the full weight of the law without prejudice, also all leaders must exercise themselves with restraint; that is no great price to pay for the inclusiveness of South Africans all and Africans in all their nations – no more songs of bringing machine guns [5] or killing the Boer [6] – in these times, it is expedient to depart from the barbaric sophisms that once allowed Africans to be labelled as savages.

History! My foot! It is deplorable and inexcusable, let us seize the day and look to the future fostering consensus, harmony and friendship whilst outlawing everything that excites primitive passions for shedding blood.

Sources

[1] White and African and belonging too [akin.blog-city.com]

[2] BBC News - Terreblanche killing reopens South Africa race wounds

[3] Dian Fossey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] BBC News - Sudan's Omar al-Bashir 'will expel poll observers'

[5] Umshini wami - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[6] The Daily Maverick: Kill the Boer: a brief history