This month's travels made me thinking about obscurities concerning living together. You see, coming from Switzerland, living in Belgium, seeing the EU from Brussels-eyes, traveling to Cyprus gives a little insight into divided communities. We all know how Switzerland works and functions though it is a small miracle to combine and integrate 4 languages (thus cultures) in one small piece of land. By the way, explaining Switzerland (our democracy, way of life, integration etc.) to outsiders is not an easy task but receives a lot respect and applause (ok, also raised eyebrows because we keep our integration an internal affair...). Hence, we can be happy having achieved that our Röstigraben (potato ditch) is not made of sandbags, barbed wire and UN watchtowers like on an island in the Mediterranean Sea. Then, you have Belgium, similar to Switzerland in size and population, but with a much clearer division of societies as it seems to me. Can you remember the last separatist party in Switzerland wanting to divide e.g. the German part from the rest? Can you imagine that the Swiss-French regions would want to 'annex' Berne in case the French speaking population would outnumber the German one? Yes? No? In any case, such questions prevented Belgium from having a common government last year. And in the middle of all this you have the EU institutions supposedly focusing on the convergence and integration of Europe. Unimaginable how this should work in the light of so much division and diversity, but the funny and good thing is, it slowly slowly does somehow just like Switzerland did :-). It's just important that we don't let only time have its share in this process but that there are also people working on this.
Have a great summer which is even creeping up in Belgium.
Matthias
