Barcelona, European city?

Throughout history, European identity is a question that arises as a concern, especially in the face of the threat of armed conflicts. This urge to reflect on one's own character is not the sole heritage of the inhabitants of the Old Continent; any collectivity hastens to define itself when it senses cannons and artillery. But our great European macro-state has much more military service than the rest of the countries on the planet and, by dint of suffering global conflicts and their consequent ethical problems, Europeans have ended up transforming the identity crisis into one of our anthropological hallmarks. As George Steiner already hinted in the arch-famous –and somewhat overrated– The Idea of Europe (an excellent version by Víctor Compta is available in Arcadia), the European is basically a person eternally anxious to find out their identity and who enjoys suffering for a collapse they sense is near.

During the happy 90s, with the testosterone-fueled rise of the Olympic Games and the brutal state economic growth, the Spanish left found it easy to implant in our neurons the idea of a European cosmopolitanism based on the mystification of cities. From here partially arises this text by Steiner, an apology for cafés (those places where Europeans like to debate, conspire, and share secrets) and for cities overflowing with statues where, in every corner, one is forced to dialogue with the weight of the past. Barcelona, ​​we used to say in those days, is a European city, because there are terraces galore and it is full of monuments with gentlemen on horseback, walls, and so on. It mattered little that we had no bloody idea who was riding the horse or why its walls had been built (or recovered).

The important thing, according to all that verbiage, was that we could feel like citizens of a common cultural environment; a Barcelonan was, basically, an individual who shared the same habits as a Parisian or a Milanese: he enjoyed vermouth (because eating late is a Castilian thing and for people who nap) and spending the afternoon at the Ateneu reading Proust or the European press, because everything that affects nord enllà ends up impacting the contingencies of our street and blah blah blah. Now it doesn't matter if that idyllic image is false because, although we intuit Steiner's requirements as something sugary, it must be stated that even nostalgia is no longer what it used to be. In my neighborhood, cafes are just offices where people go to currar for a while with their laptop in exchange for paying a doppio of seven euros (and if anyone finds a terrace where they allow you to have a coffee and chat for a while, let us know!).

 The other day I was walking, admiring A Francesc Layret, the set of statues by Frederic Marès that monopolizes Goya Square in our city. As happens with most monuments and sculptural spaces in Barcelona, our City Council has everything neglected: no trace of what the pretentious call musealizing a work of art (just putting a simple label with the author, come on) and the landscaped surroundings of the sculpture were truly pitiful. Walking along that path, you not only feel little need to confront the past, but rather to completely ignore it, praying that the pigeons don't defecate on your head. As for the rest of the European traits imagined by Steiner – namely, Europe is an environment where nature is made to human scale, in which citizens are children of Greek rationalism and Jewish spirituality – I don't even dare to speak, because Barcelona is difficult to walk through and looks very little to Athens and Jerusalem.

 Does anyone dare to identify Barcelona as a European city? Does it challenge us, even if based on absolutely démodé criteria, to feel European? These are interesting questions to ask now that we are suffering the incredibly boring grind of the parties on the occasion of the continental elections and that we are about to witness an isolationist turn by most states of the Old Continent. I write intuitively and based on a rough-and-ready statistic, but I would say that I do not know a single fellow citizen of my generation who declares themselves European, and I would say that this feeling increases even more in generations more globalized than mine, such as the millennials or Gen Z. Nor do I know if this is bad news. The only thing I can say, for now, is that the only place in Barcelona I know where you can quietly have a coffee without being looked at like an alien is the Romantic Garden of the Ateneu.

The adjective of the Garden had always seemed appallingly cheesy to me. But now I understand it much better.