Bildung verbindet

On a day when higher education was, alas, in the world news (I had to turn off the radio when they started to play a Virginia Tech student's mobile phone recording of gunfire) as well as the local (the Melbourne Model was officially launched today), I went to a talk by Ján Figel, the EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and somethingelse. The talk was sponsored by four Australian universities' EU studies programs for the EU's 50th anniversary, and his perspective as a Slovak grateful to be part of a reunited Europe after the cold war was interesting... but it was not the world's most exciting talk.

But then the EU is not the world' most exciting topic. And yet, and yet. Figel claimed that the EU was a political and cultural model of world-historic significance and novelty... Part of me wants very much to believe that - a part that's been down in the dumps since the French and Dutch no votes on the European constitution last year, since it thought the EU the only hope of a counterweight to the terribly bad vibes George Bush was sending throughout the international system. And as Figel trotted out the numbers of people who have studied abroad with Erasmus and plans to triple that number in the next seven years, another part of me suddenly found itself thinking: it's the trouble with good again!

Good news is no news, to turn a phrase. You only hear about the EU when something goes wrong, like mountains of butter, or the failure in the Balkans, or anti-Turkish rhetoric, or the politics of defining "mayonnaise," or the capricious behavior of the Polish delegates. What you don't hear is a kind of historical and cultural and political miracle, an enormous series of banal and quietly revolutionary improvements and exchanges and openings and relaxations and dialogues. It's so successful that it's hard to remember the bad old Europe it somehow managed to transform. (Easier to remember if you're from the erstwhile Soviet bloc.) Instead of seeing European expansion as the problem, Figel said in response to a question about the difficulties awaiting the newest member states and more mobile laborers, he'd rather see it as the solution. But, smart man that he is, he also quoted Jean Monnet: "I am neither pessimist nor optimist, I am merely determined."

(Not sure when this photo was taken; it's from an article on "Bildung Verbindet," Germany's theme for its current EU leadership.)