For twenty years, from 1979 to 1999. Before 1979, the European Parliament was formed by delegations of the national parliaments, but since then it has been directly elected by universal suffrage. At the time we all supported this move, thinking it would make the Parliament more democratic, but that’s proved nonsense. Before, there was more of a link between the European and the national parliaments, because the same people were involved; now that the deputies to one are not the same as those elected to the other, they have no occasion to meet. As a result, what happens at the European Parliament is unknown at the national level. You end up with this paradox: questions are discussed in Strasbourg, but when the moment comes for national assemblies to ratify the decisions made there, no one knows what members of their own party said in the European Parliament.

The newspapers rarely talk about the European Parliament either—in my case, the Italian papers wrote about my work there only once in twenty years, because a monkey bit me when I was in Zambia with a parliamentary delegation. Naturally, the decisions of the European Parliament do get publicized, but not what accompanied them—the debate, discussions and so on. The most interesting feature of the European Parliament is that representatives from different countries and cultures, with different histories, gather to discuss a single question; but none of this makes it through to the national arena; it is all lost, vanishing somewhere between Strasbourg and Brussels.

Looking at the European Parliament from a British perspective—but perhaps also, a future Italian one, if the ‘Legge Truffa’ is passed—wouldn’t one have to say there is one positive feature, which is the rule that these elections have to be more or less proportional in representation? So even if Italy abolishes any kind of proportionality, you would still have it at the European level.

In Brussels, on the whole. One plenary a month is held in Strasbourg, so deputies spend four days there. But all the Committees are in Brussels, and all meps are members of one or more of these, so they stay in Brussels two, three or four days a week. And supplementary plenaries are held there four times a year. Then there are regular meetings of the parliamentary groups, also mostly held in Brussels. Essentially, what you have is a band of nomads constantly on the move. In the beginning it was even worse: parliamentary meetings were held in Luxembourg as well as in Brussels and Strasbourg. Now that is no longer the case, but there is still a lot of shuttling between the two bases. Every year, a large majority of deputies would vote to say they did not want to go to Strasbourg any more, and that everything should be moved to Brussels, to save time and money. Strasbourg is much harder to get to—you have to go via Paris, whereas there are plenty of direct flights to Brussels. But from the start, even when there was only the European Coal and Steel Community, it had been decided that Strasbourg would be the centre—France insisted on this symbolic point—while the 1965 Brussels Treaty says that the city is the seat of the European Parliament. So the annual vote to move remained the mere expression of a wish. The thing can’t be changed, even if everyone complains. The deputies have to carry reams of papers, going back and forth between airports; it’s a terrible way of working.

Mostly it fragments families! Deputies are always away from home. There is a further difficulty, since not only documents but nearly 800 deputies, and twice as many officials and secretaries, have constantly to be moved between Strasbourg and Brussels. One of the amusing side effects of this is that there are plenty of love affairs—which is of course what happens when thousands of young people are dispatched to work in a city away from home. On the other hand, there are many ways in which things function better than in our national assemblies. The Europarliament has more modern premises—not like Westminster, which is just impossible—and has enough offices for all the deputies, unlike the one in Italy. The technology was from the start more up to date in Strasbourg too, and the administrative staff are very efficient.

I sometimes think it should be mandatory for any national deputy to spend at least a year in the European Parliament, to understand that politics can be seen from different standpoints, from other cultures. But in practice, there is very little human contact between deputies of different nationalities. In the evenings, everyone goes to dinner with their fellow countrymen—Germans with Germans, Italians with Italians; it is very rare to see people of different nationalities dining together. There are many reasons for this—they eat different things, at different times, they generally don’t speak each other’s languages. Everyone reads their own national newspaper: the Italians come along with La Repubblica, the Spanish with El País, the British with the Guardian, the French with Le Monde. There is no communal life. Once I tried to put together a Wednesday evening cinema circle, together with Catherine Trautmann, then mayor of Strasbourg; it was a complete failure—hardly anyone came, and when they did it was to see films from their own country. This has improved somewhat in recent years, but to begin with it was terrible.

Curiously, though, this national clustering is much less noticeable among the uk deputies—instead there is a rigid division along party lines. Conservatives and Labourites rarely have coffee together, as if they were two completely separate species, whereas Italian Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists, who are much more distinct ideologically, all eat together, play cards afterwards, and are on first-name terms. These are to some extent matters of ‘national character’, but there is also the question of different political cultures—different ways of speaking and of approaching a subject. Sometimes this ends in disaster, and the discussion breaks down because the translators are unable to continue; it’s not a technical problem of rendering Italian into English or German into Spanish, but one of cultural translation. Even discussing North Sea fishing stocks, for example, an Italian will pose the matter as a dialectic between fish, coast and sea, silencing the translators, while an English mep will be incapable of understanding a non-empirical speech. I have always hoped that a linguist would study the mode of expression of deputies to the European Parliament, because it would be a fantastic laboratory. There is much more homogeneity among deputies from the same country than among members of the same political party—it counts far more whether one is British or Irish than a Socialist or a Liberal. The hold of national structures is far stronger than any other affiliation.