BAUHAUS AND Brussels are an uneasy mix. Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus art school, which shaped design in the 20th century, declared that a building “must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities”.

A short stroll around the EU quarter in Brussels reveals buildings that happily violate all these rules. Post-modern monstrosities butt against merely ridiculous buildings with nicknames such as the Space Egg. Inside, things are often little better, with lurid colour schemes providing an absurd backdrop for serious discussion and layouts straight out of Maurits Escher’s paintings of “impossible constructions”. Bauhaus principles led to the iPhone, a triumph of simple design. EU design principles led to a building with floor numbers that go: 02, 01, 00, 10, 20, 35, 50, 60, 70, 80.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, believes a bit of Bauhaus spirit is exactly what the EU needs. As part of the bloc’s flagship “green deal” reforms, the EU will found a European Bauhaus movement to ape the influential design school that ran from 1919 to 1933 in Germany. “It needs to be a new cultural project for Europe,” said Mrs von der Leyen, speaking last month in the European Parliament, which is nicknamed Le Caprice des Dieux due to its resemblance to a cheese of that name. Although it was still nebulous, Mrs von der Leyen spelled out a vision of architects, artists and engineers combining as they did a century ago in Weimar Germany, except this time to help stave off climate change as well as designing natty buildings. “We need to give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic,” she declared.

Such forays into the world of culture had become relatively rare for EU leaders. When European federalism was in its pomp, Jacques Delors, the commission president who oversaw the creation of the single market and the introduction of the Maastricht treaty in the 1980s and 1990s, warned that economic integration was not enough. “You cannot fall in love with the single market,” he put it, repeatedly. But a decade of crisis then led to leaders trying to avoid divorce rather than increase romance. Until Mrs von der Leyen’s speech, calls for a common culture were unusual. Officials in Brussels hide under the desk when someone mentions the C-word. Within the EU institutions, culture is often a punchbag. In “The Capital”, a satire by Robert Menasse set in the Brussels bubble, the main characters are frustrated officials in the commission’s culture department. The EU’s cultural efforts are easy to lampoon and the new Bauhaus is no exception. It can trigger a cartoonish image of fashionable men in expensive spectacles designing ecologically sound window frames in exchange for tax-free salaries.

For others, cultural projects are the missing part of an at-times-bloodless project. The EU was set up in part to stop proud European nations murdering each other. It did so via technocratic, economic and, frankly, rather dull means. When it comes to culture, there is a feeling of caution bordering on cowardice among European officials. For an example, pull out a wedge of euro notes. Rather than founding fathers or recognisable monuments that may inflame national jealousies, citizens are left with pictures of windows and bridges that do not exist (or did not until one enterprising town in the Netherlands recreated each bridge over a canal as a tourist attraction). It is better to have a row about who goes on bank notes than a pallid, purely economic relationship with an increasingly powerful institution, argues Giuliano da Empoli, director of Volta, a think-tank.

Worrying about the appearance of bank notes rather than their value can appear divorced from reality. Yet the EU’s critics have few qualms about fighting a culture war. In relative terms, the country that spends most on culture is not France, with its world-class museums and general fetish for intellectualism, but Hungary. Viktor Orban, the prime minister, rails against art that is pro-gay or anti-ruling party. His government spends a colossal 3% of annual GDP on “recreation, culture and religion”, often on things such as the swanky football stadium next door to Mr Orban’s country estate. For eurocrats to bang on about culture from an ugly building in Brussels during a pandemic may seem like a parody of disconnection. But if they avoid the topic, the EU’s enemies will happily fill the gaps, argues Mr da Empoli. “A realist in Europe knows that it is not rationality that wins elections,” he adds. “A realist is someone who knows that symbols are what carry the day.”

Don’t let the devil have all the best tunes

An emphasis on culture can come with a dark side. Hungary and other small countries, such as Estonia, which ranks second in the spending stakes on culture, invest so much because they worry about disappearing. Strip out language and culture and there is little left of small nations, points out one diplomat. They are no longer alone in this petrified world-view, which is found at the EU’s highest levels. Eurocrats veer between hoping that the EU will be a global superpower and worrying that it will become an irrelevant peninsula. “This civilisation—Europe is a civilisation—could be clearly threatened by this geopolitical evolution,” warned Josep Borrell, the bloc’s foreign-policy chief, in a recent speech. It is a sentiment with which Mr Orban would agree. And that should make leaders pause. After all, a paranoid bloc is not a wise one.

If the EU is determined to embroil itself in a clash of civilisations, its leaders must ponder some simple but fundamental questions. What exactly is European culture? How, exactly, can transnational politics shape it? And what, exactly, is the point? After six decades of integration, the EU has created a relatively homogenous economic bloc. But creating a shared European culture is a completely different kind of challenge. Brussels can tinker, setting standards for buildings, shovelling money into theatres and helping small countries preserve their languages. But culture is a living thing, that evolves from the bottom up. It is beyond the capacity of any superstate to control. ■

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Learning to love the c-word”

The president of the European Council, said the European Union would decide in the coming days, based on the UK’s next proposals, whether it should continue with trade talks.

Speaking at a press briefing Charles Michel said: “It is important to take into consideration all our conclusions and I think the message we send, it is a very clear one – we are determined to negotiate, we are determined to reach an agreement, but we know that there are some difficult topics.

                <p>Also high in the Council's priorities is the pandemic, with coronavirus outbreaks exceeding 38 million worldwide and six million in Europe. The 27 leaders of the member-states are expected to discuss both the coordination of their actions and the creation and distribution of vaccines against Covid-19.</p><aside><strong class="trendig-now-label">VIRAL ΕΙΔΗΣΕΙΣ</strong>
</aside><p>Turkey's continued unilateral actions will once again occupy the summit, just weeks after the special summit on EU-Turkey relations, following Ankara's latest moves. "The European Council will assess where we are, regarding the situation with Turkey," a European source told reporters, underlining the "EU's solidarity with Greece and Cyprus".

At the same time, the same source noted that “the president of the European Council is closely monitoring the situation.”

                <p>"[This is] a fact that proves Turkey's unreliability but also its contempt for the conclusions of the European Union summit on October 1-2," he added.</p><aside><strong class="trendig-now-label">VIRAL ΕΙΔΗΣΕΙΣ</strong>
</aside><p>"The European Council is meeting again today. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is already in Brussels, where both he and the President of the Republic of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, will outline the latest challenges from Turkey to the leaders of the EU member states, with the opening of the Famagusta beach front and the sailing of the Uruc Reis in areas that overlap with parts of the Greek continental shelf. Especially the fact that both of these provocative moves by Ankara directly conflict with specific paragraphs of the conclusions of the recent summit," he said.

The government spokesman stressed: “Greece remains firmly committed to the position expressed by the prime minister since the first incident involving the Turkish research vessel and is summarised in the phrase: The challenges stop, the talks begin.”

He reiterated that exploratory talks with Turkey cannot be held under a regime of threats and blackmail. “There can be no exploratory talks as long as the Oruc Reis remains within the Greek continental shelf. Turkey can not pre-empt the discussion with a research vessel in the area that we are supposed to delineate. Greece confidently insists on diplomacy and continues its efforts to strengthen its strategic alliances. Our positions are already being adopted, not only by the EU but also by the United States, which has abandoned the tactic of equal distances and has denounced Turkey for unilaterally stoking tension in the region, calling on Ankara to end this pre-planned provocation and immediately begin exploratory talks with Greece.” He said, however, that “at the same time, Greece is doing on an operational level what it did the first time the Oruc Reis came out, what it should do.

The armed forces are acting in the framework of their mission to defend the nation’s interests. They have proven many times this year that they are capable of efficiently doing their job.” Continuing Thursday’s press briefing, government spokesperson Stelios Petsas referred to the government’s economic policy, stressing that “the budget for 2021 was drawn up in an environment of unprecedented uncertainty, globally, due to the indeterminable ending of the most serious health crisis of the last hundred years.

In addition to the uncertainty associated with the coronavirus pandemic, our country is facing the – also exogenous – challenges of Greek-Turkish relations and migration flows, as well as natural disasters affecting thousands of our fellow citizens, to whom the government has already demonstrated its support.” He underlined that: “In this unprecedented situation, the income of Greeks is projected in the basic fiscal scenario to remain almost unchanged for the two-year period 2020-2021. The government aims to overcome the crisis, with the economy and the society upright, while laying the groundwork for rapid recovery and high, sustainable, smart and inclusive growth.”