Fortress Europe: “the timeworn continent” 

Many characters speak of leaving but remain caught between lamentations of Europe’s troubled past and nostalgic narratives of national and regional pride. In their narratives, many of them draw on the “old Idea of Europe” (Amin 2001), presenting Europe as a civilization founded on Christianity and on the Enlightenment and racially defined as white. The way that Fortress Europe stages these narratives simultaneously invites critical reflection and calls for a postcolonial perspective on Europe and on European heritage.

“What I shall miss” 

The first heritage narrative that features in Fortress Europe is that of Europe as Christian. It explicitly appears in the chapter “What I shall miss (1) – The cathedrals”, and is announced through the sound of church bells that “start to ring, deafeningly” (p.9). To the main character in this chapter, the sound reminds him of what he will miss once he will have left Europe: “I shall miss them the most of all! Oh dear God in heaven!… The cathedrals. Our mighty, powerful cathedrals. … How I shall miss  them” (p.10). His celebration of Europe’s cathedrals demonstrates how in Europe, as Gerard Delanty explains, despite the process of secularization “the vestiges of  Christianity remain”, and that this “residual Christianity… is largely symbolic” (2013: 81). The character’s nostalgic longing conveys a sense of individual loss, but as Sara Ahmed reminds us, emotions such as nostalgia are not simply possessed or produced by individual bodies but circulate in the public sphere (p.92-93). Here, the  character’s nostalgia creates a community that identifies with the genitive case “our”  in “our cathedrals” (which simultaneously excludes people from outside that community).  

The “deafening” church bells could serve as a metaphor for the dominant place of Christianity in conceptualisations of Europe. Also, the Beckett-like dialogue brings an absurd quality to the narrative and creates distance:  

The cathedrals! The cathedrals! 

Huh? 

What about them? 

I will miss them most of all. 

What? 

Who? 

The cathedrals. Our mighty, powerful cathedrals.  

What about them? (10) 

When the second character suggests that the wool under which the first character was lying when he heard the church bells ring might have been from Kashmir or Chile (p.10), this calls attention to Europe’s place in a postcolonial, global world. In response, the first character stresses that the wool was “from sheep that once lived on the other side of your very own village. Real wool” (p.10, emphasis in text). Macdonald expands on this centrality of place, which entails ideas about “home” that in Europe are “highly affectively and politically charged” but that are also “multiply challenged–by  mobility, migration, those with ‘homes’ in more than one place and those with no  homes at all” (p.96). Lanoye’s character denies such contemporary realities, as these would challenge his belief in origin and authenticity. 

The notion of authenticity returns more explicitly in Chapter VII, titled “What  I shall miss (3) – Parma ham”. The main character in this dialogue explains how he will miss “real Parma ham” (p.47). His nostalgia for the home-grown and local points to the relationship between food and globalization, characterised by the homogenizing tendencies of globalism on the one hand, and by the new forms of identity politics this invigorates on the other hand (DeSoucey, p.433). Lanoye’s character completely ignores the effects of the global market on Europe’s position in the world. But his belief in authenticity is ridiculed by the second character who, in response to an exposé about Camembert, exclaims that he “cannot stomach Camembert”,  “[e]specially not the genuine article. An imitation, it can pass … But real Camembert?  … It should be outlawed” (p.49). This ironic response criticizes the commodification of authenticity in the European heritage industry.

By juxtaposing nostalgic ideas about heritage with ironic provocations of such ideas, Lanoye invites his readers to interpret the emotional celebration of Europe’s cathedrals and Parma ham for what they ultimately are: a desperate denial of a changing Europe. But irony not only depends on the attitude ascribed to the author, it also relies, Linda Hutcheon cautions, on the perspective, convention and community of the readers (1995: 10). The success of Lanoye’s irony partly depends on readers’ presupposed shared experience of heritage. In order to “get” irony, then, one needs to  be part of a community that shares strategies for interpreting texts and that can situate the ironic act in its socio-political context (Hutcheon 1998). When irony is not  understood, for example because the reader does not belong to the same discursive community, it fails, and this reliance of irony on context and interpretation is important to take into account. 

“Culture is what it is all about” 

A second heritage narrative Fortress Europe probes is that of Europe as the birthplace of modernity. In the prologue the character of the stem-cell biologist announces the arrival of the “New Man”, whom she describes as the “perfect European” and “Europe at its best” (p.4). In her later monologue she asks “What would the world be without our science?” and claims: “Globally, my best colleagues are the Japanese. When they go home, they are Japanese. But when they arrive in their laboratories, they become European” (p34). For the stem-cell biologist “Europe” is synonymous to progress and  modernity.  

A similar feeling of European superiority is expressed in the second dialogue, “What I shall miss (2) –Schopenhauer”. The characters in this chapter single out the German philosopher Schopenhauer as the representative of European intellectual heritage. His name is repeated fifty-six times, yet what his philosophy consists of is not addressed, which ironically undermines the celebration of Europe as a continent of philosophy and intellectualism. It is also ironic that the characters would celebrate Schopenhauer, the philosopher who believed the world to be a hell and humans to be irrational creatures, a philosopher who undermined many of the ideas that underlay Enlightenment thinking. 

European politicians are mentioned too: Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Waldheim, and Winston Churchill. But here these figures are not celebrated as heralds of peace, on the contrary: one character describes Churchill, famous for calling upon Europeans to build a “United States of Europe” so that Europe could “dwell in  peace, safety and freedom,” as the person who, “barely having returned home from the trenches around Ypres” and “nearly snuffed out in a gas offensive himself,” “as  Colonial Minister, ordered a gas attack in Iraq”; “They never mention that when they speak of the cigar and the peace sign that came twenty-five years later” (p.25). There are other sides to the story of European integration, it is suggested, in this way 

critically responding to the prevailing representation of the European project as one of peace and reconciliation (see, for example, Bhambra 73).  

Not that this character is the advocate of such a postcolonial perspective. His rhetoric reminds of populism and he defines European culture by what, according to him, it is not: African and Arab culture, both described in blatantly racist and sexist terms. When his views are challenged by another character, he puts this aside as the mere “politically correct prattle” of a “cultural relativist” (pp.28-29). The narrative presented here, of Europe as a distinct civilization with a superior heritage, reflects that of European identitarian movements and right-wing populist parties across Europe. The extremity of the character’s words is likely to have a distancing effect on the reader. And yet, repeating racist ideas, even if to ridicule them, is also in danger of resolidifying them. In other words: Lanoye’s “irony signals” may successfully invite readers to interpret the character’s racist words as ironic, but do not necessarily prevent these words from having an injurious effect as well (Butler 1996). 

In Lanoye, the idea of Europe as the centre of civilization is also challenged by the monologue of a traumatized Belgian soldier about the First World War, by the monologue of a Hasidic Jew about the Holocaust and through various references to Europe’s colonial past, interestingly primarily provided by the capitalist. He intends to go to Buenos Aires to “serve penitence” (p.44), referencing the violence Europe committed under colonialism, yet also because of a more banal motive: “If I must die, let it happen in a city where the tango rules” (p.43). His belief in the superiority of the capitalist system remains unhampered: he claims that without people like him  European civilization will perish, because “[w]e invented the community” and  “[p]eople like me forged a global peace” (p.44-45). Thus detaching global capitalism from colonialism the capitalist upholds the narrative of Europe as the place of peace and prosperity. Within the framing of the play, though, the reader is invited to consider his perspective critically. The Europe he celebrates is, after all, still the Europe he too wishes to leave. 

“Shanghai: here I come!” 

In Fortress Europe, Europe can only be revived, the suggestion is, outside of Europe. This “deterritorialization” of Europe becomes explicit in the lamentations of the three graces – the girl requiring reconstruction, the death artist and the misshapen mother – that constitute the concluding chapter. As a chorus, they bemoan the verdict of the tarnished Europe that they allegorically represent: woman is a “violated paradise / from which no man every truly departs” (p.51). The representation of Europe as female references the continent’s well-known myth of origin. Lanoye’s three graces, however, are far from innocent or virginal: they are old, disillusioned and licentious prostitutes. 

Also, while in Greek mythology the Three Graces function as the embodiment of beauty, charm, nature, and fertility, these allegorical figures are presented in negative and blatantly sexist terms. They ask the same question: does Europe, violated and torn, still have a future and, if so, where does this future lie? From a postcolonial perspective, the emphasis on the violation of Europe discounts Europe’s own history as a violator. At the same time, though, Fortress Europe plays  with the “implicit structuring metaphors that undergird colonial discourse”, which, Ella Shohat explains, tend to project Europe’s “civilizing mission” by “interweaving opposing yet linked narratives of Western penetration of inviting virginal landscape and Western taming of resisting libidinous nature” (Shohat 51). Here, the sexual imagery is ambiguously projected back onto Europe itself: Europe has been brutalized and, old and barren, no longer holds power. 

The girl requiring reconstruction wishes to travel “where the sun truly does rise, where the Enlightenment truly has been reborn: come, give it to me. In Shanghai,  Singapore, if need be in Surabaya” (p.61). This projection of a rebirth of the European Enlightenment in Asia holds problematic neo-colonial implications. Interestingly,  though, the imagery of the “Western fertilization of barren lands” (Shohat 52) is  reversed: Europe seeks youth someplace else. The misshapen mother, too, looks east to fulfil her wish of bearing a child at her ripe age: “Whether it is Shanghai, or Surabaya, or Singapore… I am going! To where women are permitted to bear children as long as they can bear to bear them” (p.56). The east, then, is exoticized as fertile (Said 5). Like the other graces, the death artist plans to leave Europe – “Shanghai is the future” (pp.62-63) – because it has become desolate and sterile: “The place must be the  problem,” she concludes, “Africa is pouring itself into us? Let them come. They have more of a right to it than we do. We had our chance. We blew it” (p.63). We could  understand this utterance positively as the “re-grounding of Europe, no longer as the centre but as one of the many peripheries in the world today” (Braidotti 99). But by projecting the future of Europe in Asia the graces essentially repeat the colonial gaze. Their focus is solely on their own bodies. While they imagine how Europe could go global, but not once reveal a more global understanding of Europe itself.  

Lanoye’s characters talk of leaving Europe and ponder on Europe’s future, but the Europe they imagine remains directed inwards and focused on the past. At the end  of the text, they are all still at the station somewhere in “the hinterlands” of Europe,  so that setting and title function as critical frames to the characters’ future projections of Europe. Through irony, dialogue and composition, Fortress Europe continuously constructs and deconstructs essentialist ideas about European culture, heritage and identity and invites readers to reflect on their own preconceptions and concerns. That this critical potential relies on how readers are themselves positioned complicates but  does not necessarily compromise Fortress Europe’s intervention in the dominant heritage discourses that circulate in Europe today. In 2018, Lanoye expressed his concern about how topical Fortress Europe, originally written merely as a “nasty and wry parable”, had become. Now, in 2023, when populist and identitarian discourses abound, his text seems more relevant than ever. 

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