Ten years ago I moved to Europe, with little idea of what Europe was. Certain only that I would no longer be fully African, but I wouldn’t be German and I wouldn’t be British either. I made good use of most of the so-called ‘common market freedoms’, but I never felt any great sense of accomplishment, community or aspiration just because of them. Europe always had to be more. What, I could not tell.
Little did we know how bad things could become. Narratives of financial demise were compounded by those of climate catastrophe and either migrated or homebred terrorism. Calls to end ‘financial terrorism’ have only ended in banks becoming larger and a negotiation of a stock exchange merger (basically the biggest banking merger of all times). Calls to invest in infrastructure and to control euro-wide sovereign debt have ended in the catch-22 of an ever-expansive market securities programme. Fear of German hegemony has crowned Merkel person of the year and the OXI celebrations have ended in Tspiras calling Juncker ‘a good friend of Europe and a good friend of Greece’. All the while, the big ‘known unknown’, the crisis of legitimacy and the crisis of democracy has given way to right wing populisms, calls for the end of Europe, and a Brexit.
Can we still change things if only we want to and provided we accept the institutions as they stand? I used to worry about this party or that, rally for this party or that, lay my faith in intelligent leadership and read the autobiographies of politicians that I thought had an ounce of honour to sell. I can only speak for myself and not for my Facebook colleagues who seem to have replaced every ounce of news and democratic discourse with comedy shows, but over the last couple of years I have basically become disillusioned by all political parties in equal amounts (though for very different reasons).
