L’Europe n’est pas un lieu
What is Europe? With strokes of brilliance, showing us around Denmark and Italy, the Danish novelist and essayist Jens Christian Grøndahl answers this question for us, without ever giving the impression that this was the point of the exercise. His answer is a shadow behind the places, personalities, experiences and works peppering this essay. It is a virtually deconstructed text, yet its variations make it what it is, a reflection of a single unit – one Europe – full of nuances and contradictions.
He pulls no punches with the picture he paints of Europe: “decade after decade, a flattering and unopposed culture of entertainment has become the mental sounding board of a consumerist society and even the slightest expression of cultural criticism is swept aside as if it were an elitist judgement call on personal taste. As long as Eastern Europe continued to exist with its absence of liberty and its shortcomings, Western Europe was able to look like a glittering party that everybody dreamt of being invited to. Once the Berlin Wall came down and the euphoria had faded, it became clear that we who had everything were also missing something. The return of barbarism in the Balkans highlighted our moral paralysis. The tragedy in the Mediterranean in recent years exposed it once again. The financial crisis came very close to destroying the single currency and the continent split down the middle, this time between the ‘irresponsible’ Catholic South and the Protestant North that lives within its means. ‘Europe’ is like a promise that should never have been made, because we are constantly finding new excuses not to keep it” (our translation throughout).
“Ultimately, Europe is not a place, but it should be a meeting place. A gathering that is repeated wherever the contradictions on either side are explained, without the illusion of one day merging. The love of a bull and nostalgia for a woman, a faith in destiny and a faith in the resurrection of the flesh, abandonment to beauty and a desire for freedom and responsibility”, Grøndahl lists, adding: “Europe is not even the slogan that writes the list of ‘values’. Because is not the most European thing about us the fact that we can disagree over what is the greatest and the most precious value?”
Grøndahl also devotes many pages to writing: “writing can be a way to fill the void, to bring language up to the temperature that we feel is missing in the world. A heat, a presence that is also synonymous with contact and liberation from the existential isolation of the self”. The concept of writing is particularly present in this essay as the author refers to Ole Wivel and Karen Blixen, Schiller and Kant, Sartre and Camus in an exploration of the responsibility of authors and artists. Olivier Jehin
Jens Christian Grøndahl. Translated from the original Danish into French by Alain Gnaedig (not available in English). L’Europe n’est pas un lieu. Arcades Gallimard. ISBN: 978-2-07-287114-6. 190 pages. €18,00
Comment peut-on être Européen?
The philosopher Jean-Marc Ferry does not believe in a big federal happy ending. In this work, he suggests bringing the citizens closer to Europe by redefining the purpose of the European project and reinforcing cross-cutting cooperation and coordination between member states.
Ferry does not hold back with his criticism of the inflexibility imposed by monetary union and is no more complimentary when describing the state of Europe: “instead of aiming for an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’, as is enshrined in the treaties, the reality of this project, to judge by the actual process, consists of relaying a form of globalisation that is leading to a subversion of the states by the markets, politics by the economy, the public sector by the private sector” (our translation throughout). Europe is facing a “crisis of civility”, which is affecting cities and is accompanied by a lack of social integration, high rates of crime, unemployment and poverty, increasing numbers of the workforce in precarious and short-term employment situations. This crisis is made even worse by a drop in both the quality and quantity of local public and social services and public transport, a lack of small and artisanal shops that are vital to community life and maintaining social connections. On top of this comes a “crisis of legality” (loss of power for the law, recidivism, penal impunity, the courts overwhelmed and a prison system that is no longer fit for purpose) heightened by the obsession of the legislator to pile rules on top of rules. “The regulatory and legislative compulsion, sometimes supported by court judgments that are, in France at least, almost crimes against common sense, conspires in a system of defiance, insinuating that the loss of civic responsibility is a fait accompli. On the basis of this implication, the politico-administrative apparatus is like a machine, continuously churning out standards that are supposed to regulate communal life or to guarantee that consumer products are harmless”, the author rightly points out. Finally, a “crisis of publicity” betrays a “want of decentring and a desublimation of interests”. “The marketing segmentation of the media space corresponds to a submission of agendas, which not even the news escapes, to the supposedly desirable public, along with a focus on more local and intimate matters. The spontaneity of the emotional is valued to the point that it takes precedence in public opinion as to what deserves its votes. What is right is eclipsed by what is good, as the obvious course of action seems to be to object chiefly to anything that frustrates desires or wounds egos, rather than things that infringe freedoms. Hence the repressive backsliding of politically correct thought and the corresponding censoriousness, denoting a degeneration of public rationality, which is particularly pernicious as it is accompanied by good conscience and operates on the registers of intimidation”, Ferry stresses, completing his analysis by adding that there is a “risk of dislocation of political society (…) by pooling the national space”.
The author then goes on to develop four arguments for his European philosophy: (1) “the first question to build a united Europe is integration in accordance with its own motto: united in diversity”; (2) “European integration should not just be about engineering (large market, single currency). There should be a properly political civic integration alongside an integration of systems”; (3) “to tackle divisive national sovereignism, political union remains the long-term goal, but European integration will be post-state. There can be legitimate European sovereignty only by dint of the co-sovereignty of member states of the Union”; (4) “to tackle supranational federalism, ‘European sovereignty’ must result from sharing undertaken on the horizontal plane of the collaboration of the member states and the coordination of the public policies, rather than a vertical transfer that would be tantamount to confiscating national sovereignties and subordinating them to a supranational power”.
In his model of “co-sovereignty”, Ferry suggests “unlocking the Eurozone” by setting in place an intelligent coordination of budgetary policy, whereby states in surplus would agree to a deficit calculated on their national budgets so that their internal recovery would allow states in deficit to pursue their own financial rebalancing. A President of the Union appointed by a highly complex procedure (each national parliament or congress would appoint a candidate. Of these 27 (or more) candidates, the European Parliament would shortlist ten, with the European Council to have the final say, by selecting the President from this final ten), would be tasked with submitting proposals to the head of state or government on budgetary coordination, multi-annual budgetary frameworks and, along with the President of the ECB, monetary policy guidelines. Finally, the author recommends an increased role for the national parliaments, but also of the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, in the EU decision-making process. (OJ)
Jean-Marc Ferry. Comment peut-on être Européen? Éléments pour une philosophie de l’Europe (available in French only). Calman Levy. ISBN: 978-2-7021-6694-9. 270 pages. €19,50
La bibliothèque du jeune Européen
“Transmission is in crisis: not simply the transmission of major authors of major works, but also the transmission of the very capacity for thought. The resulting malaise is blatantly obvious and central to the identity crisis Europe is currently going through: how can we face the future calmly when the founding stories and history have been forgotten, when the frameworks of thought have been taken apart?”, reads the introduction to this joint work by Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Travers, going on to summarise its ambition: “to contribute to this transmission with a selection of 200 works that we consider some of the most important in the history of ideas”.
In itself, the exercise is a laudable one and the decision to present an author and one of his or her works, together with a bibliographic record, adding up to two or three pages each altogether, makes the result both digestible and practical. The language is clear and many major authors and major works are included in this catalogue, which offers the novice some very interesting discoveries. Before diving in, however, potential readers should be warned that although any choice is arbitrary, the selection of works was made by the principal theoretician of the “new Right” and his friends. Without really unbalancing the overall effect, it offers a non-negligible platform to authors who are frequently rejected due to their affinity with Nazism, Fascism or the far right.
The chapter “the unity and diversity of Europe” dwells chiefly on its diversity and although we can easily understand why Denis de Rougemont has been included, it is harder to work out why Boulainvilliers and Maurras are in there. There is, on the other hand, no trace of the authors who contributed to the reflection on European unity, such as Georges de Podebrady, Erasmus, Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Althusius, Saint-Simon and many more. The chapter “Thinking sacred” is also biased, leaving out all major authors of Christianity and Judaism in favour of a panel of critics, primarily Celsus and Julian the Apostate. History, foundation stories, ideas and debates deserve a better transmission, but this should be based on a more objective approach and despite its merits, this library is not, as its cover claims, “the best gateway to the intellectual heritage of our continent”. (OJ)
Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Travers (editor). La bibliothèque du jeune Européen – 200 essais pour apprendre à penser. Éditions du Rocher. ISBN: 978-2-2681-0441-6. 667 pages. €29,90
Politics of Stigmatization
Taking as her basis the case of Poland, with which she is particularly familiar as a Polish diplomat, posted to Iceland at the time of publication of this work, Molly Krasnodebska describes the stigmatisation (suffered and/or felt) by her country as a latecomer to the European Union, particularly in the light of the crises of 2003 (Iraq), 2008 (war between Russia and Georgia) in 2013 (Ukraine). She observes that the Polish government has attempted to respond to this phenomenon, depending on the occasion, by making efforts to adapt to attain recognition or by challenging the rules that the more established member states tried to oppose upon it. The author seeks to draw a few general conclusions about how stigmatisation and the fight for recognition have influenced international dynamics. (OJ)
Molly Krasnodebska. Politics of Stigmatization – Poland as a ‘Latecomer’ in the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-030-51520-1. 248 pages. €93,59