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In Kuala Lumpur, I stay awake until dawn to watch a Champions League game eight time zones away. The city twitches into life just as the team from coastal Portugal scores a late winner against the team from Islington. It is a pan-European tournament but here, in a more fragmented region of the world, I see for the first time how it might all seem like one nation.
South-east Asia has countries whose main religion is Islam (Indonesia), Buddhism (Thailand) and Catholicism (the Philippines). Per capita incomes range from Cambodia, which is in the UN’s “least developed” tier of nations, to Singapore, which is richer than Sweden. Then there is the matter of getting around. Hanoi to KL took me three and a half hours on a plane. You can cross Europe — Paris to Athens, say — in less time. So, without leaving the Asean member states, or even just the contiguous ones, or even just my maternal country of Malaysia, whose ethnic Chinese minority are almost a quarter of the population, there is more variety to get one’s head around — cultural, material — than there is from Galway to Tallinn.
Some things about home are easier to see from afar. Whether or not Europe ever manages to unite as a political entity, the continent is, by global standards, a country. If we define Europe as the EU plus Britain and the Efta nations, all of it is majority Christian or post-Christian. All the states meet the World Bank threshold of high-income. All are democracies, even if one or two are wobbling. The travel times are so miraculous that friends elsewhere google them to confirm I am not joking.
Europe’s artistic and intellectual life has been integrated for centuries: Poussin in Rome, Handel in London, Beckett in Paris. There is nothing like the separateness, born of territorial distances and ill-matched writing scripts, that Professor Nile Green argues characterised Asia for millennia. (The Analects of Confucius weren’t translated into some major Asian languages until the last century.)
Speaking of Europe as one thing is seen as both elitist, because Brussels federalists do it, and vulgar, because New World tourists do it. Let’s grow up about this, shall we? It was fair enough to insist on the glorious variety of Europe when the point of contrast was the US, with its one sovereign state, more or less one language and much smaller population. But as other regions rise, Europe will come to feel, for one thing, small, and for another, quite samey. Who is more parochial? The person who can’t see the differences within Europe — Protestant and Catholic, maritime and continental — or the person who believes these are significant on a world scale of difference? (Or even an Indian one.) I am with the Aussie backpackers on this. There is such a thing as “visiting Europe”.
Looking back, Brexiters got Europe all wrong — and understood Europe better than anyone. Wrong, because for all their bravado about leaving a sluggish continent for the wider world, a truly global viewpoint would reveal Europe for what it is: a coherent and manageable unit. (Asean alone has 660mn people.)
At the same time, one Brexit insight is wise. The essential oneness of Europe is too ingrained to depend on the EU. The Erasmus scheme for students, even in its name, which honours the restless Dutch scholar of five centuries ago, concedes that a pan-continental academic world flourished for ages before the EU. I took a train from London to Paris last week as though crossing a single city. This owes something to politics, but much more to the central fact of European life: the sheer geographic compression of people and places. The single market might be the most remarkable international construct of my lifetime. Without it, there wouldn’t be cheap flights, or a Poland that is closing in on UK levels of income per head. But there needn’t be outright fragmentation either.
This daunting century, as it wears on, will bring home to Europeans a sense of their scale. I can’t decide if Europe is so much like a country that it should federate, or so much like a country that it needn’t bother.
Email Janan at [email protected]
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