The Friends of a Re-United Dystopia

I had made an appointment for the installation in the House of European History in Exile (Domo de Eŭropa Historia en Ekzilo) at 5PM.

Created by the Flemish theatre-maker Thomas Bellink, the ‘exhibition’ is tucked away in a quiet street in the European District in a building that used to be a private boarding school. Empty now for a decade, the dilapidated building with broken polystyrene ceiling tiles, flaky paint, chipped, cheap wooden panelling is redolent of decay. There are signs of renovation works abandoned due to the recession.

The objects exhibited are sometimes faded, watermarked, damaged; even the large boards in four languages explaining the content are discoloured. The overhead lighting is stark. Plastic pots of sansevierias stand on grey lino in an attempt to add some cheer. It reminded me of the museums I visited in Eastern European countries during the period of decline, around the time the USSR fell apart.

This is a very evocative site for an installation that pretends to house a collection of objects salvaged from the official House of European History that is scheduled to open triumphantly in Brussels in 2015 as an appendage to the EU’s 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. These objects we are told were all that could be recovered from the collection in the years following the disintegration of the European Union in 2018. We are looking back on a period of history, a retrospective view, from some point in the future. The curators are part of a fictitious association entitled The Friends of a Re-United Europe.

This is a brilliant concept that challenges our complacency. The spectators visit the exhibition alone; it is deliberately a solitary and sobering experience. It is frightening, though-provoking, and at times hilariously funny. The retrospective view of the first part spikes our recent history with irony and the details, while undeniably correct, are delivered tongue-in-cheek.

We move from the moment after the ‘Second Civil War’ (WWII) when six nation states first agreed to cooperate in the European Coal and Steel Community (1950) to the ‘Great Recession’. The second part, taking us through divisions, internal competition and the end of the 33-member Union (apparently Scotland joined as an independent nation in 2017) is highly plausible. We can easily see that by 2013 the ground has already been laid for disintegration.

How much do we know about the organisation and workings of the EU? We all know that it is complex and overly-bureaucratic, a point which is underscored effectively by the column of A4 documents, complete with staples and paper clips, that rises from the floor in the very first room and continues through holes in the ceilings right up to the roof on the 4th floor.

Should we know more? After all it regulates many aspects of our daily lives. It is exerting pressure on sovereign states to adapt their social systems, to dispense with workers’ rights, to apply ‘austerity measures’. But, is it possible for the average (wo)man in the street to comprehend the interrelationships between the EU Commission, the EU Council, the EU Parliament, the Central European Bank and all the other offices attached to the EU?

Sometimes, the information is quite bewildering. Why does the entire EU Parliament with its entire entourage and mountains of bumph have to up sticks for one week a month and move from Brussels to Strasbourg? To keep the French happy?

As one proceeds through the various rooms, more pertinent questions arise. Are the decision-making processes really as transparent as we are led to believe? Why are the meetings of the EU Council kept secret?

One room in the exhibition is dedicated entirely to visiting cards handed out by lobbyists. They cover the walls of the room and display cases are stacked high on the floor where wall space is insufficient to accommodate them all. These are all the genuine article. At present, there are over 3,000 lobbyists in Brussels, all representing the industries and corporations exerting their influence on EU laws and directives.

As we can glean from the panels explaining the history and the exhibits, the EU was created in the spirit of compromise, to end the long and bloody history of European wars stretching right back to the fall of the Roman Empire. Compromise requires certain conditions, such as time for negotiations and the desire to live in peace democratically and with equality between member states and individuals.

Sometimes the regulations that are supposed to facilitate fairness take on absurd proportions. We see exhibits, for example, containing the stipulated dimensions, shape and colour of tomatoes, cucumbers and leaks as well as the legally-required sweep of windscreen wipers.

Half way through the exhibition we are introduced to the flaw in the fabric of the internal market. It is a startling moment, as hitherto the collection has consisted of diagrams, photos, maps and associated objects.

Now, we are led on a wooden walkway, knocked together from rough pieces of wood, into a structure made from sheets of plastic. This make-shift tent is home to a migrant worker in the shanty-towns that surround the ‘plastic desert’ in southern Spain where our salad vegetables are grown in mile after mile of polytunnels. The tent contains a mattress with some blankets, some shelves with cheap electronics, but no sanitation, no water, no cooking facilities.

Why is this happening in a civilised EU country? Because, as we can read from the information board, EU citizens want to eat tomatoes all year round, and, moreover, they refuse to pay more than 2 Euros a kilo. Suddenly, the decision-making process that was out there somewhere in the corridors of power, something we as individuals cannot affect except in the ballot box, is transformed into our own everyday decisions, the ones we make in the supermarkets for example. Our individual choices do play a major role in the direction our societies are taking.

Anyone who thinks that this exhibition will have UKIP and Tory Euro-sceptics cavorting with joy should think again. It’s not that simple. Perhaps one could say that European directives are overly occupied with fiddly details like the shape of a cucumber, while social integration has not gone far enough to avoid dissonance between member states.

Spain can allow the use of (illegal) migrant workers to grow standardised EU vegetables at competitive prices because each country in the EU regulates its own social system. Each country can determine a minimum wage, health care, pensions and benefits as it sees fit. The minimum wage in Germany is half the legal amount in France. German labour laws and social welfare programmes give Germany a competitive edge in the market place.

This is the crux of the matter. We can already see the inequality between countries and individuals emerging. The countries in the south are being forced by the debt crisis to adopt rigorous austerity measures requiring cuts in social welfare and ultimately the opening up of these public assets to privatisation. This is what happened in the East Block countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union: what Naomi Klein refers to in her book Shock Capitalism as the greatest fire-sale of public assets in human history.

The installation doesn’t spell this out for us, but we can link the exhibits to the political reality of 2013 as we are living it. The neo-mercantile countries of the north (Holland, Austria and Germany) are attempting to slash social welfare schemes (Holland has already privatised its health service, England its higher education). Job security has to give way to ‘a flexible workforce’ and employers contributions to national insurance reduced: all to make goods and services more competitive in the European market. As the French de-growth economist Prof. Serge Latouche has pointed out, competition is a race to the bottom.

By the time we leave the migrant workers tent we must realise that our grand European project has already lost sight of the post-war Community rationale and has entered the logic of free-market capitalism and neo-liberal ideology.

We have already arrived at the ‘Great Recession’. The dummy of a smartly-clad and innocuous EU flunky in the earlier part of the exhibition gives way to dummies dressed as security guards and protesters. The material is cleverly devised. For example, among EU souvenirs displayed is a paper theatre, the type that children used to play with by moving paper characters around a paper stage. The EU theatre has cut outs off the major politicians, but also riot police and a man committing suicide by setting himself alight. As Europe descends into fear, people and nations turn in on themselves or support right-wing extremism; crime waves and infectious diseases abound.

Besides, providing insights into the pros and cons of the EU, and reminding us of its more idiotic aspects, this installation is a challenge to our complacency. Maybe, the installation generates an apocalyptic view of Europe’s decline. But it raises important questions. What future awaits us? What are the consequences of the spirit of compromise giving way to the drive for competition? Are these dire consequences inevitable? Whose responsibility is it to create that future?

And just at the moment when everything might look pretty bleak, the visitor passes through a doorway covered in plastic sheeting to emerge in the bar, with a panoramic view of the local rooftops and Thomas Bellink himself ready to sell you drinks gathered from across the EU. You can end your passage through the past, present and future in a congenial discussion, or a heated debate, with the artist himself and the other visitors as they emerge blinking into reality.

The information panels throughout the exhibition are in 4 languages: English, French, Flemish and a simplified form of Esperanto, the language used in collection and its labelling. This is simplified so that it is readable for everyone and reminds us from start to finish that the European project was an ideal that would erase boundaries and differences. This installation should go on tour around every member state in the EU and it should have visitors queuing at the door. In Brussels, it remains open until 14th June.