The Invasion of Britain

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/opinion/beppe-severgnini-the-invasion-of-britain.html

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TORQUAY, England — It’s that time of year again. Every July and August, an army of teenagers, several hundred thousand strong, marches, flies, sails, drives and rides trains across Europe toward Britain. The invasion is peaceful, and meets no resistance. In fact, the British welcome it.

In Oxford, Cambridge and Exeter, youngsters from abroad fill university dormitories and housing vacated by students. In seaside towns like Torquay, in Devon, or Bournemouth, in Dorset, elderly English retirees mingle on the beachside walk with bubbly Spanish youngsters, sharing bad weather and indifferent food. If you’re middle-aged, you’re in the wrong place.

Some come to work, though most come to study. Teaching English and hosting foreign students is a sustainable industry that brings in $1.2 billion every summer and injects tourism-fueled life into parts of the country that badly need it.

But it also shapes the students, and not just because they learn English. These young people, largely from educated middle-class families, will go home and eventually fill the professional ranks of the countries’ economies. But they will retain a connection to Britain, and through it to the rest of the European Union. If you want to know what holds the Continent together, this is it, to a surprising extent.

These cheery young invaders have an official reason for being in England: to improve their English. And they do, a little, though not always because of their classes: The only way a 17-year-old Italian boy can talk to a 16-year-old Swedish girl is by smiling, gesturing and trying out his English.

If motivation drives learning, the Italian is on a roll. That girl from Malmo is the unspoken reason he has come all the way from Milan: she, and of course a first taste of freedom. The “vacanza-studio” — called a “study-vacation” in English, but in Italian the vacation bit comes first — is the one time Italian families let their children off the leash.

Students stay in England for an average of three weeks, and linguistic starting points vary. According to EF/Education First — founded in Sweden in 1965 and one of the largest companies that facilitates such transnational educational migrations — beginning English proficiency is high among teenagers in the Nordic countries, Estonia and the Netherlands; good in Germany, Poland, Switzerland and Belgium; average in Spain, Slovakia and the Czech Republic; and below average in France and Italy.

It all started back in the early ’70s. I was one of the enthusiastic pioneers, the first time in Eastbourne, in windy Sussex, and then in Edinburgh, in rainy Scotland, and finally in majestic London. Each year from 1972 to 1974, I journeyed to Britain to listen to Alice Cooper songs in cavernous discos with French names (La Poubelle — The Trash Can); to go to concerts at the Rainbow Theater, where a sassy David Bowie strutted his stuff in the guise of Ziggy Stardust; and to dodge heavy-booted skinheads who didn’t appreciate our attempts to socialize with their female friends.

In a word, Britain was heaven. We didn’t care if our English hosts in their semidetached homes had windowless bathrooms and viewed bidets as continental perversions. We didn’t mind if they ate as much for breakfast as we did for dinner, had dinner just after lunch (5 p.m.?!) and ate supper when it was time for bed. We enjoyed meeting other teenagers like us for the first time. We discovered Europe in the least European of countries — Britain. And we loved it.

Forty years on, nothing has changed. The British may have voted en masse for Nigel Farage’s Euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party in the recent election for the European Parliament, but Britain is still Europe’s exciting boot camp. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women come from Lisbon, Leipzig, Vienna, Valencia, Bordeaux and Bologna to make friends, fall in love and pledge eternal Facebook friendship to each other. Their obvious differences make finding out they have so much in common all the more exciting; the unlikely bond formed between a boy from Warsaw and a girl from small-town Portugal is the one most likely to last.

Claude Debussy composed “La Mer” in Eastbourne. Since then, generations of Italians, French, Germans, Spanish, Greeks and Portuguese have composed their own Europe there. In the past 10 years, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs have joined the chorus. This is a stronger, more vigorous Europe than the one Eurocrats craft, often painfully, every day in Brussels. And this is a Europe that will endure, come what may.

Beppe Severgnini is a columnist at Corriere della Sera and the author of “Mamma Mia! Berlusconi’s Italy Explained for Posterity and Friends Abroad.”