Culture Shock: ‘Food on sticks is not a meal’ – Brexit, the first time it happened

Everybody knew we were in trouble. This fragile European project of ours had already shown signs of unhappiness and unrest. But nobody really expected the UK to leave. And then, bitterly and suddenly, she did – with an imperious complaint about the food.

Eight years ago, during the French presidency of the European Union, 27 cultural journalists were assembled from each member nation (minus France) to attend a week-long programme of arts and culture. From exhibitions nestled in the chilly Pommery champagne cellars, in Reims, and gastronomy demonstrations held on a boat on the Seine, to an open-air opera in Aix-en-Provence, experimental theatre in Avignon and a photographic exhibit in Arles, it was, as you might expect, seven days of unremitting torture.

I’m not joking. Programmed by a cabal of French primary-school teachers who had been inexplicably elevated to cultural curators, the Saison Culturelle Européenne was, like the European project itself, conceived with high ideals and integrationist optimism. In practice it all turned out to be erratic, ineffectual, divisive and baffling.

By day three, journalists who had been subsisting on finger food snatched during an infinity of launch events were close to mutiny. In a defiant speech, Churchillian in tone and stance, the British rep voted to leave. “Food on sticks is not a meal,” she said. And, with that, she Brexited. It was hardly lost on the remaining 26, trapped together on a converted school bus, that we were living in a metaphor.

After Britain left, however, things quickly improved. The remaining countries banded together; the organisers became more attentive to our needs; flabbier elements of the programme were trimmed away; even mealtimes were reinstated. And, with that, we breakfasted.

Here's some food for thought. The EU has long understood itself not just as a political or monetary community but as a cultural one – "essential for creating emotional bonds to Europe", as the European Cultural Foundation recently affirmed in a typical pre-Brexit encomium: "because it is a cornerstone to building Europe".

It’s a nice idea, sure, with generous funds to back it up, and you see its evidence everywhere in arts centres, cross-border initiatives and junkets for cultural journalists. But how secure can anyone remain in this belief? When different cultures encounter one another, emotional bonds do not always grow stronger. They are often tested by barriers more impenetrable than language. Responses range from fascination to incomprehension to rejection.

Take the European Theatre Prize, which is sponsored by the European Commission and hosted (in its most recent iterations) by a different post-communist city every other year. This year's event, in Craiova, in Romania, recognised a diversity of international heavy hitters, including the Swedish choreographer Mat Eks, the Spanish writer Juan Mayorea and the National Theatre of Scotland.

The prize was founded to “promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples”. It honours that remit but, in its generous and gloriously good-spirited mess, perhaps not exactly in the ways it intends. This year, just as National Theatre of Scotland was experiencing a funding crisis and an organisational heave, it brought a huge delegation to Romania to celebrate its 10 years in business and explain “a theatre without walls” to people whose theatres rarely come without columns. Such huge disparities in funding, aesthetics and infrastructure promote understanding while buttressing differences.

I was in Düsseldorf at the Impulse Theater Festival when the result of Brexit emerged. German responses initially leaned towards faint bemusement; reaction from British and Irish artists living there was one of shock and disbelief. What, now, was the status of collaboration, co-operation and mobility between these interconnected cultures? (A company such as Gob Squad – half British, half German – must feel the rift profoundly.)

Impulse itself skirted close to its own controversy when a far-right German party was invited to contribute to a debate on arts funding with little challenge, and an experimental artistic summer school, high in liberal ideals but short on structure, seemed to devolve into Lord of the Flies.

Still, even in that “radical pedagogy” were instructive lessons: when a course moderator said something broadly offensive to international students, young Germans shut down the racist argument with force, spurred by a bitter history of division towards absolute vigilance.

That student intervention, in essence, shared the spirit with which the EU first came to life: a determination to increase respect and co-operation between its members because the alternatives, we know, are too awful to bear.

As for the 2008 Saison Culturelle Européenne, its remaining participants persisted long after Brexit, reforming our own European union, building lasting friendships and even leading to at least one marriage.

So not everything is a metaphor.