Miscellaneous Europe ideas

A German view of Europe

Yes, I am using “Europe” and “the EU” interchangeably, since I am talking about Europe as a political entity, which exists most significantly in the form of the EU. The context to me finding this German view is that I was asking my German friend if he could think of anything bad that the EU had done in the last 5 years. This is my usual test I apply to Eurosceptics to see if their views are based on prejudice or facts, and while I did not necessarily think my friend was a Eurosceptic, I thought it would be useful to know what sort of responses I might get if I asked this question to other Germans.

For those that are interested, the best answer I have got so far is “They made the UK change the colour of their fire extinguishers.” It is true that an EU directive mandated that fire extinguishers be coloured red to make them more visible, and have a standardised label colour to specify their type, but that was over 10 years ago, it’s just that the changes were allowed to be phased in as old extinguishers are replaced. I haven’t done research into what would cause the most deaths – people not being able to find fire extinguishers because of their colour or people not being able to tell the type of fire extinguisher because it only has a label and not an all-over colour – but having this analysis done at a European level doesn’t seem like a significant loss of sovereignty.

Sometimes I wonder if people draw an artificial distinction in their mind between changes imposed on their country caused by multinational corporations and those caused by governments / supranational political unions. When a “sinister cabal” of American, European and Japanese finance industry businesses colluded to control the way the world pays for things using credit and debit cards, people just accepted this. It may be based on the open ISO 7816 standard (with ISO admittedly being connected to governments through the national standards bodies), but the pressure to adopt it was not from ISO. Thus, while you could vote out a government that changes the colour of your fire extinguishers, you would have difficulty voting out a worldwide electronic transaction system, unless you owned a lot of banks or retail outlets.

My friend had an interesting, uniquely German complaint, however. He said that states like Schleswig Holstein or Hamburg have had to spend local government time (and thus tax payers’ money) writing regulations about cable cars, even though those regions are flat and do not have any cable cars, all because of an EU directive. According to Berliner Zeitung, the rules were actually passed in 2000, so it unquestionably fails the 5 year test, but there are other problems with it as a grounds to criticise the EU. Firstly, the reason why each region of Germany has to pass this law individually, rather than having one national law, is because of Germany’s federal system. I pointed out to him that Germany’s federal system is the result of the second World War, and that the second World War in turn was caused by Hitler, who pre-dates the EU. In doing so I nearly Godwinned myself, but I managed to come back with an even better argument: you don’t need mountains to have a cable car.

Another European sentence

It was fun writing about toxic fog and robot hordes, but sometimes a simple example can be more compelling than a detailed one. While I was researching words to build a European sentence from, I stumbled across an interesting fact about a word I knew quite well. As one site says “Originally, a nautical command to keep a ship’s head to the wind, it now describes the emotionally distant. What word is it?” That word is “aloof” from the Dutch word “loef”. After some more quick research, I found that “drab” came from the French “drap”, “fool” came from the Latin “follis”, and “bard” is Gaelic word, which means you can quite succinctly express Europe’s linguistic connectedness with one pleasing palindrome:

Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

As English is a Germanic language (some might even jokingly categorise it as a western German dialect), it might seem like Germanic features are surprisingly absent from that sentence. However, the word “as” is related to the German word “als”, which brings the vocabulary to 25% German, matching the statistics. According to those same statistics, though, between 30% and 40% of our words are of French origin, and yet the UK is not even an observer member of La Francophonie, unlike Ukraine, strangely. Worse, with most of our vocabulary being either French or Latin, the UK is not represented at all in the Latin Union, which I think dismisses the great contributions Romance languages have made to English, and the contributions English has made to spreading and continuing Latin.

Who can forget a Romanian language song reaching number 3 in the UK pop charts?