EYJA 2009 - Trip to Berlin

East meets West... and North and South

I love the linguistic mix too, and the small conversation groups that form based on a common or similar language: Czech and Slovak, Austrian and German, Greek and Cypriot. Most of us, however, can't pronounce each others' names anyway, so by day 3 we've given up and are simply referring to people by their country: "Have you seen Malta?" "No, ask Hungary"


By ANNA PATTON
from Brussels, BELGIUM
(EYJA winner in Ireland)


Where are you from? You work as a journalist there? What kinds of things do you write? What kind of radio station is it? More important than the names, which most of us struggle to remember even after spending 4 days together, is what brought each of us here. With one journalist from each EU member state plus three non-EU countries, that's a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity, and a lot of ground to cover.

The unity-in-diversity cliché

Looking around, I kept being struck by the simple fact of the way we look. We might all be European, but I don't think you could get a more diverse picture of "Europe" if you tried: from the pale, blue-eyed Northern Europeans to the dark and olive-skinned complexions of south-eastern Europe; our features, colouring, gestures, style of clothing, all mark us out as different to one another.

I love the linguistic mix too, and the small conversation groups that form based on a common or similar language: Czech and Slovak, Austrian and German, Greek and Cypriot. Most of us, however, can't pronounce each others' names anyway, so by day 3 we've given up and are simply referring to people by their country: "Have you seen Malta?" "No, ask Hungary".

There's a range of experience too, from the 19 year-old Estonian who has just left high school (and has already won two laptops and several trips abroad with his blog) all the way up to the 35-year Turkish journalist working for the BBC and finishing his PhD; with freelancers, staff writers and radio producers in between but also students and researchers. There's not enough time to hear everyone's story, but from day one, connections begin to emerge, even for me as someone on the edges of this profession: Greece attended a summer school at the research institute in Berlin where I previously worked; Portugal, like me, had also done an EU traineeship in Brussels; France worked with a former colleague of mine.

There must have been countless other intertwinings within our group, most of us having lived and worked abroad. There are some more commonalities too: mostly smokers, true to the stereotype image of a journalist, and while on guided tours of museums, we ask far too many questions, picking the guides up on any details they brush over, until they get nervous and say we'd better continue as we're running out of time. We're more alike than we appear. If ever the EU was looking for a genuine materialisation of its celebrated motto, "unity in diversity", we're it.

They're paying for it all

30 of us spent four days in Berlin with all our expenses, travel and entertainment paid for; the national juries of each country were also all invited to spend the day and night of the final conference in Berlin. As a fellow participant remarked to me in a restaurant one evening, while our cheering and clapping was drawing quite a bit of attention to our group, "all the other people here think our good mood is funny... they don't know they're paying for it all".

The EU isn't spending all this money just for our professional and social gains. The national media around Europe, when it covers EU affairs, tends to (perhaps needs to) home in on an attention-grabbing fact (often taxpayers' expenses) or the areas of failure or embarrassment. Promoting more in-depth reporting on the EU, particularly on enlargement, is what the Commission hopes to do. And I don't disagree: objective, informative reporting of the issues, the people involved is essential for the debate that will rage on for years to come about what the EU is doing and who should or should not join.

But there's an implication, and even more than this, that the EC is encouraging us, and the next generation of journalists and political commentators, to write only positively about these things. During our final conference, the EC representative in Germany Matthias Petschke talked about the responsibility of journalists to respond to those sceptical about the benefits of the EU, saying "you will have to explain [the benefits] to people, very often to those who take the EU for granted".

Presumably if we'd called him up on this, he would have denied implying that the role of journalists is to portray the EU in a positive light. Or perhaps he just meant the younger generation, the pro-Europe, Erasmus generation - perhaps these are the people who hold the responsibility, in his eyes, to explain Europe's benefits. Still, I found the underlying sentiment a tad patronising, and I hate the way that expressing anti-EU views, to whatever extent, even if only on one aspect of the EU, has become such a taboo.

Across borders

I don't doubt that the other young journalists feel as objective as they did before regarding the EU - I'd hope that we're not that easily bought. Presumably most of those who enter the competition are already at least moderately in favour of EU enlargement. But the trip does work on one level: meeting others from Turkey, Albania and Serbia as well as the newest member states, discovering that you have something in common with them, and then forgetting that they come from the "other side" of the border, suddenly makes those countries seem closer. And when these people tell you that to get a visa to come here - on a European Commission sponsored trip! - they had to go to the embassy three times and provide letters from college, from their employer, from their parents' employers... the borders do seem a bit ridiculous.


(Published: 12.09.2009.)