On Monday evening I attended a concert at the Tashkent Conservatoire by the Conservatoire Students’ Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.
It was an excellent concert, with a series of show-pieces to show off the students’ skills. I always enjoy hearing young orchestras and choirs performing at this sort of level.
They tend to have a special fire, and an enthusiasm for the music that can be very exciting. Particularly striking were an extract from Tchaikovsky’s “Evgeny Onegin” with an elegant and strong-voiced M. Trichet and a chorus who were clearly enjoying themselves; and an exuberant piece – “Wedding” – by the Uzbek composer Tulkun Kurbanov.
The concert was to mark the presentation of this year’s Nobel Peace prize to the European Union.
It’s easy, when the headlines are full of the problems of the Euro, to forget how extraordinary the achievements of the EU are. It has given Western Europe, ravaged by war for centuries, seventy years of peace, and at its best is an exporter of peace to other parts of the world, through its programmes of development aid and through its political actions.
Its success is based on the idea that the prosperity and security of individual states are best guaranteed through common prosperity and security. Often that means compromising on the immediate interests of individual states. It means giving up some traditional aspects of sovereignty for a common benefit. It’s an answer to the traditional – essentially 19th century – approach to relations between states that saw them as a zero-sum game, in which a gain by one player necessarily entails a loss to another.
It’s not just international issues: the EU has set standards in environmental regulation, in human rights, in labour conditions, that would have taken individual member States far longer to achieve.
This approach of common responsibility, of pursuit of the common good rather than competitive goals, is what we need in the face of global problems like climate change or arms control. The EU, for all the current troubles of the Euro, is proof that it can be done, and that when it works we are all better off.