What constitutes the EU has been made into an entity capable of delivering far more than its component parts
JAN OPLETAL, Herman van Rompuy, Catherine Ashton and Leanne Caulfield – four Europeans, two men and two women, from Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the UK and Ireland, with different profiles.
Jan Opletal was a medical student at the Charles University in Prague when, on October 28th, 1939, he helped organise a demonstration to mark the 21st anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s independence.
Occupying Nazis opened fire on the crowd, wounding Opletal, who died two weeks later. His funeral on November 15th became an affirmation of national resistance, as thousands turned out. The Nazis responded by interning over 1,200 students in concentration camps and executing nine of them. Jan Opletal is widely commemorated in today’s Czech and Slovak republics.
In 1941, November 17th was proclaimed International Students’ Day in his honour. I was invited to join the event in Brussels last week as the 27 EU leaders arrived to select the new EU Council president and High Representative, or foreign minister.
Herman van Rompuy (62), an economist, has been active in the Flemish Christian democratic party CVP since the early 1970s. He is probably best known in his native Belgium for his effective consensus-building skills. It was these skills, coupled with his political affiliation and the fact that he comes from one of the smaller EU countries, which helped persuade Europe’s leaders to select Van Rompuy as their first Council president.
Due to the careful balancing acts that mark all EU progress, the foreign affairs post (which owes its awkward name to UK hostility to anything that smacked of a European foreign minister) had to go to a socialist.
Ideally the socialist candidate had to come from a larger state, and a woman was preferable. Leaders of Europe’s social democrats gathered in the Austrian permanent representation to the EU and decided upon the UK’s Baroness Catherine Ashton (53), who has impressed as EU trade commissioner.
The ascendancy of the centre-right means it holds all three major EU presidencies, Herman van Rompuy at the Council, José Manuel Durão Barroso at the Commission, and Jerzy Busek at the Parliament. Ashton’s appointment completes everything except the gender balance – big/small, northern/southern, new/old member states.
At the student and school student event I met the impressive president of the Irish Secondary Students’ Union, Leanne Caulfield from Lucan.
Four Europeans from very different backgrounds, operating in very different circumstances – yet all have contributed to the imperfect but comforting edifice that is our European home today.
I left Brussels on a French TGV for the five-and-a-half hour trip to Bordeaux, another illustration of our benign European reality. The train glides out of the European capital at 7.30am and whisks you to the station underneath Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport in just over an hour – faster than downtown-to-airport transits in many cities.
It circumnavigates Paris on a mixture of spanking new and clattering old tracks serving Disneyland Paris and linking with the Eurostar and French high-speed lines before racing to the Loire. The high-speed tracks end just outside Tours and the train continues at a more sedate speed to Bordeaux.
Work will shortly begin on extending the high-speed track to Bordeaux and on to Toulouse. Bordeaux will then be around 2.5 hours by rail from the French capital.
The more than 6,000km of high-speed railways built in Europe since 1981 have carried over a billion passengers. At least a further 10,000km are planned. Neither the tracks nor trains can be called revolutionary. They take elements of proven technology and blend them into a revolution in continental transport that’s environmentally sustainable.
The erratic and frequently less than perfect construction of the EU in the last half-century somewhat mirrors growth of the high-speed network. Proven elements are assembled into an operational whole capable of delivering considerably more than its component parts.
The mere fact of being debunked has done nothing to silence the Cassandras who warned, pre-Lisbon, about an EU superstate. The negotiated compromises that are the essence of democratic politics were dismissed as an “EU stitch-up” by the Daily Mail.
Europe has slowly built a progressive entity using the raw material of the countries, cultures and conflicts we inherited. Warts and all, it is a major improvement on anything we have ever known . . . and a fitting tribute to the sacrifice of Jan Opletal.