Anthem - Intellect

Anthem
their opposition to Turkish membership. The ‘no’ can be grounded in
rightist-populist terms (no to the Turkish threat to our culture, no to
the Turkish cheap immigrant labor), or in the liberal-multiculturalist
terms (Turkey should not be allowed in because, in its treatment of
the Kurds, it doesn’t display enough respect for human rights). But the
opposite view, the ‘yes’, is as false as Beethoven’s final cadenza. […]
So, should Turkey be allowed into the Union or should it be let to
‘steal itself weeping away’ from the EU’s circle? Can Europe survive
the Turkish march? And, as in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, what
if the true problem is not Turkey, but the basic melody itself, the song
of European unity as it is played to us from the Brussels post-political
technocratic elite? What we need is a totally new main melody, a new
definition of Europe itself. The problem of Turkey, the perplexity of
European Union with regard to what to do with Turkey, is not about
Turkey as such, but the confusion about what is Europe itself. The
impasse with the European Constitution is a sign that the European
project is now in search of its identity. 394
Žižek uses what he hears in Beethoven to reinforce his critical opinions on the EU
project. His specific reading seems to contradict the ‘empty signifier’ thesis he borrowed
from Cook, but may also be regarded as an example of Cook’s request for continued
reinterpretation to prevent the music from being appropriated by ideology.
Interpreting the European anthem
This whole argument is based on the larger symphony context of the ‘Ode’, but its
relevance to the European anthem is questionable, as the latter silences all the lyrics as
well as the Turkish sounds. The European anthem is thus at a significant distance from
the text that Žižek and Cook analyse. It is possible that the Beethoven context remains
an absent but still somehow remembered intertext, but one must also consider what
the anthem expresses as such, in order to see how relevant these echoes from its
original setting may still be.
It should first be noted that the uses made of the ‘Ode’ melody are not equally
divorced from the original symphony context. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is the
most significant context in which the ‘Ode to Joy’ melody is embedded, and from
which any interpretation of the European anthem necessarily fetches at least some
elements. But to what extent is it its location in this context that has enabled it to have
so many different uses, or is it on the contrary its isolation from this context that has
opened up such an interpretive span? This is not easy to assess. The expressive force
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