A wake up call for the West
In the ARENA lecture 16 February, the Dutch journalist Mak looked ahead at Europe and the USA in the 21st century and presented a powerful wake-up call for us, citizens of the West, regarding our self-images and the need to revise them.
The author Geert Mak presented the ARENA Lecture 2011. (Photo: Ragnar Lie, UiO)
In the lecture ‘Europe and the USA: Two historical experiments at a crossroads’, Mak glanced into the 21th century. He compared Europe and the USA in a historical perspective and our self-images.
Maybe it is about time for the two old great powers for a reality-check to see if the values we like to hold up still hold true, he said.
– Will we manage to handle the challenges from the world around us and the shifting crises domestically or are we floating like a chunk of ice in the water, unable to influence our own development?
A journey to a divided United States
Geert Mak is author of the book and TV-series “In Europe”, based on his travels through Europe. The fall of 2010 Geert Mak travelled through the United States. Mak used the ARENA-lecture of 2011 at Litteraturhuset to share his experiences from this journey.
– This time I didn’t travel through the USA one normally sees, I went of the main road. I met a divided people that have lost its faith in the image of The United States that they grew up with.
Frail self-images
The view we Europeans have of Europe gives us a warm feeling: A serene and organized law-abiding society with a good welfare system. But the economic and democratic crises of recent years have proven that the EU is a frail project. If something is not done – the union is not sustainable, Mak says.
Europe’s self-image as a ‘soft power’ is also frail. The EUs ability to portray itself as a soft power, spreading its values through globalization, trade and by being a good example rather than through force rest largely on the backing of the USAs military force.
We have to take responsibility
Mak is not a pessimist when it comes to Europe, rather he supports the project. – We all have to take responsibility for the future of Europe, according to him. We Europeans have to take part in and politicise Europe. The democratic deficit in Europe and the distance between citizens and the decisions that are made concerns us all and needs to be solved in community.
In her comment to Mak, ARENA-researcher Cathrine Holst suggested that Mak perhaps painted a too nostalgic picture of the western society of the past and ignores the progress that our society has seen.
But there is no doubt that the EU could need to improve its democracy. After all Mak is one of the few people I know, Holst says, who talks of us as citizens of Europe. There are few, especially in Norway, that recognizes this community.
Geert Mak
Journalist and historian Geert Mak was born in 1946. His father served as a Protestant clergyman in the Dutch province of Friesland; the family also lived for a time on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Mak’s journalistic career has included stints with the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, the VPRO broadcasting company and the NRC Handelsblad daily. As from 1992 he has dedicated himself increasingly to the writing of book - some journalistic, some more historical in nature. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, among which Norwegian.
He was invited by ARENA, Centre of European Studies, University of Oslo in collaboration with Cappelen Damm Forlag to present the ARENA Annual Lecture of 2011 at the Literaturhuset in Oslo.
The Annual lecture partly built on Mak’s much appraised historical novel ‘In Europe’. It was published in 2008 in Norwegian by Cappelen Damm Forlag under the title ‘Europa. En reise gjennom det 20. Århundret’. The documentary based on the book with the same title has been broadcasted by NRK on Norwegian television.