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Europe Daily Bulletin No. 12706

27 April 2021
Contents Publication in full By article 30 / 30
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No. 036

La trajectoire des religions dans notre histoire

 

In this short but fascinating essay, the former member of the European Parliament (1984-2004) Philippe Herzog discusses the role of religions in our history. “Believing that it is possible to relegate them in people’s private lives and get rid of them altogether in public life is a prejudice that is all the more harmful since, as Europe abandons Christianity, religions are on the rise elsewhere in the world, especially Islam”, he quite rightly points out (our translation throughout).

 

Around the whole world today, young people and their families are increasingly questioning the meaning of life as they discover the risks of disasters, on occasion getting the feeling that the end of the world is nigh. The reign of nihilism is still thriving, because the Enlightenment invoked in the West has not been regenerated: it is no longer part of society, such that the Republic is leaving the field open to extremists. Wishing to protect ourselves in the framework of a public order that is based on secularity as it was devised just over a century ago is reasonable, but somewhat anachronistic. One need only note the lack of interest in secularity as an academic subject and its low impact on the awareness of young people”, writes the author, a former lecturer in economic science at Paris X – Nanterre. “The awareness of the nations has become terribly introverted and the world is a melting pot in which everybody makes their own choices as they see fit. In France, like elsewhere, national education and the formatting of the curricula prioritise beliefs, legends and national prejudice. It should come as no surprise that the European Union is seen simply as an institution that most of us accept, but with no affectio societatis, which is threatening its very existence”, he explains, adding that “national history should be systematically put back within the context of European and world history, it should be subjected to personal questioning, to a way of learning that is connected to current events and imagining future ones. Young people should learn how to understand and love cultural diversity, to compare cultures and to understand the nature of their conflicts”. He is certainly not wrong. The teaching of history would benefit from being put back into a general European and global context, which would not only give students a better understanding of history by uprooting it from an interpretation that is dominated by contemporary prejudices, but also allow them to take ownership of its European dimension. And certainly, comparing histories is a powerful tool in the sharing of cultures. I recall an experimental school twinning project based around history that was launched nearly 30 years ago by the Council of Europe, for which I served as rapporteur. Primary schoolchildren from different countries gave presentations for each other of an extraordinary wealth and diversity, covering family, local, regional or national history.

 

The teaching of the history of religion must find its place because, the author argues, “it is an initiation into the most profound issues of moral creations and human representations”. “Imitation, revelation, the imagination sculpt spirit just as much as knowledge”, adds Herzog, going on to stress that “faith and reason have been coupled together in history to give meaning to the human adventure. He also quite rightly stresses that “if religious texts are revelations, they should be subjected to interpretation”. “In my opinion, they benefit from being understood as components of the social history of cultures, rather than, in a disembodied way, as eternal truths, abstract beings that live in the sky”, he writes. It is to be regretted that he does not refer here to the major contribution of Judaism, which does not hold with a single interpretation, a stance that has opened the door to schools of interpretation, debate and criticism. Despite periods of mystification, Christianity has inherited this and the seemingly rhetorical question “what is truth?”, which the evangelist John attributes to Pontius Pilate, should always resonate with everyone, whether or not they have faith. Many sects and full-proclaimed orthodox streams and most components of Islam nonetheless claim to hold the truth, rejecting any interpretation other than their own.

 

Faith and Reason were the foundation of European humanism, inspiring search for a fair social order conducive to progress. The social contract, secularism and civil law are central to our institutions. But these have been thoroughly undermined by the great mutations of individualisation and technique. The autonomy of individuals and multiple ways of belonging within our societies are needs that the public order struggles to meet. Indifference and practicality are setting in. Regenerating humanism is vital to overhaul our institutions”, Herzog writes. “In the context of the neoliberal capitalism claiming to cultivate its own values, there is a process of dispossession of the intellectual tools and modes of socialisation available to the human being. The market is suffocating public services, the information network positions itself between people and isolates them while shattering reciprocal learning, productivity and life. The ability to choose one’s own time and to represent one’s own future has gone. This capitalism is not only addictive for consumption: although seemingly liberating, it is becoming a capitalism of surveillance of individuals before our very eyes, in which the states themselves participate”, he argues, adding: “the ethics and vision of humanity are therefore in question. All spiritual sources should be able to work together to regenerate them”. (Olivier Jehin)

 

Philippe Herzog. La trajectoire des religions dans notre histoire (available in French only). ASCPE (contact@entretiens-europeens.org). 62 pages. €10,00

 

Initiative européenne d’intervention: opportunités et limites

 

André Dumoulin devotes a lengthy study to the European Intervention Initiative, which he likes to see as a “tool” which “still needs to mature and reaches cruising speed in 2021 and beyond”, but which has the potential to become (but when?) a “politico-military cultural springboard” for European cooperation in the field of defence (our translation throughout).

 

At the beginning of the next decade, the EII objective is for Europeans to have a common doctrine, the capability to conduct credible joint military interventions and appropriate common budgetary instruments”, the author explains, stressing that the initiative should “also contribute towards reinforcing their interoperability in all scenarios of force deployment, but also to bring together geopolitical and geostrategic visions, which are vastly different between States, depending on their regional and global interests”. He adds: “the EII should also be in a stronger position to deploy jointly tomorrow. It continues to be dependent on the will of the States to invest time and commitment in it. It should also be a support, an example or a model under a new dynamic around the importance of reinforcing the strategic autonomy of the European Union just as much as its sovereignty”.

 

Although nobody will argue with Dumoulin’s view that the EII has proven useful, to a certain extent, in recent cooperations (humanitarian interventions following hurricanes in 2017 and 2019 in the Caribbean, Takuba special forces in the Sahel in 2020-2021, maritime security in the Persian Gulf in 2019-2020), it should also be acknowledged that the EII is the latest manifestation of the Europeans’ immeasurable propensity to invent new frameworks of cooperation, imagine new instruments, and new institutions whenever they run into difficulties acting within the existing framework. These structures, which are usually launched to great fanfare and bolstered by a number of activities to accompany their start-up, generally produce very little, such as the Permanent Structured Cooperation, a pointless duplication of the European Defence Agency, to name but one example. European diplomats and senior military personnel have, with the complicity of politicians, tirelessly invented a vast talking shop, to which the EII adds another layer of complexity. Rather than thinking about new forms of cooperation, it is high time to rationalise what there already is. If European defence is necessary to re-establish our sovereignty, and I believe that it is, let us create it for real, with a European federal army with clear missions, under the control of the European Parliament.

 

The author goes on to reveal that “in a survey on European sovereignty (IPSOS, January 2021) carried out among European citizens from eight different countries, the term ‘European sovereignty’ evokes something that is overall positive, just behind (52%) the concept of national sovereignty (57%)”. The author goes on to specify that the “common security and defence policy comes top with 67%, whilst control of the external borders of the EU received 59%. As for the reasons justifying calls to reinforce European sovereignty, the terrorist threat was cited by most respondents (37%), ahead of climate change (34%), the public health threat (31%), the lack of weight of the respondent’s own country at international level (27%), China’s power ambitions (20%), those of the United States (17%), the digital giants (14%), Russia (13%) and Turkey (7%)”. (Olivier Jehin)

 

André Dumoulin. Initiative européenne d’intervention: opportunités et limites (available in French only). Sécurité & Stratégie 147. March 2021. 60 pages. Institut royal supérieur de défense. The study can be downloaded free of charge from the website of the Institute: http://www.defence-institute.be

 

Diomède

 

The second book in the Peruzzi saga, ‘Diomède’, which was published in Italian in 2015, has just come out in French and covers a period of some 10 years, between the fall of the fascist regime and the reconstruction of Littoria, now known as Latina. It picks up where Canal Mussolini left off, having told the story of the migration of the Peruzzi family from north-east Ferrara, along with 30,000 other people from Veneto, Friuli and Ferrare, to the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, which had just been drained. In the novel, which lends its name to a resourceful young redhead, we meet the descendants of the first colonists from the North, running the gauntlet of fascist reminiscences, the Anglo-American landings and routed German troops. Antonio Pennachi recounts them all as if in vigil, with a simple and direct narrative style with a great deal of humour and irony, which certainly owes much to the regional dialects, but which the translator has clearly taken pains to convey not only in its earthy vividness, but also the phrasing. In some regards, these little slices of life are highly reminiscent of Italian cinema of the 1950s.

 

Diomède’ may have the title role, but this is basically just a pretext or rather a spider’s web, leading the reader through a broad palette of places and portraits where characters from fiction and real people rub shoulders and a funny novel about a family meets solid political history. Over the pages, we meet Mussolini and his mistresses, Pius XII et and his procrastination, Togliatti and De Gasperi, in the middle of a crowd of anonymous individuals, actors or victims of these years of world war and, for some of them, civil war in Italy. And perception, stories and legends overlap. For Pennacchi, who was born in Latina in 1950 and was a labour of more than 30 years, a committed member of the radical Left following a youthful error of judgement that saw him join the MSI, has constantly interrogated History and how it is perceived, moving constantly between condemning behaviour and a form of empathy for those who carried it out. His justification makes sense: “in the absence of a chronology – without trying to understand other people’s reasons and the mentality of the periods of time in question – nothing can be understood, we make films about it and we take our own prejudices for reality”. “Everybody has their reasons, unfortunately, even the worst criminals who, deep down, are the same as us”. Food for thought … (Olivier Jehin)

 

Antonio Pennacchi. Translated from the original Italian into French by Nathalie Bauer (not available in English). Diomède. Globe. ISBN: 978-2-211-30257-9. 473 pages. €23,00

 

Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines

 

Cheery and subjective, but by no means exhaustive, this little dictionary may be both useful and fun for anyone, whether they are already familiar with African cultures or simply open to finding out more about them. Well written, which it owes to its authors, both novelists, essayists and lecturers in French literature – Alain Mabanckou teaches at the University of California and Abdourahman Waberi at the George Washington University – the work also benefits from quality proofreading, something that has become so rare as to be worth mentioning. The two compères, natives of Congo and Djibouti respectively, and who met while studying in France, explain that it is akin to a “bush ABC, a sort of portrait or, more precisely, a kind of mythography, allowing the reader to see and to take the pulse of an enormous continent whose cultural power is being deployed before our eyes”. Then, as a kind of profession of faith, they add: “we are aware that Africa is in the world and that the world is in Africa. It is the same for all other continents, as our destinies are so inextricably linked, for better and for worse. We reject a perception of Africa as a reservoir of misfortune or a continent under an atavistic curse and characterised by clashes between ethnicities”.

 

From A for Abacost (meaning “Down with the suit!”), the Zaire jacket imposed by Mobutu from 1972, to Z for Zemidjian, a motorbike taxi common in Benin, the book takes the reader on a stroll that is, at one and the same time, scenic, cultural, sociological and political. Readers can work through the book in alphabetical order, but there is also the freedom to dip into it at will.

 

The book lays great emphasis on the artists and authors of the continent and the diaspora. Paying beautiful tributes to such remarkable individuals as Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Amadou Hampâté Bâ of Mali (with a reproduction of his magnificent “Lettre à la Jeunesse” (“Letter to Youth”) from 1985), Mongo Beti of Cameroon, Frantz Fanon of Martinique, the Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma, whom the pair have met and of whom they sketch out a remarkably accurate portrait, and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.

 

Mabanckou and Waberi remain true to their firm beliefs, such as their unequivocal condemnation of “development”: “it is one word too many, a hollow concept that annoys more than one person in our friendship circles. Our hostility towards it is immeasurable, our rejection of it total. This word has perpetuated the domination of an entire continent for decades, it has seen a large proportion of the world’s population continuing to be disregarded”. They add: “development aid is a lavish scam. Far from helping to remove inequality, the money paid by rich countries to the countries of the South serves first and foremost to exercise political and commercial influence, whilst maintaining the infernal cycle of debt”. In the same vein, the authors refer to a thesis by Élise Huillery dating from 2008 to condemn the myth of alleged French colonial investments in Africa. They point out that barely 0.29% of the tax revenue of Metropolitan France is allocated to these colonies and that four fifths of the budgets earmarked for French colonies went into the coffers of military expenditure. (Olivier Jehin)

 

Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman Waberi. Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines (available in French only). Pluriel. Fayard. ISBN: 978-2-818-50631-8. 327 pages. €10,00

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EU RESPONSE TO COVID-19
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