SPIRIT OF EUROPE, ARE YOU THERE?
The press: Paul Johnson
on the survival-chances of a new venture
DO WE need a paper specifically devoted to Europe, or rather to 'Europe', the whole concept of our unified future? And if the need is there, can a commercially viable product to satisfy it be put together? Robert Maxwell is not my favourite news- paper tycoon but, to do him justice, he is always willing to have a shot at difficult targets and he has long been determined to produce a European publication of some sort. His first idea was a daily. But that proved too ambitious. Even the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, with all their unmatched professional skills and clearly-targeted readership, have found it took much time, money and energetic ingenuity to establish footholds as truly Continental newspapers. Their experience Was not encouraging and Maxwell's own investigations forced him to drop his ori- ginal project. He has now gone ahead with a three-part weekly newspaper, published on Friday and selling here at 50p. There is a 16-page broadsheet of news and features, a similar section of business news which includes six Pages of sport, and a 32-page tabloid-sized letterpress magazine called Elan covering culture. Since Maxwell first thought of producing a European paper, the Iron Curtain has come down and the whole of Eastern Europe, including Russia in some respects, has pushed itself into the com- mercial calculations. The European has an Important story on its front page by its Diplomatic Correspondent, Ian Mather, saying that the Bonn government has offered to pay the cost of keeping Soviet troops in East Germany, since the 2 July East-West Germany currency union would otherwise oblige Moscow to fork out in hard currency, which it does not possess. This amazing turnabout is yet another reminder that Eastern Europe is now moving into the era of currency converti- bility and thus offering reasonable targets for Western enterprise. A paper originally designed to sell chiefly in London, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Rome etc., can now aim at commercially valid sales in Budapest, Warsaw, Prague and (in time) Moscow and Leningrad, which — I am willing to bet — will be called Petrograd again within five years. Maxwell is well placed by experience, some of it question- able, to exploit the publishing opportuni- ties offered by Eastern Europe. To that extent his European starts off with much better prospects than were offered two years ago, and a paper whose aim is to bridge East and West Europe, as well as to reinforce the Community idea, has a real role to play. Rightly, then, it kicks off with a multina- tional opinion poll carried out by Audience Selection in France, Italy, Denmark, Bri- tain, Russia, West Germany and Switzer- land. Its front-page splash was the answer to the question 'Do you want a single currency for Europe?', which showed that this was the choice of over 60 per cent of those questioned. I don't regard this answer as particularly significant since most people simply do not know what a single currency would involve in practice, particularly its disadvantages to them. More interesting, in my view, was the 'voting intention' for the first President of Europe, where Mikhail Gorbachev emerged a clear winner, with Francois Mitterrand a poor second and Chancellor Kohl and Mrs Thatcher sharing third place. I would have _ 0,, `It's a grass-roots revolt.' splashed this aspect of the survey because what it clearly shows is that a large number of people in all seven countries prefer a foreign candidate to their own current leader or his/her chief opponent. This applied even more to the Russians than to the rest of us: Gorbachev's popularity in free countries is not matched by the views of those who have actually experienced his `iron teeth'. What is significant, however, is that people in many countries are already beginning to think in supernational terms about leadership. Moreover, Gor- bachev had made his impact on West Europeans not by his record or program- mes — both of which are, in fact, abysmal — but by his personality, which is seen as friendly and reasonable. We are entering the age, in fact, of supra-European perso- nalities, and this in itself is a publishing opportunity, for it is personalities which sell papers.
The European, then, starts off with better prospects than I would have be- lieved possible a year ago. But I am not sure whether the paper's general philoso- phy is correct. It seems to believe that the most important aspects of the new Europe which is emerging are political, economic and financial. They are, of course, of great consequence, for unless we get them right the concept will not work. But what Europe lacks at the moment is emotional dynamism, something that appeals to peo- ple's minds rather than their pocket-books. The most attractive section of the Euro- pean to me was its culture-and-leisure section, Elan, covering the latest develop- ments in music, books, plays, exhibitions and fashion all over the Continent. Charles de Gaulle, the most perceptive man of our times — he truly saw the future when he spoke of a vision 'from the Atlantic to the Urals' — got it right when he characterised the emerging community as 'the Europe of Dante, of Goethe and of Chateaubriand'. I thought then that he should have added `and of Shakespeare', and this has since been put right. But he was surely justified in guessing that a united Europe would never come into vibrant life until it learned to build on its common cultural heritage. In economic terms Europe has long been a sound proposition and the removal of the Iron Curtain means that the political obsta- cles to unity are disappearing fast. But the new entity, as it emerges, will need above all a soul of its own, and that is something politicians and businessmen simply cannot provide. The physics of a united Europe are already there, but it is artists, writers, musicians and philosophers who will supp- ly the metaphysics. The practical problems facing Maxwell's new European may prove insuperable, but his chances of surmount- ing them, in my judgment, will be radically increased if his paper pays rather less attention to the ecu and more to the oikoumene, the common cultural assump- tions which have distinguished us for a millennium.
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