Over the last month or so you may have noticed that I have
been travelling around Europe. This was
part of my sabbatical time and I did to spend some time alone experiencing
other cultures and ways of being. I
travelled (Interrailed actually!) by train through Spain, France, Italy,
Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France, before returning
home.
Throughout all of this journey I was faced with constant
reminders that this huge area of land has been almost constantly the scene of
bloody warfare, consuming and destroying the land and people involved. In Spain, the mediaeval castles on the
hilltops, the tortured images in Picasso’s Guernica, in Italy the Renaissance
city states, in Vienna the reminders of the Austro-Hungarian empire that fought
over much of eastern Europe, in Berlin not only the very stark history of the
Cold War and the terror it created, but the previous terror of the Third Reich,
in Holland Ann Frank’s house, crossing the battlefields of northern France, and
finally in Paris the memorials on almost every building to resistance fighters
who were killed all through WW2.
Like it or not we, on our little island stuck of the coast of this, have always
been part of this – many of us are descended from Vikings from Scandinavia,
Angles and Saxons from Northern Germany, Normans from France. And we have participated in some way in the
conflicts that have dominated Europe, either as instigators, supporters,
participants, defenders, liberators.
In another post
doing the rounds on Facebook this quote from Winston Churchill addressing the Congress of Europe in 1948 appears:
“A high and a solemn responsibility rests upon
us here ... If we allow ourselves to be rent and disordered by pettiness and
small disputes, if we fail in clarity of view or courage in action, a priceless
occasion may be cast away forever. But if we all pull together and pool the
luck and the comradeship - and we shall need all the comradeship and not a
little luck … then all the little children who are now growing up in this
tormented world may find themselves not the victors nor the vanquished in the
fleeting triumphs of one country over another in the bloody turmoil of … war,
but the heirs of all the treasures of the past and the masters of all the
science, the abundance and the glories of the future.”
This was
the vision of the founders of the EU – that never again would lives be wasted
fighting back and forth over the land which could be so fertile. It makes me mad that some argue that those
who fought in two world wars didn’t fight for what we have now. I bet this is exactly what they fought for –
so that their children would never have to do what they so bravely did.
Yes, there
are probably some things that need fixing with the EU, but there is a higher
vision here, a vision that says that despite the problems we are still better
working it out together, than carrying on fighting each other. It seems even
more important now in light of the murder of Jo Cox MP allegedly by someone who
has named himself in court as "Death to traitors,
freedom for Britain." When you have stood between a piece of the Berlin
wall and the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin it focusses the mind
on the need to stand up and be counted and say “I do not want a future that
looks like this.”
So after
spending a month getting up close and personal with Europe, I’ll be voting to
remain in it.
