Translated by: Cristina Rodríguez - yuyu_ac7[at]hotmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
What is Europe? Will we ever be able to recycle the continuous war between ideas and People? Will we ever be able to get a new different present, which we are trying to build and doesn’t exist yet? Every time a bunch of aware Europeans get together to deal with this matter a recurrent question appears <<What in hell is the European citizenship?>> My answer usually is: <<First, we should think about what is being a citizen in general, shouldn’t we?>>
I think that the idea of a really united citizenship in Europe, beyond peace among countries and a free market without frontiers is something that worries to a minority with polyglot, cultural and economic skills to go as an equal to visit, live or work to a neighbour country. Nevertheless, the majority need to see, as it happens in the programs of mobility for young people, how they are going to benefit from being Europeans.
Examples as the French comedy film “Euro pudding” show a real feeling of hope while sharing laughter, language and drinks around a table from place to place. A reality lived and present in the collective imaginary of an emergent higher number of young Europeans.
The memory of that film sparked in my mind that summer afternoon in Budapest, when I met, once again, those other European volunteers that I had got in contact few weeks before; while sharing some laughter and pálinka, in one of the typical terraces set in the indoor patios of the big urban buildings there, which was making havoc in our polyglotism.
The odds put Montse, one of the volunteers from Catalonia, to whom I must thank for her company and support those days, on my way. I remember her that night singing that famous song from an instant hot chocolate drink, which became popular in our parents times, when the only official language in our country was Spanish, to later on sing it in an improvised translation to Catalan. Even within compatriots it was not the same to be French from Brittany than being French from Paris, or being Spanish from the centre than being from Catalonia, but independently of our culture or language, a few sips of pálinka wreak havoc in all of us.
I wasn’t an ERASMUS student but I had the feeling I had when watching that film, a feeling of a different Europe formed by crazy people who spoke a language which was not theirs, in order to have fun and be understood.
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Will we ever be able to recycle the idea of Nation-State? I understand, that a body bathed by the Mediterranean sun, with tanned skin and sunny brain, cannot behave as another one, cooled down by the almost polar cold of the north, in spite of both of them living in one same entity they call nation X. A small example which proves that the idea of nation is a historical and temporary invention, half way between the medieval feudalism and the planetary society of a future without states, a more regional one, a global village, that threatens some with so developed communication technologies and international airports that get close together, people that were so far apart before.
To fight the blind, profound and selfish nationalism and its madness, racism, is one of the reasons why youngsters are encouraged to move around Europe. However, today’s young men and women would move anywhere and, everywhere, breaking down cultural differences, we find the same totems and globalizing taboos, destroying, as some would say, all European traditions.
The European complaints and the attempts to hide behind tradition, to oppose a uniting globalisation, are surprising, as it is not outrageous to say that this globalisation is a phenomenon that emerged inspired in the evolution of European ideas, exported throughout the world, therefore being sensible that they are implemented by a boomerang effect, in the old Europe.
The reaction, against the cultural imperialism encouraged by the good scholars of the European ideas, should finally make us understand, that not all life styles are or should be the same, even if their needs are the same in their origin, as diversity is a good thing, and it will be us, who will finally decide to fall apart and live surrounded by virtual worlds. I believe this is the best attitude against exclusion.
To hide away from a reality with static traditions and to contain the natural creativity that formal education tends to cover for new generations, besides denying that the different needs and desires happen between individuals and not between cultures, will lead us nowhere.
I am not so naïf as to think the answer to some questions will come from an imperial source, a trustworthy particular big brother, or a magnificent idea; that is why I don’t intend to deny the past. It is important to look at the past carefully to avoid making the same mistakes and to recycle ancient ideas while we try to (re)create those truly new ones.
<<Thanks God we believe in economic liberalism and its messiah, capitalism>>
This statement, which could sound as typical from touched ones, is simple the firm belief withheld by those who believe in a free market (free just for some) as the best economic and social system for humanity.
Further from discussing that happiness can be reduced to econometric equations, as it has been done for over a century, the severe problem of this statement lays in the absurd consideration of a belief, a fairy tale, as the foundation of an economic stream which is not only considered rational but also scientific.
Economics was the science that studied the most efficient methods to satisfy material human need through the use of limited resources. This was the case when there was rational, scientific common sense, and the needs of human beings were essentially vital and social. In the upside down world, in which we live, economy could be defined as a belief that tries to create superfluous needs, underestimating the vital ones, without taking into account that resources are few and limited, assuming that in due time, an invisible hand (called God in the classical liberal theory or war caused by any excuse, as in the neoconliberal approach) will come, to put things in place or mess them all up. This faith is not only supported by honourable professors but by publicity and propagandistic agents too.
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The United States of America were built thanks to what Europe rejected; huge flows of volunteer emigrants looking for the wealth and glory of the New World or, in most cases, exiled people whose rebel character stood up against a life imposed by the illustrated European elites of the time.
The utopia of the new world demanded a “new American order” which meant exterminating the native inhabitants of that land, together with the bison, to stop them from becoming illustrated men that, instead of taking care of living in communion with what had been their environment for millenniums, would get busy hassling those foreigners that nobody had invited to stay.
A nation that forgets its origins is condemned to repeat its errors.
If it wasn’t enough with the massacre that made the natives become an almost extinguished ethnic group, the application sui generis of the “Monroe doctrine”, during last century, reinventing the European colonial sins, made the United States get involved in a police neo-colonialism by which the “America for the Americans” would become “United States equal America” in which the asleep citizens really believe and which has blocked the free and democratic development of the rest of countries situated in the south bank of Rio Grande.
Is this a surprise for old Europeans? Are the Atlantic citizens more than black sheep from Europe? Might they be less rebel and not so black sheep as we would like to imagine?
Thanks to the German sociologist, Max Weber, we have an explanation for the adoption of capitalism as an economic system in America: the European and Protestant belief that the rich are the chosen ones from God; otherwise, that is if you are poor, you are condemned. The business initiative, proved by some social experiments like the communists ones, to be uncommon in ordinary people, was an aim for population that, after emigrating from Europe, were risking more than just their gold, their eternal life…
In South America was completely the opposite, as the influence of European Catholicism and its aphorisms, like the one that says <<it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God>>, caused the opposite effect by being more in favour of submission and oligarchy.
It is not necessary to say that although the U.S.A. fought against the British for independence, they counted with the tacit support of the French. Is it also necessary to remember the European Masonic Brotherhood of the North American founders? As long as China doesn’t become the new world order” (this could really make us feel angry and surprised by their politics), we should wonder about the reasons why, sometimes, the young Atlantic empire annoys us so much, independently of its political hypocrisy, being it a European invention as well.
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During the last century of ideological, economic and religious revolutions, Europe struggled between the sectarian and soviet communism, and the sectarian and savage (as in the American Wild West) capitalism. Economic beliefs and blind faith, fought against rational theories such as Marxism. Fantasies began to get strength not during the revolutions, but from the practice of Russian roulette which played to the full in the stock market, lead to a spectacular crack in 1929. Place your bets and god will provide! The benefits of the capitalist economy and its spiritual support, the stock exchange, are like a casino, a question of luck where the Bank always wins.
What did Europe do in the crossroad between new and old victorious ideas? Ideas coming after the Great War, from the other side of the Atlantic and form the Urals. It created a third path, but not the most recent one by Anthony Giddens, which is trying to substitute it and British perseverance got into fashion. However, as Europe usually do when facing a historical lunge of this kind, this was an original and innovating path that some countries, even today, hope to reach, while others dream about defeating it, blinded by their condition of intended new rich.
The welfare State allows the chance of guaranteeing some basic conditions of existence and redistribution of wealth at different levels, facilitating citizens’ initiatives, through conditions of equality of opportunities which reduce some tension created by inequality.
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In the upside down Europe, the already European and democrat Polish, had recently gone back to the “samizdat” of the soviet occupation period, having to evade censorship, once more, through clandestine self publication and distribution, not of antisystem materials, but of “COMPASS”, a manual on Human Rights Education with young people published by the Council of Europe, as it refers to issues like homophobia, which is forbidden by a government in full ideological purge.
In my upside down country, some people, declaring they are protesting and demanding the same freedom that they try to restrict to those different from them, cry out against the establishment of school plans for a specific subject called “Citizenship Education” arguing that the curriculum of this subject is based on the government imposing a certain moral about family and life. These very same people protested, in the recent past, about schools not having a subject about civic values. Facing this paradox we have no option but to think that for them, civic ethic is the same as the imposed and questioned moral to which their ancestors used to use by force, during the dictatorship.
Many opinion leaders hide behind the fact that our politicians and intellectuals subdue ordinary Spaniards when they refer to the world beyond our frontiers. It doesn’t come across their mind to state the real European reality where that issue, they criticize so much, “Citizenship Education”, is the target of all educational and cultural policies of both, the blameless and well documented Council of Europe and the Directorate general for Education and Culture of the European Commission. An idea to join the society of citizens is used by some as an excuse to create confrontations.
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In the upside down world is surprising to see, once more in this Europe of Europes, how the army in its far southern area could revolt in a coup against the republican government, with the excuse of restoring order and a catholic state by force; isolating it from Europe when it represented a hope to solve its centenary national problems. On the contrary, the far eastern area revolted against sultanate and the influences of foreign governmental positions as far as religious fundamentalists. That army demanded a break up between civil and religious government within an autonomous, republican government, with the future expectation of transforming the new republic into a modern state within Europe.
Two opposite realities coexisted in different spots of Europe, twinned by their devotion to an authority represented by a paternalistic leader. Their aim was, in one extreme, to stop modernization and return to feudalism and the social and individual control techniques of religion. On the other (with a very different culture which came from an imperial situation and the join of religion and politics) in order to adopt the modern ways of the social and political European realities, including, for instance, giving rights to women that fully democratic countries weren’t giving to their female citizens; or real measures of secularism.
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It was summer 2005; I was for the first time in my life south of the great Hungarian plain, suffering from a weird summer. One week it was unbearably hot; the following, there was an autumn like weather accompanied by heavy rains. Then, the week after, back to the hot summer, and then back again to the grey autumn, in a constant cycle that culminated in Vienna, where I was able to see children splashing inside the fountains of the museums square, dehydrated by the high and unusual temperatures for the region, even though it was August. It was obvious, although I did not know the climate cycles, that these weird, sudden changes were not normal. Nowadays, there are millions of people like me, realising, all over the world, that Gaia is telling us something quite different from what great scientists were telling us before.
In the upside down world, there are not natural disasters of a badly wounded Gaia. The climate change seems as science fiction, something that in due time we could relieve by increasing the use of air conditioning (this is a real statement spoken by an eminent, very liberal and without a doubt, a very aware radio commentator….).
In the upside down world, our pro men of progress and human wealth, the priests of reason, the members of the scientific community, announced that something was wrong with the planet. They quietly commented, as if they didn’t want to upset the ones paying them, that men could be the ones to be blamed for it, but that anyway, there was no rush. A few decades before, a summary of a report called “The limits to growth” commissioned in 1972 by the Club of Rome, a global think tank, began as follows:
Our world model was built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern -accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.
It seems as if three decades ago there already were global thinking organizations, which had not doubt about the urgency of the issue for the survival of the human species, finishing their report saying:
If there is cause for deep concern, there is also cause for hope. Deliberately limiting growth would be difficult but not impossible. The way to proceed is clear, and the necessary steps, although they are new ones for human society, are well within capabilities. Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a very new form of human society -one that would be built to last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide humankind to the equilibrium society and the human will to achieve that goal. Without such a goal and a commitment to it, short-term concerns will generate the exponential growth that drives the world system toward the limits of the earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that commitment, mankind would be ready now to begin a controlled, orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.
The idea of the climate change being slow and it being a medium to long-term change has been proved wrong. The prophecy of the Club of Rome is becoming more and more evident, it is here, and it is suffered and felt by millions of people around the planet. Just to mention a couple of consequences that these quick changes are causing, people do not know what to wear because seasons are disappearing and there is an increase in epidemics and massive extinctions. This is just another example of the conscious or unconscious incompetence of some scientists we tent to elevate to gods, as if they were more than people doing the job they have chosen and for which they have been trained, and who are expected to prove their competence as any other professional.
The various and continuous natural disasters that today affect the planet; the tremendous desertification in my country, where very hot summers and droughts have given place to hot winters and rainy summers with sudden winter temperatures, that is, the unpredictable and constant weather and temperature changes, are evidences that anyone illiterate in this subject can notice. The planet is claiming what belongs to it, and it seems to be saying that if we are insane and we continue in the upside down world, it, on its own, will make sure we get sane again and stop allowing our lies and abuses.
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In the upside down world, Marxism revolutionary ideas, created from the capitalist phenomenon analysis, and conceived for the old countries of this industrialised Europe, were a sudden justification for border countries with a feudal structure. They adopted them as an excuse to achieve a European level of development, like in Russia, whether it meant sacrificing millions of lives; or as in China, to get rid of the European colonial yoke waiting, perhaps, for a revenge day.
It is surprising to see how mass control and peoples ideological poisoning mechanisms (created before and after the world wars, by enemy ideologies, as they called themselves) are still being used today in many varied contexts and with a very similar effectiveness, under other names and justifications, without shame, in the so-called free societies. Statements such as <<a repeated lie becomes a true fact.>>; <<if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it>> or <<the bigger the lie the more people will believe it>>, have become a doctrine and a dogma for publicists, TV spokesmen and popular democratic politicians all around the world. A particular example of the doctrines the first world has treasured and learnt from propaganda geniuses such as the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels.
When are we going to understand that neither religion nor institution can be true or tell the truth, when instead of union and hope it becomes an instrument of exclusion, exclusivity and hate? What true God could consent to be represented by such institutions? Who would like to be created by a God who has preferred and condemned ones? Is it strange then, that we replace those gods for golden eggs, or flesh idols once political now mass-media ones?
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Why this historical review and talking about the upside down world? I might be naïve for thinking that there was a straight world before, even for thinking that there could be one in the future in which every man could aspire to find a place where being respected and grow as a human being.
The great opera of abuses in human progress was performed in the stage of the two World Wars initiated in Europe. As it is said <<trouble always comes in threes>>. That's why the United Nations and the European Coal and Steel Community, base for the actual European Union, were created; hoping the curtain would go down for good and avoid a third World War to solve the problems that people had not solved in the battle field in so many years.
The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” was passed. Some stated, before and after, not to feel represented in this “Declaration”, arguing it was an incomplete product of a very specific occidental life style and society. What an excellent excuse not to apply these rights to their subordinates!
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What I would say to those who deny the human rights, if they wanted to listen, is that if they are afraid of themselves and the freedom of their people, they should not bother following those rights. I encourage them and their societies to create the more absurd or exalting rights they wish, as long as they have the decency of respecting the fundamental right of Life and everybody’s Right to live and exile, if the case, in the rule of law that makes them feel more worthy and respected. If a woman wants to be a man’s possession she can go to a society that works like that, and the one who wishes to live in an Amazon society, can associate with a group of them and live happily in the community.
What a Utopia! Who would allow borders and passports to disappear and although we are not able to chose where we are born at least chose where we live? Who will dare make societies compete in rights, as money does in free market, with the only regulation of an invisible hand? <<That Never!>> some would say, amazed by such an absurd proposal. The peaceful and ideal society of the Hoyhnhnms horses of “Gulliver's Travels” found absurd those human yahoos that blinded and killed themselves for a bunch of precious stones called diamonds.
Nobody could say a “Declaration” is better than another is or that it is more incomplete or objective than another if everybody had the right to live in the society they consciously want, and not, like in some religions, where the fact of being born in one or another place determines your social and personal beliefs. We could all decide our nationality, the society in which we wish to live with those we consider our brothers in rights and obligations.
I don’t intend to talk about creating a society market where we could bet for one way or another of social organization, but for a diversity of societies and the possibility to chose the social regime desired, as a metaphor a way of seeing Europe. A Europe of opportunities in which the different ways of cultural organization that we can experience and live, not only in different countries and ghettos, but also in our neighbourhood and everyday reality, are far from minimal integrating models or non aggression deals like in multicultural societies for good.
There would not be higher utopia made real if the basic rights, as faith acts, were realized. Free men and women community would be able to walk towards the utopia of an autonomous and peaceful Humanity. However, who would dare to fight and accept that men and women are really free to chose who they want to live with and who represent them? How many people would accept the challenge of living freely, of fighting to live life according to our conscious, and the opportunity that the immense cultural diversity of humanity offers?
Maybe these ideas are just a new romantic reflection as the idea of nation.
<<When I am said Europe is the country of rights, I think in the arbitrariness: If they say, it is the country of human dignity I think in racism. If they say, it is the country of reason, I think in the romantic dreaming. We can find justice in Pennsylvania, human dignity in the Arab nationalists and common sense anywhere in the world if, as Descartes said, it is true that common sense is the best-distributed thing in the world>>.
Jean-Baptiste Duroselle. “L’Idée d’Europe dans l’histoire”, 1965, Denoël.
France, a contradicting country where the historian mentioned above came from, rejected, together with the Netherlands, a European constitution created behind citizens. They argued that one of the causes of rejection could have been the fear to a chauvinist lost of a cultural sovereignty. Another cause was the unhappiness about the integration problems of the Islamic communities; the fearing of the European Union entrance of Turkey considered an added problem instead of an integrating element. Another reason, changing the political view, is the disagreement about a too economical and not so social constitution.
France founded today’s European Union to avoid a new War among previously enemy countries. It looks forward and cries out for the respect of civil rights in other countries (even though they have restrained them in various periods of their own internal and colonial history). Their citizens paralyzed a process initiated to give political and citizenship strength to a Union that needs clear constitutional and supranational models. A union to put into action means for an internal citizenship policy and an external common safety policy to be important in the global society.
Once more, “the Europe led by bankers” defeated the Europe lead by citizens who demand proximity, real participation and another possible constitution. Politicians, as usual, try to avoid hearing what people have to say until they stand up against them and claim...
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Some argued that the establishment of a unique coin between some of the EU members would facilitate the citizens Europe. To prove that the interests of the Union were clearly economic, they spent great amounts of money trying to convince people about the benefits [of the Euro], arguing the saving in commissions’ currency exchange it would entail. Such bargain would be understood by Euro MPs who have to travel to Brussels, Strasburg and their native countries, but not by ordinary Europeans that with a bit of luck could afford a short holiday in another European country once or twice a year.
The euro reality hid behind shameful publicity campaigns that Europeans paid with their taxes, kept on repeating that the entry of the new coin and the exchange rates from our old coin to the new one would not mean an increase in prices. If only they had invested a little amount in the effective control of markets and merchants for prices not to increase so dramatically, we might have been able to think that our politicians can do something rather than mocking at us. Youngsters would be willing to participate in politics and continue with a task that today seems relegated to technocrats and bankers longing to be in politics.
In my country money was spent to repeat that a euro was not 100 pesetas but 166, finding out the year after that a coffee had magically gone from 100 pesetas to one euro, suffering an increase of about 60% which made us all long for our old coin. They should have invested half of what they spent in promoting travelling to other European places and cultures as far as informing us about the advantages and ins and outs of the Union. A possible citizens´ constitution, although different from the one proposed, had been approved this way. On the contrary, money is invested on propaganda to conceal the Euro reality: a greater European capacity, for banks and financial entities, to compete in the global market with a strong coin, and the attempt to blend prices to a higher average without increasing the salaries of the least wealthy members.
Another attempt to create the Europe of Europeans is the European Higher Education Area, which is full of different ways of understanding and approving the teaching and training in a specific field. The goal seems to be to homogenize but adjusting it to Anglo-Saxon ways, as if colleges of knowledge should also become profitable enterprises. Institutions globally competing for the best students, to originate benefits in the shape of brain-devices and transform universities in attractive places, not for their scientific or at least teaching quality but for the employment figures of their future master degrees. Summing up, a past public and social space is under threat by privatization, instead of coordination for the benefit of a globally European educational space.
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Universities were once a place to train the elites of society in a common language (Latin) and a specific discipline (Theology, Philosophy, Law). Knowledge restricted to a bunch of privileged people was get out of monastic libraries to support the feudal structure of the Middle ages. Those days it happened that one son would inherit the castle and the other one the knowledge to control the villagers, through the clerical habits and rhetoric of universities. (We refer here to the European and occidental frame). The later official reason for universities to exist was to make knowledge more accessible to more people, taking advantage of inventions like the printing press, which lower the endless hand written copies of monks and allowed a greater compiling and criticism of information. Neither in its origins nor after the industrial revolution has university been intended to be a bridge for wealthy people to get a better job, or to become financial capitalists.
The exceptions were traditional professions such as medicine, where university, due to this career’s characteristics not far from those of theology, philosophy or law, really becomes a way to facilitate professional development. For the rest of the trades just a vocational training was required, at least until the technological development, through the modern progress of science, improved and professionalized certain trades and therefore advising their study in engineering or technical colleges, other than faculties, as it happened with medicine in the past.
Nowadays, many politicians and business men believe that is a luxury to keep a place for knowledge, in spite of the undeniable and proved benefits that investment in basic research yields. Under the practical suspected jealousy, even in initiatives such as the Bologna treaty, they applaud university’s lost of identity, transforming it in the imaginative idea, from our parents times, of professional technocratic training centres, getting rid of less productive or potentially subversive degrees. As an example, the more statistic, fragmented and pragmatic degree called Human Sciences at the expense of the senior, general and global Philosophy studies. Issues as truth or freedom are neglecting in a time where it is more important to learn how to get economic benefits or of any other kind from these concepts.
As some last century philosophers prophesied <<Once God and Human are dead>>, there is only virtual reality, virtual money.
I do not understand fundamentalism; neither the one which demands the conversion towards secularized Christian ideas to Islam, nor the Islamism used by ambitious politicians to justify their abuses.
There will always be “Rebels without a cause”. Some will rebel at kindergarten, on the street or University, but not because they are, vocational revolutionists or something inside tells them that things are not right. They don’t need it!; there will always be people who, pretending to play and scorn their time, among ideas and books, they were imposed to read and the subsequent pre-eminence of a partial life reality, will learn, as their ancestors did, that they need no leaders to tell them about their inner feelings. That is, the world is turning too fast and, it slows down or they will get off it. The Rebels created by the World are capable of making their voices be heard, and if they were asked about the reason of their acts, they would reply asking them what motivates that type of question. Rebels disappointed with kindergartens that try to teach life in society to newborn, through confinement to military barracks and a discipline thought to fight the chaotic and free nature of children.
Those capable of seen through the bandage once adults, won’t accept the out of date answers and attitudes of the obsolete system in which they were brought up.