European culture

The book The Search for Europe, Contrasting Approaches was sitting begging for a home. I'm not planning to give it one, but nobody else wanted it, and there was one essay, in amongst the economic and foreign policy blah blah blah, that addressed a question I've had for a while: Julie Kristen, Home Europeus: Does a European Culture Exist?

The headline rule applies, I'm afraid. If the headline is a question, the answer is "no."

She's hopeful, and convinced that multilingualism will be its foundation ("calls upon the French to become polyglot").

"But tolerance is only the zero degree of questioning; when not reduced to simply welcoming others, it invites them to question themselves and to carry the culture of questioning and dialogue into encounters that problematize all participants. This reciprocating questioning produces and endless lucidity that provides the sole condition for "living together." Identity thus understood can move us towards a plural identity and the multilingualism of the new European citizen."

Like hell it will.

Endless questioning produces endless fuzz, and there's no mention of any positive statement; no central value or belief. Everything she describes is process.(*)

In a footnote she cites Augustine as saying that "in via in patria": "there is only one homeland, which is the voyage itself." I can't find that, though I do find that he said the exact opposite: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee." I suspect she doesn't understand him.

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(*) People often write about democracy being an American value. I'm not persuaded that's right. Liberty is an American value, and the democracy is a procedural tool that follows from, and is supposed to help ensure that.