Dr Stefan Waanders (NL), worked for the Thomas More Foundation for 17 years, nine of which as director. He studied history and philosophy of religion, and has worked in Taizé (France), in a house for the homeless, as a bus driver, and in business. He has published on: Dostojevski, Guardini, Saint-Exupéry, the monks of Tibhirine, mountaineering and Europe. (E-mail: stefanwaanders@gmail.com)
Are you coming with me to get lost? I know the way! – Loesje
Europe puzzles me. I consider her as a perspective of hope. But since the drama of Srebrenica (1995) I can’t ignore the question: what is there about Europe that this could happen again? Europe and the European Union are not identical, but there is a relation. I am convinced we can’t afford a failure of the project EU. But the project has become bogged down and needs a new impulse. I am grateful for your invitation to dialogue on what this new impulse might be.
To begin with I quote a wise European thinker, Romano Guardini.
“When dealing with the essential questions of existence, it is more important to work through the problem than to choose a dodgy ‘solution’. Because that is often paid for by simplification and the living consciousness feels it and becomes suspicious. When the problem is unfolded in its true extent, our spirit knows it is being confronted with reality and that is much more beneficient even if no solution is achieved.”
For decades our world was paralysed by the softly killing perspective of a ‘brave new world’. Thank God we say goodbye to that future. We are living in a less boring time. Our future is very much unknown and maybe that makes it more worthwhile to live it. Under this condition we are confronting ourselves with reality and don’t shy from our contemporary challenges.
We are living in a moment of great historical changes. It’s not easy to understand these changes while we are in the middle of them and we need distance to see them. We have to do our very best to understand them and should try to read and understand the signs of the time.
I am confident that the direction which gives us perspective and hope has a name… that of ‘Europe’. Doing so I introduce my second point of unknowing. This lecture tries to focus on this as yet unknown perspective. It’s not the story of someone who knows the answer, but a very much an open-ended story; some raw sketches pointing in one direction we should move towards. I am looking forward to a dialogue with you in quest of Europe; an adventurous quest that should explore new ways – with a wink at the playful quote of Loesje at the beginning of my lecture.
Exploring the historical context
First of all: Europe is one of the five continents of the world. But it’s the only one that is not actualy a continent. Africa is a continent, so is America, Australia and Asia. Maybe it’s better to speak of the Eurasian continent, of which Europe is just an peninsula – smaller than India. So Europe is not clearly outlined. Yet it has become recognised as a continent because of her history and her own dynamic. Europe stands for values that places her under a standard that transcendents her and includes self-critique. And the struggle for the validity of these values is marked by a dramatic past.
Two years ago we remembered the beginning of a war a century ago – by some called the ultimate catastrophe of the 20th century. Finding the right name took some years. First it was called the Great War. Twenty years later it was renamed in connection to a serial number, as a second round started: we call it First World War (1914-1918) and Second World War (1939-1945). And some call it ‘The Thirty Years War of the 20th century’ – pointing to the other destructive war (1618-1648) where one third of the population in Germany died.
The cruel reality of the world wars had a different character than all other wars. The first round had an industrial accent and mobilized whole the society which gave it a total character. In the second round a systematic extermination of ethnic groups occurred that surpassed all imagination. This war ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, but not with a peace treaty. Really a different war than other wars. The First World War implied the decline of Europe. The balance of powers of the European concert, as arranged in the subsequent peace treaties (Westphalia Peace 1648, the Treaty of Utrecht 1713 and the Congress of Vienna 1813-1815) collapsed and didn’t work anymore as a principle or order.
European history shows a repeating dynamic trying to restore in a certain way the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages we had the Holy Roman Empire. In modern times we had different forms (Spanish, Austrian, British, French) until it fell apart in a plurality of national states all with their own imperial ambitions (Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy), each playing the beautiful wild beast trying to conquer as big as possible a part of the world. Because Europe is too small for several offensive empires, it resulted in the catastrophe of the world wars. The Peace of Versailles (1919) did not succeed in creating a new stable order. The Second World War nearly completed this European suicide. After 1945 this dynamic stopped. It seemed as if the name of Europe had disappeared.
At the liberation the name of Europe rose again. General Eisenhower gave his memoirs the title Crusade in Europe. This liberation just succeeded half way – in double sense. Because not only was Europe was split up by the Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1989: the east was occupied by the Soviet Union, while the west had freedom. Also it must be mentioned that Europe from a continental perspective ‘was’ liberated – passive form. Protected by a foreign power, western Europeans could play ‘sovereign state’ in their sandbox.
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk marked this period 1945–89 as one when Europe was absent. Withdrawing into an unreal climate, traumatised, incapable of facing reality, Europe tried to interpret her political irrelevance in vacuum ideologies. For instance, philosophical-literary existentialism with Jean-Paul Sartre as an icon. His motto that man is ‘condemned to freedom’ shows this traumatic sentiment of time. Man didn’t feel solid ground under his feet. Because what kind of freedom is it, if you didn’t fight for?
The decades of the seventies and eighties made a transition from existentialism to consumption. According to Sloterdijk, this was just another variety of post-war nihilism. Without any project, we were just driven by the rhythm of industrial innovation. Sloterdijk saw a Zeitvernichtungsgeist, where lack of earnestness became lifestyle and proclaming the world unreal became dogma. This was our post-modern condition. ‘Wir sind bodenlos, weil wir zwischen vierzehn Arten von Dressings wählen müssen.’
Sloterdijk saw an ideology of absence, where Europe wandered around in semi-consciousness. Used to being the master of the world over 500 years, Europe now had declined into political irrelevance. In this vacuum Sloterdijk observed the ideology of absence blossoming in Europe. Existentialism as well as consumption were varieties of a sense of the unreal in which Europe lived out her absence. Europe as a psychiatric patient in shock, was waiting for the moment to wake up and to have the courage to face reality again.
Problematic awakening of Europe after 1989
Then came the year 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. An exciting moment.
Up to now I spoke about Europe in geographical sense. During and after the Second World War the name of ‘Europe’ had circulated as a project of hope. A small group was the driving force. It started with the Schuman Declaration on May 9, 1950 – 66 years ago today. It was a quiet revolution. No empty words, but deeds, courageous and constructive. A united Europe was necessary to give peace a chance. This unity would not come immediately, but step by step. Concrete actions that would create a de facto solidarity.
And this solidarity started with a supranational authority for coal and steel. It was a courageous jump into the unknown. Not just an economic project, but a political project in-the-making with concrete actions of solidarity that would contribute to world peace and would make war impossible.
The fall of the Berlin Wall offered the opportunity to regain the process of liberation of Europe that started in 1944. Central and Eastern European countries were given control of their own destiny. They chose for ‘Europe’ by joining the EU and NATO. This extension of the EU happened after the Cold War ended. As the external threat of the Soviet Union disappeared, the urgency of European states to cooperate declined. With the rejection of the EU Constitution in referenda by the Netherlands and France in 2005, the speed of the political project in-the-making slowed down and became mired in bureaucracy.
Today, it’s up to us to recognize our common good (bonum commune). If we don’t succeed, then we’ll have chaos. The year 1914 reminds us that the failure to recognise the common good then, ended in the ultimate catastrophe of the 20th century.
So what kind of political power Europe will become? Some use the word ‘soft-power’. Is that a reality, or a euphemism of an absence of a solid peace and security strategy?
Since 1989, we have to admit some painful realities:
In the Balkan crisis, Europe was incapable of reacting adequately. The ethnic purification in Srebrenica still is a traumatic event which Europe could not cope with – the Europe after Auschwitz. Values are not just formulated to write down on paper, but they ask for historical incarnation, rooted in power.
The Libya crisis also lacked a coherent strategy. Firstly, after one week of bombing, France had to ask the US for help because she ran out of ammunition. Secondly, had we realized that Europe had outsourced the repressive control of our borders, for instance to regimes as Gaddafi? After destroying it, the stream of refugees via the Libyan route became out of control.
Thirdly, the weapons of Gaddafi started wandering through the desert, destabilising the sub-Sahara and necessitating a military mission in Mali.
If that’s what softpower is about, one might ask whether it is the continuation of Sloterdijk’s ideology of absence and Europe is not yet awakened.
There is a painful lack of planning in long term and strategic thinking, which we can’t afford. While EU lives in peace, our borders are destabilized and we are confronted with geo-politics at our eastern border – a geo-politics which some thought had gone now that we had arrived at the ‘end of history’. The politics of pacification by economic cooperation, leading to the EU inside, found its limits. We are entering a region of a different dynamic and Europe has no solid answer yet.
Is Europe waking up?
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a surprise. It was not an action of the West. Even the leaders in the west were surprised by this event and there was no scenario ready.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was also a surprise. As was the fact that it happened largely non-violently. The war in Chechenya indicates how it could have happened on a big scale.
Yet Europe still seems to be absent. Not yet awakened to the reality of today’s world.
Now I make a big step. Up to here my story had a focus on geo-politics, with the notions of economics and power. Let’s look now at the dimension of culture.
Cultural remarks
One of the important cultural sources of Europe is the Greek classical past, perhaps one of the biggest cultural developments in history. Here the quest started for freedom, sciences, philosophy, poems and tragedies, exploring the mystery of mankind. Some call Europe the ‘extended Greece’. But this should not blind us to a crucial failure of the Greeks: they did not succeeded in uniting Greek diversity into a political union. They spoiled their energy in the Peloponnesian war (431-404 BC) – in fact a Greek civil war. The political unity was in the end imposed from outside: firstly by the half-barbaric Macedonians, and later by the Romans. But this was a union without freedom.
At this point perhaps we should learn from the Romans. For they did not just exercise power politics. They also adopted a specific attitude which the French philosopher Rémi Brague calls ‘the Roman way’. The Romans had the fairness to recognize that the Greece they conquered had a much richer culture than their own. They didn’t destroy it; on the contrary, they embraced it fully. By doing so they gave it a new chance in the context of the Roman Empire. Maybe this is one of the greatest achievements of the Romans: their capability to accept those foreign elements they recognized as worthwhile and make them fruitful again. In doing so they cultivated a learning attitude. They did not consider themselves as superior, but opened their horizon for foreign influences. That is the Roman way. Brague discovered something we might call a substantial dynamic of Europe.
A new effort for Europe
Now let’s ask ourselves: what will get Europe moving again? An awakening of consciousness that faces the challenges of our time: down-to-earth, sober, courageous and creative, able to contribute to the (re-)making of Europe?
We live in a period of modernity characterized by specialization, dominated by sciences, technology, economics, trade and finance. I don’t negate all this, because it makes our living possible. But specialization tends to run dead in a narrow logic. It needs a counterforce. An old proverb says: sapientia est ordinare, wisdom means to put things in order. Or we could say: wisdom means that things are finding their own place. It’s a sentence worth pausing to consider because we have almost lost its meaning. That things have their own place, means also a notion of wholeness.
How can we learn holistic thinking again? How can we see the whole without becoming totalitarian? Not as a closed system, but one with a sober and healthy form of unknowing; an open whole, capable of withstanding tensions and provoking creativity. For our challenges today demand this kind of thinking very much, a constructive form of thinking connected with our tradition, one rooted in our local national tradition but also open to the bigger context of Europe. We should also involve art and learn from it.
For this effort we need a focus on a triple quest marked by the three B’s (in Dutch): Bronnen (sources), Bildung (formation/education) and European Burgerschap (citizenship). I consider them a kind of trinity.
SOURCES/Bronnen
We need again a quest for the sources of Europe; not as a specialism parked in under departments like ‘education’ or ‘European studies’, but as part of our common interest, the bonum commune. The three cities of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome are perhaps symbols of past cultures, yet still European tradition is the ongoing dialogue with these traditions in relation to today problems.
This quest involves a continuous dialogue with the past – a broken past. Europe shows us a violated face, and the traces of these wounds are part of it. The brokenness of the Latin (west) and Orthodox (east) parts; the Protestant (north) and Catholic (south) parts; and the religious and secular divide.
The memories of these scars should be kept alive. We should not suppress them (which requires honesty), but they should not cripple us either (which requires working through). This renewed quest for European sources should be cultivated in a lifestyle. This takes us to so-called ‘Bildung’ – a German word for a comprehensive (holistic), cultural, political, and educational programme.
EDUCATION/Bildung
European culture is not a self-sufficient property. Culture requires working on oneself, an effort to gain something beyond the individual. It is not inherited. We are not born Europeans, but we can make effort to become a European. European culture is a constantly acquiring way leading to a foreign source. Culture is not a quiet possession, but a goal to be gained by much struggle. As Rainer Maria Rilke described himself in a poem, wandering around an old statute of Apollo, suddenly a mysterious sentence is quoted: ‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern’ – you should change your life. Confronted with this archaic piece of art, the poet felt a calling. European culture and Bildung are of similar order.
We need therefore Bildung, deeply rooted in European culture. If our education system fails to offer us this, we should seek other ways to realize this general Bildung for all.
The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas started from the fundamental statement ‘we don’t know what God is’. If man is image of God, then even in man we will find something unknowable. Then we understand when the theologian Karl Rahner says ‘der Mensch ist die Frage auf die es keine Antwort gibt’ – man is the question for which there is no answer. In that case we see freedom as part of that image-of-God, because as one thinker stated: ‘he who knows what freedom is, already betrayed her’. With amazement we can discover that these forms of unknowing can be combined with a radicalization of questioning and a critical and disciplined form of thinking, through which we could find a way with our own questions. It means becoming awake. It dismantles perversities of systematic thinking, because fundamental notions as ‘human dignity’, ‘freedom’ and ‘common good’ are involved. And it helps us to get things right.
But Bildung not as an elitist attitude that withdraws into an ivory tower and stays apart. This renewed quest to a lifestyle rooted in the sources should be engaged with the problems we are dealing with today. That includes a responsibility for building our society. Since we live in a period where the nation state is less capable of dealing with today’s problems, we have to broaden our horizon to include the greater context of Europe. That brings us to European citizenship.
CITIZENSHIP/Burgerschap
I mentioned the history of classical Greece because, despite their enormous cultural efforts, the Greeks failed to build their richness into an adequate political form. And to be honest: were not our world wars similar to the Peloponnesian War?
Exploring European citizenship, we should remember what democratic politics is about. It is certainly not about running a business company. Neither is it the sum of unqualified opinions. Nor pushing one’s own private preferences. It is however about dealing with the common good, the bonum commune. In our system of representative democracy, the politician needs to come with a solid vision for the common good and to persuade citizens of the validity of this vision. Consequently citizens need to get the right information and judge it for the sake of the common good – if necessary, despite their own prejudice.
Dealing with the common good we should not ignore the EU. Maybe it is an odd political construction, which provokes a lot of questions. But it is a political project-in-the-making which can learn from the past, because many of our problems are only to be solved in cooperation and no more by the nation state alone.
If Machiavelli is right that everything is falling apart, unless… This ‘unless’ might be for us European citizenship. We have to admit that we are still discovering what this complex European citizenship is about: composed of national identity (difference) and a shared community (unity) with the tension that brings (tolerance). If citizenship means rights, duties and feelings of belonging together, it is still a rather weak citizenship. How can we make this European citizenship more complete, experienced and engaged?
What might be the duties of a full grown European citizenship?
Shared identity and the ongoing story of Europe
To answer the question, ‘what brings us together?’ it helps if we realize that the EU in the beginning was a Western European project. Then the project got enlarged with the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Baltics and parts of the Balkan. Eastern Europe, for instance, has a different history from Western Europe, as have the other parts of the EU. Do we know these ‘foreign’ histories? How should we respond to this history?
For instance did these countries join Europe? Or should we say we were first amputated and then Europe became re-united? Are we prepared to listen when Central and Easterne Europe tell us in Western Europe they felt betrayed by the West during a period of time?
Recently I was surprised by the intellectual richness I found in Eastern Europe concerning the quest of Europe. Vaclav Havel is known as a kind of European Nelson Mandela. And those present at the State of Europe Forum 2015 in Riga last year know Tomáš Halík. But what about Adam Mičnik, Adam Zamoyski, Josef Tischner, Jan Patočka? In a way their history is more aware of what is at stake with ‘Europe’. We can and should learn from them. For instance, in a way they liberated themselves–following the initiatives of Charta 77, Solidarinosc and the human chain in the Baltics. They gave us an example of one of the few revolutions in Europe that succeeded in its own terms and did not turn into the opposite–because they did not seek revenge on their opponents. How does this history relate to ours? And what about the richness of the other unknown parts of Europe?
We urgently need a history from broader European perspective. Much history today still is nationalistically coloured.
We are not just citizens of the Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, France, and so on. We are also citizens of the European Union, a unique political project-in-the-making. But since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, this project has hardly moved. No new projects have been started since then. Only new states joined the Union. But now we need urgent new ideas, ideas that unite states together. What will be the ongoing story of Europe?
Europe is longing for a new phase and a new start. But how this will happen since reviving nationalism creates a climate of fear? What initiative could break this climate?
Facing our real problems today
Firstly, we should ask what the crucial problems of our time are. What challenges the very essence of Europe in the long term? Why do we need unity? We need the courage for Utopia, a realistic vision of hope in connection with Sources, Bildung and European Citizenship that creates perspective.
What challenges do we face today?
Let me mention some:
• a dialogue between the different regions of EU: Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern Europe and so on;
• a solid peace and security policy, including also a energy union;
• how to give refugees opportunities to develop their talents and skills and to participate in building our future society at home or abroad?
The essential challenge is not in the first place the numbers but how to make their experience of Europe constructive. We should realize the biggest number of refugees has yet to come – from Africa;
• how to realize solidarity within the EU concerning the youth unemployment in Southern Europe, to prevent it from becoming a social time bomb; how to make the banking union effective;
• promoting sustainability – see Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato si on this topic;
relating to Islam, a relationship threatened by terrorism sowing fear, a fear that is also exploited politically. We must find ways out of this fear. And this starts with knowing our sources well, by looking for dialogue with the other.
On this subject, the legacy of the monks of Tibhirine (known from the film Des hommes et des dieux, first prize winner of the Cannes Film Festival 2010) is important, because they were pioneers of the interreligious dialogue with Islam.
These are no easy topics. But if our European Union is to make sense and is to be taken seriously in a world that is uniting in her problems, these topics should be openly discussed. Then people will pay attention. Only then will ongoing unity bear enthusiasm, because Europe opens a horizon and enters into a new creative phase. Politicians and statesmen should be honest about today’s realities and its challenges. Maybe e-Utopia represents a right tension. We are living in a ‘no place’ yet (Utopia), that has the possibility to become a ‘good place’ (EUtopia). In the adventure of this tension a new way might become clear in quest of Europe.
So we urgently a platform where this dialogue and discussion about our common good should take place. Where are we confronted with the real problems, where the story of ‘Europe’ is to be told afresh so we can again move on?
I will end my lecture quoting the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski:
“The European citizen – who is he? He has a good memory, and remembers the splendid and evil things from European history. He’ll never be arrogant, because the quantity of evil excludes all pride. He respects the achievements of Enlightenment, and doesn’t have contempt for the Middle Ages and its religion. He knows that Europe contains analytical thought as prayer as well, physics and music. He doesn’t think that the US is a military giant and an intellectual dwarf. He hopes that the taste of his favorite cheese won’t be dictated by the Brussels smartass. He is not very optimistic about future common European foreign policy. Still he believes in Europe, without forgetting that Europe is a beautiful fiction. He loves European landscapes and the black bird, that sings in ecstacy during springtime in all cities from Portugal to Ukraine.
Even if he isn’t coming from the ‘old and rich Europe’, he is not patronizing and doesn’t consider his humanity superior than that of ‘newer’ and poorer Europeans. If he comes from ‘new’ Europe, he knows that along with great responsibilities are also privileges.
He reads poetry–I don’t mean in the narrow, egocentric sense. (You might replace poetry by serious novels, philosophy, history or music.) He has to read poetry because our democratic system he lives in, is intellectually vague and not sufficiently spiritual food. This system needs help, a voice that ascends from a deeper shift of reality. If this doesn’t happens, if democracy is left alone, she tends to mock, and to present herself in a distorting mirror, her ugly stepsister. So the European citizen has to read poetry to clear out the democratic framework – and besides to demolish the foolish, utopian longing for a perfect political system.”