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outubro 15, 2004
How Britain rose from its sickbed and became the envy of Europe. The European Union believes it is witnessing a new British ascendancy
[Fonte: The Times]
IN BERLIN, a thousand German music fans wave Union Jacks to a relayed broadcast of the Proms and Rule Britannia. In the Czech Republic, Tesco becomes a household name. In Paris, officials lament the British takeover of the European Union.
These are among many images that illustrate what much of the Continent sees as a new British ascendancy in Europe. Twenty years from the Thatcher revolution and a decade since the peak of Franco-German power, the former sick man of Europe has recovered to set the pace in a union that little resembles the version that reigns in the media and pub conversation of Albion.
In the view of much of Europe, Britain’s longstanding sense of inferiority, its perception of battling to defend beleaguered interests against a French-driven machine, has blinded it to a new reality: the British social model, business methods, diplomacy, economic affluence and cultural power are paramount in the new union of 25 members.
Less loved than admired, often grudgingly, Britain has perhaps not exerted so much all-round influence since the Edwardian age a century ago.
“The British model is very largely dominant in Europe,” says Nicolas Baverez, author of Falling France, one of a stream of books on French decline. “The French like to think that they are still the masters of Europe when they are no longer. The British refuse to believe that they are the new masters of Europe because they hate Europe so much.”
Britain’s lack of self-confidence often masks the country’s success as the pioneer of a looser, de-regulated, globalising, market-driven union. While Britons were anguishing this summer about giving up sovereignty under the new EU Constitution, much of “old Europe” was marvelling at London’s triumph.
Italy’s La Stampa newspaper said: “Blair’s United Kingdom has been and still is the lion . . . and it alone has won the bout.”
Germany’s Handelsblatt said: “The British have fought excellently and achieved what they wanted . . . the remaining member states, including Germany, have realised that and have long since accepted London’s diktat.”
The new image of the British as fiendishly efficient negotiators, diplomats and businessmen is especially prevalent in France and certainly excessive. “It is almost embarrassing,” says one British envoy. “The French think that we have colonised Brussels, just taken it over, which is nonsense of course.”
The sense of British renaissance should not be exaggerated. The old Franco-German core that created and drove four decades of postwar integration is still active. Tony Blair’s Britain may enjoy the highest per capita income and lowest unemployment among the big states, but is still seen in some of old Europe as a rough-and-ready place of social inequality and crumbling infrastructure.
Mr Blair’s alliance with President Bush over Iraq has also damaged Britain in the eyes of much of the Continent. The British Prime Minister is still seen across the EU as the most dynamic national leader, but no longer as the hero that he was in the late 1990s.
In many places, drunken tourists and football hooligans shape the local view of Britons as much as those universal icons Harry Potter, Robbie Williams, David Beckham and James Bond. It could also be argued that French football players, Mediterranean cuisine, and the arrival of European companies have brought the Continent to Britain rather than the reverse.
But there is no dispute that Britain has achieved pre-eminence, thanks to a confluence of factors, including luck, talent and timing. Membership of the American-led “Anglo-Saxon family” has fuelled Britain’s economic and cultural penetration. The English language, which has eclipsed French as Europe’s lingua franca, is the main vector.
More than 40 per cent of Europeans claim to speak English as a first or second language, more than French, German, Italian and Spanish combined. Over the past decade, English has come to dominate work at the European Commission, long a French bastion.
Big companies such as Thales, the French-based defence and electronics firm, Germany’s Siemens and EADS, the Franco-German-led aerospace giant, have adopted English as their corporate languages. The Paris Education Ministry decided this week to impose “international English” as one of the five essentials in a new back-to-basics syllabus.
Publicado por jpdias às outubro 15, 2004 11:51 PM