Pretending cartoonists

Some of us didn’t know excatly what they were promised to, when the first day of the EYMD workshops begun.  Like me. I simply thought  “Teasing Europe” sounds interesting and political caricatures even more so. However, I didn’t know that it’s going to be about cartoons. I have very few cartoons in my bookshell, except the political satire Persepolis (which is, in my opinion, a great book). In the end of the day, I found myself talking about political caricatures and the decision-making process in the European Parliament throught the lens of cartoons rather enthusiastically.

It turned out in the first meeting of our group that we are the smallest workshop in the Media Days – only seven young media workers altogether. Almost no-one knew how to draw but everyone liked cartoons and are amused by them occacionally, though. We all agreed that there are so many things one can say by just a single drawing, whereas dozens of words would be needed otherwise. “One picture is able to tell more than a thousand words”, as the expression goes. By participating to the workshop, this wisdom showed its meaningfulness in reality.

Member of the European Parliament, Elly de Groen-Kouwenhoven has worked as a journalist, essayist and commentator. She is also a member of the Group of the Greens here at the European Parliament. She has published i.e.  political cartoons, such as “a Dictator’s Manual” she gave us in three different languages. This experienced lady has strong opinions and is not afraid to express them in front of the public. We were impressed by her general straight-forwardness and fearless way of challenging traditional ways of making politics within the EU parliament. She has fresh ideas and an enthusiastic attitude towards “making the world a bit better”. An idealist, in a word. It’s a pity that she has decided to leave the European parliament – her kind of idealism is very much needed here. International politics are often quite ceremonial and the political system changes rather slowly. Someone needs to shatter it a little bit from the inside. She told us, however, that she will continue to struggle for the things she believes in, such as the dangerous nature of nuclear-based weapons. She strongly believes that there is some much toxic substances in the Iraqi soil, for example, that it’s practically a lost case. Even though her evaluation of some corners of the world made us sad, we are glad that there are persuasive and critical MEP’s who don’t take anything as such but tries to do his/her best to find out the other angle of the conventional truth. Al Gore material? Maybe.

Political cartoons are powerful when it comes to political communication. By the help of laughter, we make sense of the world around us especially when the state of things is not pleasing us. We can make fun of delicate issues by the help of caricatures and let the universal nature of human sense of humour unite us a little bit. However, there is always the danger of misinterpretation. Some issues are especially delicate, as we very well remember what happened a few years back with some caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. What happened then, reminded us of the power of the image. Humour can be either an uniting or a separating indicative. I certainly hope we have worked for the first option here in Brussels. It has turned out during this workshop that it’s actually quite difficult to summarize the challenges in the European Union decision-making process into simple drawings. However, if we manage to raise a little smile on your faces, at least for a short while, we have succeeded in something. If we can laugh to ourselves, we can’t be far from working together to evolve and make this little continent a little bit better plca to live in. An idealist thought? Perhaps so. In the end, we are entitled to being politically incorrect.

Eeva & Cecilia, Anastasia, Clare, Elisenda, Adam, Daniel and Emmanuel