Of Anthems and European Identity

European flag outside the EU offices, Maastricht. Photo by Atticus Mullikin

It's time that Europeans learned their anthem. Problem is, it doesn't have any words.

Ode to Joy became the anthem of the European Union in the 1970s, but the profusion of languages in the EU and an historical aversion to German following the Second Wold War resulted in the decision that it be played without words. Originally, the movement, which is part of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, was set to a poem by Friedrich Schiller called An die Freude, "To Joy," containing the famous phrase, Alle Menschen werden Brüder, "All men shall become brothers." Ode to Joy, words or not, was never meant to replace the anthems of member-states.

I don't like my own national anthem, or at least, I don't like it for this age. The Star-Spangled Banner is an amateur poem set to a popular English drinking song. Its talk of bombs and explosions and military glory are well-suited to Independence Day celebrations, where many forget the blood and severed limbs of war, the people blown to tiny bits, and cheer the crushing of the British and their oppressive taxes which, in truth, hardly anyone ever paid. The British overlords were sent packing and local, landed Americans continued to keep the peasants under their boots. Today, the Bush Administration continues to exalt the tradition of war-mongering and tax-hating by raiding American coffers to pay themselves and their constituency at the expense of education, social security and infrastructure, and even the very lives of their countrymen. In part, I blame the bloody anthem.

It's not that war doesn't bring out the best in people. It's that war also brings out the worst, and no one knows this as Europeans do. They have seen, committed and been victims of the most horrible crimes in history. There is the Shoah and the Second World War, of course. But there are also centuries of warlording, empire-building, crusading, Inquisiting, colonizing, revolting and ethnic cleansing that have killed millions; all for the sake of ideologies that no longer exist and martial dreams that everyone has forgotten.

European national anthems are rife with militancy, odes to God-ordained monarchs and to "the Fatherland." La Marseillaise, which we Americans also play on our Independence Day, is beautiful to hear, but violent as hell. Het Wilhelmus is sung as if spoken by William of Orange, fighting alongside the Dutch. Brabançonne and La Marcha Real refer (if only in name) to monarchy, Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, Kde domov můj?, Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja room, Il Canto degli Italiani, God Save the Queen and Deşteaptă-te, române!: war, fatherland, fatherland, war, monarchy/war and war respectively.

If an anthem is the window to the soul of a nation – and obviously, many are set in their ways -- then why is the Anthem of the European Union a tabula rasa? Is it, perhaps, because the EU has fought no epic war, was conceived to promote cooperation and peace instead of war. Or is it perhaps that so many centuries of failed social systems and horror have left the European Union hesitant to put forth any words for fear of setting yet another standard against which to define "the enemy" or "the other?"

In 1993, Maya Angelou, my countryman, wrote a poem – and we are talking poetry -- for President Clinton's inauguration entitled, On the Pulse of the Morning. It was written as the voice of America, speaking to her people, but it might as easily have been written for the European Union.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
…
If you will study war no more
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and the stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
…
I am yours – your passages have been paid
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage
Need not be lived again

It continues to amaze me how many Europeans do not realize the incredible position they're in, or the things of which they are capable. The United States is in decline. My nation is being ripped apart for the sake of a few, super-rich people whose ideologies, in the end, are not so different than the kings, emperors and dictators who defrauded Europe, and the Star-Spangled Banner gives them a coloured flag and a martial theme to hide behind.

I recall Robert Service's Soldier of Fortune. It is set, appropriately, in a war in some bygone, colonial era. The narrator is surrounded by tribesmen with spears, who order him to deny his God or die. He searches his soul, and finds no reason, for God or country or ethnicity, to sacrifice his life. And then he thinks of his true love, many miles away, and of what she would think of her living but dishonoured man.

No! no! my mind's made up. I gaze above
Into that sky, insensate as a stone
Not for my creed, my country, but my Love
Will I stand up and meet my death alone
Then though it be to utter dark I sink
The God that dwells in me is not denied;
"Best" triumphs over "Beast,"—and so I think
Humanity itself is glorified…

Make no mistake. Service isn't talking about the tribesmen when he writes "Beast," for when the narrator refuses to deny his God, they set him free. The "Beast" is the thing in us, the thing with a nature for war, and the thing which whispers to us to sell our soul. No one ever really loved a nation-state, but rather those parts of home that that give us identity, that when we return from fighting wars, redeem us from the Beast.

The blank slate of the European Anthem has no language, has no words, merely the sentiment of Beethoven's soul-rousing spires of music, like those of the cathedrals that grace European cities. What shall be written upon this blank slate, this European anthem, this open invitation to define European identity? "All men are brothers," perhaps, or "Humanity itself is glorified…" Or shall it be yet another bloody, patriotic hymn to emperors and kings?

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