Le jardin et la jungle
The work of journalist Edwy Plenel, former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Monde and co-founder of the website Mediapart, can generally be described as beautifully written, eruditely argued and militant in tone. And this book is no departure from the norm, although some of its statements could do with some qualification. It draws its title from the unfortunate metaphor used by the former High Representative of the EU, Josep Borrell, in a speech in Bruges on 13 October 2022. In his inaugural address to the new European Diplomatic Academy, the Spaniard likened Europe to a garden surrounded by a (by definition, threatening) jungle. And it is this caricature, with its far-right undertones, that the author sets out to denounce, while stressing that it is present throughout the collective subconscious. Its roots reach into the darkest pages of European history – from slavery to nazism via colonialism – and the author identifies offshoots of this in the European anti-migration policy, theories of “great replacement” and the “clash of civilisations” and even the conflict in the Middle East.
“Unless and until Europe and, with Europe, its political expression, the West, give up their desire for power, they will rally against them the resentment of all the people who have, over the last five centuries, lived the bitter experience of their domination. For the jungle spoken of in the Bruges speech is none other than our own, produced by blind conquest and exploitation. And far from being an exemplary model, our garden has been the breeding ground for the very worst kind of barbarism, where, in the name of identities superior to others, the crime of genocide has been committed”, writes Plenel, urging the Europeans to put an end to this “mindset of superiority and power” and to return to a “Europe that respects the fragility of the world and of life” (our translation throughout). “In other words, promoting a radically alternate mindset that it simply democratic and social, egalitarian and humanist, but also ecological, non-colonial, feminist, anti-imperialist, welcoming, concerned for minorities and the excluded, tolerating no discrimination, refusing to impose its own laws on the rest of the world”, he explains.
Stressing that one of the recitals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948 states that it is “essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, the author argues that “this provision, which makes it lawful to resist injustice, sums up the terrible contradiction that was bequeathed to the world then, firstly in the suffering of the Palestinian people with the Nakba, the enforced exodus of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine”. “By recognising Israel, Europe, and the West with it, was repairing the crime committed on its continent against the Jewish people, but did so by placing the burden onto the shoulders of other people, the Palestinians. Hence the indifference that allowed the genocide to happen did not go away, it just found other victims”, he writes.
Further on in the text, he adds: “until the Israeli leaders tackle head-on the original injustice committed against the Palestinians, until they stop persisting in prolonging it and making it worse by occupying and colonising the Palestinian territories (in violation, among other things, of resolutions adopted by the UN since the annexations of 1967), as long as they continue doggedly to deny the Palestinian people the right to live in a sovereign state (in breach of the Oslo Agreements of 1993), history will stumble and repeat itself. As has been shown by the unprecedented martyrdom suffered by the Palestinian people (…), this repetition could well be unlimited. If confirmation were necessary, Israel’s allies had it on 18 July 2024, in the midst of war, when the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, voted by an overwhelming majority against creating a Palestinian state, which it described as an ‘existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens’. This vote was a slap in the face to the Western powers and their usual diplomatic litany on the subject of the ‘two-state solution’”.
Criticising the “cynical hypocrisy of the nations who claim for themselves the privilege of the universal, the law, what is fair and what is good”, Plenel speaks out against the “uncontested fact that the current French, European and US leaders do not grant the same significance to international law when it is the fate of the Ukrainian people at stake or that of the Palestinians”. He goes on to point out that “in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, a veritable avalanche of diplomatic consequence, economic sanctions and military support. In response to the war of extermination unleashed by Israel upon the Palestinian population, the slaughter of civilians, including children, the destruction of an entire society, the ravages of famine, a blatant crime against humanity to drive the Palestinians from their land, nothing but vague calls for restraint and belated humanitarian actions, but nothing to put a stop to it; in fact, quite the contrary, as the Israeli army continued to benefit from Western aid, including military aid, and the unstinting support of the United States of America. International law cannot be divided. We cannot support the Ukrainian population whilst abandoning the Palestinians any more than we can defend the Palestinian cause whilst deserting the Ukrainian cause. In both cases, the same principles are at stake and are no longer worth anything if they are of variable geometry. This guiding principle is the only thing that can build ramparts against Vladimir Putin and his ilk, against a threat that is not only imperialistic, but fascistic as well. In the case of Gaza, this has been dramatically neglected”.
According to Plenel, “the injustices committed against the Palestinians, accompanying the reparation for the European crime, has extended to the present day the global disaster of colonialism, which ought to be a thing of the past”. He goes on to explain that “colonisation does not civilise people, it makes savages of them. The resentment fed by the humiliation of dispossessed populations goes hand in hand with the enclosure of the colonies in a posture of conquering, indifference and inward -looking attitudes. The gearing mechanism is formidable and infernal in equal measure, providing the perfect breeding ground for the closeting of identities in which the community becomes a tribe, religion absolute and origins a privilege. Accepting colonisation, therefore, is tantamount to stoking the flames of a war of civilisations as illustrated by the parallel radicalisation of both sides, the racist Jewish supremacists of the Israeli far right echoing the Islamic ideology of Hamas and its allies in the negation of the diversity of Palestinian society”.
Quoting the Martinique-born author Frantz Fanon, who wrote The Wretched of the Earth – “Europe has declined all humanity and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness. She has only shown herself parsimonious and niggardly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe?” –, Plenel observes that “this Europe, which proclaimed natural equality, then created the universality of rights, ransacked both through colonialism and imperialism [Fanon wrote his book during the war in Algeria: Ed], denying them to the people and humanities it oppressed and exploited”. He adds that “it is this devastating deception that the long injustice dealt to Palestine with the occupation and colonisation of his territory since 1967, and the segregation and discrimination of its people stemming from it, has kept alive to the present day, spreading a deadly poison through Israeli society, killing democratic ideals, as demonstrated by the rise of far-right Jewish forces, who are just as racist as the anti-Semites”.
The author argues that “the colony question reopens the French question and, through the place France occupies in Europe, this weighs upon the European mindset with particular insistence”. “More so than all the other imperial powers, the France of the present is profoundly shaped by its colonial past, structuring its relationship with the world and the way it sees itself. Like a violent resurgence of repressed instincts, its persistence and insistence have been thrown into sharp relief by the reactivation, under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, of the aggressive colonialism exhibited in the antipodes, in Nouvelle-Calédonie, in the disavowal of the decolonialisation agreements concluded after the massacre of the Kanak independence activists committed by the French army on the island of Ouvéa in 1988”, writes Plenel.
“Until France – and Europe with it – has put to bed the colonial question, it will remain at the mercy of the ideologies of inequality (of races, peoples, cultures, civilisations, etc.) that it produced and, consequently, of the political forms of perdition to which it gave rise (imperialism, racism, anti-Semitism, etc.). The political rise of the far right in France since the very early 1980s – the decade in which the Caledonian crisis reached its zenith – and the ideological hegemony gradually conquered by identitarian undertones – corrupting the public, political and media landscape – have their roots in this delay on the part of the French, where the unfinished past continues to necrotise the present and paralyse the future”, Plenel adds. He goes on to stress that “a people that oppresses another can never be free: the message that accompanied all struggles against colonisation still holds true. It is thus that the future of Europe, through the French colonial policy, is playing out as far away as Oceania, in Nouvelle-Calédonie. Either France persists in its mindset of appropriation, power and domination, at the risk of the emergence, in its hexagonal country in the continent of Europe, of authoritarian, identitarian and racist policies, or it sees this opportunity to shake off the colonial question, while supporting independence to the extent desired by the movement in Kanaky thereby paving the way for a new beginning that will elevate it and give it relief, escaping the demographic and social regression that is currently harming it and bringing it down. Europe will not successfully deal with the identitarian and authoritarian threats facing it unless it looks squarely at the colonial past that has shaped it over the centuries and moves away from the colonial presence France is perpetuating”.
“As is already the case in Russia and Hungary, but also in India, now the country with the highest population on earth, under the yoke of a Hindu supremacist power, as was the case in Poland and Brazil, as [is the case with the return of] Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, as is currently happening in Italy with Giorgia Meloni, the reach of the far right to the very top of the machinery of government and state always triggers a devastating effect for equality and the universality of rights”, the author goes on to point out.
Where they exist, these forces have already succeeded in imposing a narrative of closing oneself off to the Other, programmes of building walls and barbed-wire fences, an arsenal to fight migration, while “contrary to what we are told over and over again [this narrative], Europe is not experiencing a migration crisis, it is experiencing a hosting crisis”. “The migratory apocalypse is a phantasmagorical narrative, the absurdity of which the demography experts and statisticians of every international reference body, including Eurostat on behalf of the European Commission, have comprehensively demonstrated”, Plenel stresses. “While the Mediterranean has become an enormous watery graveyard, our continent is barricading itself, with Frontex, behind a wall that is as costly to us as it is barbaric, so much has it accustomed us to tragedy”. He illustrates this point by stressing that the agency budget has risen from 19 million euros in 2006 to more than 845 million in 2023, and that with a total envelope of 6.4 billion euros for the period 2021-2027, Frontex has the highest budget of all European agencies.
The author rightly criticises the fact that “security obsessions” have created a situation in which we are used to the “existence in Europe of camps where we lock away people who have committed no crimes, but have simply tried to exert a natural right, set out in article 13 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: ‘everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’”. Plenel goes on to state that “this is how we grow used to indifference to our own fundamental rights: to the absolute power of a police state, to locking up minors, in contravention of the rights of the child, to restraints being placed on the freedom to come and go, to the rollback of the freedom of liberty and the right to protest, the calling into question of the right to asylum, the right to health, the right to education, the right to housing, to xenophobic discourse and acts, to the criminalisation of solidarity, contempt for human life, the dehumanisation of the Other for no other reason than that he is other. Essentially, the arbitrary nature of inequality, to the detriment to the requirements of equality”. (Olivier Jehin)
Edwy Plenel. Le jardin et la jungle – Adresse à l’Europe sur l’idée qu’elle se fait du monde (available in French only). La Découverte. ISBN: 978-2-3480-8324-2. 203 pages. €18,00