To put it bluntly right from the start, so there are no misunderstandings, to preserve myself from being unveiled as a phoney: I cannot rely on my knowledge of European issues to distinguish myself as a blogger.
Or I can – but I would not be distinguishing myself to my advantage…. mhmm
So after taking a little while to think about it (!!!), I realised that the only way to go for me was to let go of my journalistic ambitions… Being a journalism student it was legitimate to want to write journalistic articles, but in the end it comes out that for one thing it would be inappropriate to such a competition, and , well, I don’t think I would be any good at it. Truthfully, I don’t have the time (nor sufficient desire?) to do the journalistic work it requires.
That said… I can begin to speak a little bit more freely about what I see when I look at the EU (and the news).
What obsesses/ interests me the most about the EU is how we (Europeans) are all at once close and different from each other…
Having grown up in Africa and America, as a child I used to have quite a rough understanding of Europe and I thought EU countries were all pretty similar to France, where I was born (apart from the languages- I did pick that up).
I guess historically and now politically the similarities are indeed important… and celebrated.
But I think I have for a long time thought our cultures were closer than they actually are. I am certainly not saying that I wish everyone was more like the French (… no !). It’s just that I have always found it difficult to understand just how close or far EU countries are from each other, culturally speaking.
And really interesting to look into. No? In fact why aren’t we sharing and comparing more ?
Not to mention how great a more dynamic EU “cultural material sharing” could be for our artistic scenes…
We do have some things:
Arte is a great channel for comparing, contrasting, mixing French pretention with German severity…. (Joke- it really is a great channel)
Erasmus of course is fab…
(…should I mention the eurovision ?)
Am I missing a lot ?
Sometimes I think it is sad that our main source of common (popular) culture has become the US.
(16 votes, average: 3.63 out of 5)
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