Europe @ 2.4 km/h (55 page)

From the Arctic to the Atlantic, this expanse of land is populated by Russians, Danes, French, Germans … almost everyone
but
Europeans. The exceptions are worth noting, and I have done so in a spirit of tribute and admiration.

The ancients called it the ‘known world’, but what did they know of themselves? Precious little, if Herodotus is right. Hear the great writer and pioneering traveller — who should have known about the place if anyone did — admit in exasperation, ‘Clearly no one knows about Europe, neither about the parts lying to the East nor to the North, and whether it is surrounded by sea … Nor can I find out the names of those who decided upon its boundaries.’
⁵³

I have followed Herodotus to those farthest shores. No one cried out when I trod on Europe’s extremities — Gamvik, the Lofoten Islands, Skagen, the beaches of Etretat and D-Day, the Tower of Hercules at A Coruña, the Pillars of Hercules at Tarifa, and Cabo da Roca. Only there I found the one boundary marker on which everyone agrees, where ‘the land ends and the sea begins’.

Maybe the Eurosceptics were wiser than they knew, and Europe doesn’t really exist.
The Paperback Oxford English Dictionary
lists Eurasian, euro, Eurocentric, European, Europeanise (and its cognates), European Union, the element europium and, yes, Eurosceptic — but look for ‘Europe’ and it’s not there.
⁵⁴

In general, I have discovered, people on either side of Europe’s national borders regard their neighbours as significantly different from themselves. The ‘bad neighbour’ policy is in evidence all over the world. But in each nation there have always been voices who dared to speak up. ‘They are no less human than we,’ they say. ‘Let us learn from the stranger at our gates.’

The European spirit is hostile to absolutism. It promotes diversity through the pairing of opposites. It is not a European trait to be ‘of one mind’. The prevailing spirit is friendly to duality, keen to compare belief systems. In politics this is reflected in the European invention of democracy, which might begin with a duality — conservatism versus socialism — although more than two can play as each pairing attracts its own opposites until soon the public space (the ancient Greek
agora
) is a cacophony.

Pluralism in religion leads to alternative visions of ‘ultimate truth’: Protestant versus Catholic, and both separated from the Orthodox faithful. Having found what happens when governments try to compel belief, Europe now believes in ‘live and let live’. But it learnt its lesson the hard way. In Lisbon I met a restaurateur who had left the Catholic faith in which she was raised, to become a Buddhist. Her former co-religionists might disagree, but her decision was surely in the European spirit.

As I suggested early on, the basic division of Europe is not between East and West but between North and South. In the standard typology, Northern phlegm — cold reserve — is opposed to the exuberant warmth of the South. But, as the reader may recall, I met with rudeness in France (where the rudest person of all was from Morocco). In the same country I encountered humanity (from an Algerian) and hospitality (from the member of an ethnic group Algeria had oppressed). I shared railway platforms with Germans mortified by late-running trains, an insult to Teutonic efficiency; and found that the trains in Spain run mainly on … time (even if some no longer run on the tracks).

And yet nations do exhibit ‘personality traits’ — not invariably but often enough to make us say, ‘How typically Dutch’ or ‘Just like the French’. The Swedes tend to adopt a quiet demeanour, as Andreas Edvardsson said in Archangelsk. (Though now I’m told young Swedes at parties really let themselves go. Obviously, I was hanging out with the wrong crowd.) In this house of many mansions it may help to think of each nation as a communicating apartment where each family lives by its own set of rules. It is a great strength of Europe that somewhere within this warren of apartments you will meet a cast of mind, or a national attitude, congenial to your own.

Yesterday Europe, today the world. The idea of Europe began with the Greeks, and spread from the Greeks via the Romans to the lands of the Goths. But Europe, as we know it, wasn’t built from the South up. All along my route, from its Russian start to its Portuguese end, the Vikings had been before me. For all the nobility of Viking and Greek myths, both were warrior races. The hunger for dominance does not reside in one place, or one race — and has certainly not been banished from the human heart. Its presence ‘so close to civilisation’ prompted Ryszard Kapuscinski to call Europe, in a masterly phrase, ‘a bright Arcadia that every few years overflows with blood’.
⁵⁵

Arcadia the idyll, whose ideal is ‘the good life’. This Europe is not a piece of real estate but a mindset. The notion of Europe as a civilised place — by contrast with Asia, Africa or the Americas — has somehow survived two brutal world wars intact. The failure of that ideal state, Europia, to dawn quite yet — in Europe or beyond — has not dimmed a shared belief in ‘the good life’ as a goal worth striving for. Football, fireworks, flamenco and
fado
. The last leg of my Europe-wide slalom ride, touched by far too few glorious sunsets and far, far too much rain, has furnished some of its best memories. But what do all these have in common? They thrill the senses, tug at the emotions.

Throughout historical time the European region has been a garden beyond which you ventured into the wild and barren steppe of Asia. The garden is cultivated, the soil rich. Tilling it, or raising livestock on it, the European settles down and strives to tame the world — at first the world he can see, and later the world far over the sea. Blessed as the land is, Reason demands an explanation for luck.
Blessed by whom
? he aches to know. And the answer, spread by those with claims to special insight, is
Blessed by the gods
— Norse, Greek, Germanic — and, later, by God Himself.

Claiming God was on their side, and that they had a civilising mission, European-descended societies in Australia, and the Americas North and South (much later in Africa), came to dominate non-European communities. The justification claimed for this domination — a justification must always be found — was that the occupied races were sub-human or savage; like the plants in Europe’s Eden or the beasts on its farms, they needed to be tamed … for their own good, of course.

Europeanisation of the globe remains a work in progress. It was Mike Holland, my English fellow traveller in Bavaria, who pointed out that the little specks of purple on the obverse of euro currency notes represent French Polynesia, Reunion and French Guiana, making European currency legal tender in parts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as in a corner of tropical South America. The European dream of a ‘good life’ could not be sustained without non-European immigrants or refugees — Iraqis, Egyptians, Algerians, Bangladeshis — who work for the Club of Europe but can never hope to join. Many of the members, as it happens, aren’t the least bit clubbable.

How many self-identifying Europeans are there in Europe? Several tens of thousands, it would appear, perhaps fewer. They could make up a small nation of their own — and, in the sense that they transcend national borders, they do. There was the Dutchwoman working in tourist information at a Brussels railway station; Eugenio, the Spanish restaurateur of French and Portuguese parentage; a Catalan receptionist in a Barcelona hostel; and an Englishman living in Portugal with his German wife. To say ‘I am a European’, where national sentiment remains so strong, requires much more bravery than to say ‘I am an Australian’.

To be of a European mind in the 21st century is to lay claim to the world’s most exciting and long-running story — the Norse word ‘saga’ applies — one that has not only run and run in Europe but provided a template for the way most of this vast globe is now run. If we are all Europeans now — and exploring my own family background bolsters the claim — we must have been so for a long time. When we appreciate the arts and sports Europe created, our own good life, which we have worked hard to achieve and enjoy, can only be enriched by tapping into the source.

* * *

Runyon’s riddle can at last be answered. Which Europe would that be?
All of them
. The noble, the base; the kind, curt and rude; the unalterable fact of geography, the ever-changing mood. Even at the far end of Europe I feel oddly like Ulysses, long an exile, coming home.