PREMIUM
SILVIA ROMÁN
@RomanSilvia
Sunday, January 3, 2021 - 02:02
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Diplomacy & Geopolitics.
Christmas dinner, a matter of world state
Diplomacy & Geopolitics.
And impotence melted Merkel's iron breastplate
PROTAGONIST. London. POPULATION. 8.9 million. DEBATE. What have the experiences of so many Europeans in the once 'open' London meant for years and what will be the new role of the United Kingdom in the world?
Dear London,
You have definitely signed the divorce papers with the European continent.
As in any rupture, it must be respected, but it hurts in a special way for those generations who grew up with the British dream: go to the United Kingdom one day and study English under the long shadow of Big Ben.
In the late eighties, Spanish teenagers flocked to Ireland.
I wanted to go to the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Thus, with all its letters.
Thus, with the little English you learned in high school.
And I succeeded, like so many other colleagues: I went to study my first summer in London.
What do we find there?
To Europe.
London has been the heart of Europe.
We always point to Brussels, when we talk about the European Union;
or to Berlin and Paris, when we think of the continent as a whole.
But, until this past
Brexitera
Christmas Eve
,
London was the city that
revealed to you what it meant to be European, the western region to which you belonged,
the multiple values you shared with people from near and far countries, and the richness of the differences that you housed with them ...
Just by paying a plane ticket to Heathrow, you knew what the intensity of Southern Europe is (the Italians you ran into on the bus), the spark of the Nordics (the Finns with whom you ate at the fish and chips ) and those who needed to travel more (the Spaniards who, even having crossed the English Channel, looked at each other sideways because one was from Madrid and the other from Barcelona).
London has gotten serious with her umbrella and bowler hat, she doesn't want to be so funny anymore,
and has decided to isolate herself in the mist or, as Downing Street points out, has chosen to regain her identity.
"Sovereignty" is in particular the word that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson insists and repeats, waving it like a trophy, arms raised, full of euphoria.
Meanwhile, from the mainland, faces of "relief", in terms of Brussels;
sadness and melancholy, for those young people from Madrid, Stockholm, Warsaw ... who met each other along the Thames, who felt what it was like to be European walking through Trafalgar Square or Camden Town.
Now, our children will not grow up with the British dream,
but will get closer (already in the post-Trump era) to the hackneyed American dream: "Mom, I want to study English in California."
As in most contests, you don't have to look for good or bad.
As misunderstood as the picturesque British Prime Minister from EU lands, Boris Johnson has displayed a quality that should accompany every politician: being faithful to his electorate.
An overwhelming majority of British citizens gave their vote to the current
prime
minister to cast off with Europe.
Without hesitation, or sentimentality, or doing the math (how many millions has the United Kingdom lost in post-Covid European aid?).
"We regain control of our destiny." "The clock is not going to tick anymore."
How many lapidary phrases have been sculpted in the final goodbye between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Those of us who would have preferred to continue having them with us with their tea while we have a coffee, we are left with a grateful sound memory: with the litany of the loudspeaker of its endless subway - "
Mind the Gap
", so as not to put our foot between car and platform-, with the eternal songs of The Beatles in the stalls of its fascinating markets, with the afternoons of television at full volume by the Premier League, and even with the silence that shrunk your soul every time you took shelter, with your multicultural European friends, in its monumental museums, where your breath caught on every corner: here the Arnolfini Marriage, there the Rosetta Stone ...
And it was that London was not the British dream; London was the European dream
.
In the British capital, countless Spaniards, French or Austrians have decided in recent decades to stay and work after studying, but most of us returned to our respective countries with great empathy for the United Kingdom and an insatiable desire to discover and immerse ourselves in the rest and different countries of the Old Continent: the one through which you could already travel and deepen thanks to a language learned on some islands that in 2021 turn their gaze to the other shore of the Atlantic.
"We will continue to be the best friend and ally of the European Union", proclaimed Johnson this week, with his disheveled blonde hair and surrounded by sovereign flags (Union Jack).
Words that already sound like a distant echo,
with the EU freed from the burden of Brexit and finally focusing on its future
and internal affairs, and the
United Kingdom in search of its new role in the world,
as when it was an empire and furrowed with I power the seas.
But the international wind does not blow this time so in favor of your sails.
Pirates lurk.
Hence, we can only wish "God Save the Queen": God Save the Queen ... and the United Kingdom.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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