AN INCIDENT a few weeks backs aptly illustrated the impact that our one-year-old membership of the European Union has had on society. An employee at the CyBC had poisoned a group of stray cats who were being looked after by a colleague. When the police were called, an officer apparently reprimanded the culprit, telling him: “We’re Europeans now; we can’t do this kind of thing.”
The anecdote is a good example of our absorption of European values. They don’t yet come naturally (the cats were poisoned, and the culprit was upbraided, not because what he had done was intrinsically wrong, but because ‘we weren’t allowed to do that sort of thing any more’); but we are beginning to be aware of certain norms and principles that realise we ought to apply.
It’s un-European to kill cats, throw litter on the street, dump waste in the rivers, smoke in the office, drown our vegetables in pesticide, or any number of other similar things. The ‘correct’ forms of behaviour don’t yet come naturally, but we are vaguely aware of a new set of rules out there. And in time, such reflexes will become second nature.
This, on a very day-to-day level, is one of the greatest benefits of EU membership, especially for a country as small and geographically isolated as Cyprus. We are being shaken out of a lifetime of bad habits in a way our cosy political establishment would never have dared to contemplate for fear of upsetting any number of vested interests. And what is true about poisoning cats is also true about anything from sharp accounting practices, to slimming down the bloated public sector, or protecting the individual consumer from the monopolistic powers of giant corporations.
It’s easy to focus on the negatives: the interest groups that have suffered – from potato farmers to staff at Cyprus Airways (yet all the EU did was to expose the fundamentally uncompetitive nature of such business by stripping away the shield of protectionism) – or the fact that we still have a long way to go, in everything from institutions to mentalities, both at a political and an individual level. We have only been in the club for one year (a year has also coincided with traumatic political upheaval).
Things are slowly changing, and will change more and more, as contact with Europe becomes ever-more pervasive. Just the fact that so many public officials are so regularly going back and forth to Brussels, that so many private businesses are integrating more and more with European markets, will in itself break our isolationism and lock us into a greater whole, whose practices will in time become second nature. Just remember, even the policeman knows it, we’re European now.
