The Map of Tendre
Philippe Cayla
President of Euronews
Europe loved by Zeus, king of the Gods, is she loved by
man?
At a time when the disaffection of Europeans with
Europe threatens its very democracy, can one explain this as
a general falling out of love? Or rather, isn’t love for Europe
conflicting to the point of becoming impossible? Let’s try, like
Madeleine de Scudéry, to draw a European map of Tendre
(the land of tenderness). Europe is placed neither above nor
below nations; she is among the nations, all members along
with her of the same family.
Within the family, the Greeks occupy the place of the
founding ancestors. At the origin of our civilization, they
loved Europe as one would love his or her great-grandchildren:
as troublemakers, but already distant, in thought as
in affection. The success of the 2008 Olympics comforted
them through the feeling of their capacity to relive their past
and primacy. But the identity theft that the former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia is attempting on Alexander the Great,
and the little support they sense from the rest of Europe,
distresses them. They feel neglected and misunderstood by
Europe, their ungrateful great-granddaughter. It even happens
sometimes that they feel closer to Russia, their close
spiritual and alphabetic line of descent, particularly through
their little Cypriot sister turned Russian colony.
Italy is the grandmother fulfilled by a prolific and universal
lineage. Like Berlusconi holding court in the middle of the
photo of the G 20 in The Financial Times and The International
Herald Tribune headlines, she is the mamma holding court
in the center and at the top of the family photo.
The French, having conceived Europe and having given
her away in marriage to Germany, are in the role of father.
As such, they claim to be guardians of her moral values; if
not of her virginity lost a long time ago, at least of her rules
of conduct, her priorities, her timetable. It’s not easy to see
her leave the nest to lead an independent life. The French
love Europe only when she is submissive, obedient to her
father. If not, leave her to her own devices: this was the message
of the 2005 referendum.
In Germany – Deutschland for close friends – Europe
finds more than a partner: a husband. After having assaulted
this fiancée with a barbarism beyond the concept of human
rights, Deutschland settled into a marriage of reason, with
the consent of the penniless father-in-law. An ideal, dynamic,
newly rich son-in-law, Deutschland loves Europe like
a nineteenth-century bourgeois loves his wife: her place is
at home, Kirche (church), Küche (kitchen), Kinder (children).
The German wife works little, and so does Europe. It makes
no difference: the German man/husband keeps watch and
makes the best cars in the world. Deutschland is a civilized
but affirmed male chauvinist, a giver of lessons bordering
on arrogance.
The United Kingdom and Scandinavia, like Spain and
Portugal, brothers and sisters of France, have one foot in
Europe and the other in America. Their expatriate offspring
on the other side of the Atlantic by now surpass them in
size and wealth. They admire them and can’t help but look
at their niece, Europe, with a feeling of commiseration.
This second cousin was less successful than the United
States, Brazil or even Spanish-speaking America. Europe is
sometimes
invited
to the house but not warmly. Rather indifferently
and calculatedly.
Torn away from their Russian landlady, the Eastern countries
are the adopted children of Europe and Deutschland.
They escaped the orphanage, not to mention the reformatory,
and were taken charge of by an authoritative paternal
guardianship. They put up with it out of necessity, but it
weighs them down. Obtaining their financial autonomy will
allow them to get out of this thankless age in order to love
mother Europe as she deserves.
These various typical family roles are not enough to
create the family spirit. So what is missing?
The Europe of today, which the young have adopted, is
the Europe of Schengen and the euro, of travel and exchange.
Travel and exchange without borders; there is the base of a
new culture to come, the one invoked by Jean Monnet.
To create this culture we would need, in principle, a
single language. Alas, even if our continent can become
Europhile, it will never be Europhone: a common language
does not exist. Then let the languages remain: the love of
languages is a condition for diversity and exchange; it’s the
only possible love in Europe, the only one that can help us
escape the monoculture of jeans, T-shirts and McDonald’s.
Only polyphony and multiculturalism can make Europeans
become Europhiles and fall in love with Europe.
In the savannah of the New World
Jean-Dominique Giuliani
President of the Robert Schuman Foundation
The twenty-first century isn’t the jungle.
Rather, it is the savannah, with its predators, but also its
infinite varieties of animals that coexist with man, a bit lost
in the beautiful vastness of its landscapes.
There, one is in close contact with all kinds of species.
The American eagle competes with the Asian tigers, the
venerated Indian cow surprises, the Latino horses frolic in
the unending space. The African gazelles could well astonish
others and get even somewhat, the caribous of the Great
North resist global warming! One can even find a Russian
bear, not very comfortable in this climate…
And Europe? What can she be compared to?
She is the elephant.
First, because of its weight: the old continent produces
the top GDP in the world; it is the number one commercial
power, the number one investor, the number one consumer
market. Everything in this elephant exudes the tranquil
power under its tan-colored skin that has experienced so
much!
The elephant lives to an old age. Very old.
It has a long history and a prodigious memory, perhaps
sometimes too present. The past should never obscure the
future.
But it is likable. Eminently so. It seems to always smile.
And, unassumingly, it goes his own way, attacked by no one,
sometimes tamed, displayed everywhere.
It has values. Family values. It protects its children and
lives in society. Civilized.
It eats a lot. Sometimes too much. But it is not a predator
of anyone other than the sparse forests that it alone can devour.
What an appetite!
It loves its comfort, its territories and would not imagine
not seeing them again until the end.
It abuses water, a supreme luxury in the warm latitudes…
But it’s clean and it’s a habit.
Ingenious, resistant, immutable, solid, it only seduces
through its ivory.
It’s been there forever. For centuries.
Of course, it could develop its muscles a bit more, it would
run faster… like the much-envied big cats. Because a tender
look is not what one would picture in the savannah…
They say it’s on the way to extinction. But they’ve said
that for a long time.
It’s always been there. Like the European Union is, from
now on, indispensable to the world landscape.
The world can’t exist without Europe, just as the savannah
can’t exist without the elephant. It would be lacking the
essential: the memory of the wind in the baobab branches,
or that of the world in the saga of history.
A family to face the wild jungle of the world
Sunday, December 20 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 14 comments
europe in the global world, cohesion, identity and few assets
Friday, December 11 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 16 comments
The wager of the Erasmus
generation
Adriano Farano
Cofounder of cafebabel.com
A new generation is born, the daughter of student mobility, the single currency and low-cost flights. It’s the first generation that is really experiencing Europe on a daily basis. Its goal within the construction of Europe is not to finally restore peace on the Old Continent. That goal – noble and oh, how difficult! – was accomplished by the founding fathers. For us, Erasmus children, Europe’s role is to broaden the horizons of its citizens. To offer everyone greater possibilities for life, work, business, travel, discovery and – why not – love. Whenever they make a new city their own, exploring its bars and centers of life; whenever they feel a new language quiver on their lips, discover other methods of study, or let themselves be swept away by a love that does not seem so foreign, the Erasmus students experience an extraordinary feeling of freedom. It’s this magic of Erasmus, wonderfully depicted in Cédric Klapisch’s film, L’Auberge Espagnole, a film that took us by storm in the fall of 2000, when, with a group of students from 12 European countries, we founded cafebabel.com, the first European current events magazine entirely translated into six languages. To meet the enormous challenges of the twenty-first century, our national societies need a breath of fresh air; they need to open themselves up to one another, to speak to each other. But as she acquires new proficiencies, the European Union suffers from a terrible democratic deficit that alienates it from its citizens. Thus, it becomes pressing to create a European public opinion, with its debates, its catalysts for ideas, its multilingual media. This is our day-to-day work: exclusive coverage, unique interviews, forums and blogs that open up debate. The Erasmus generation is the first to have successfully wagered on this. Because this generation “thinks and speaks” European, as opposed to the leaders of different countries who increase their plans of national revival, confront each other on foreign policy issues, and act “as if” the sharing of the sovereignty (currency, borders, legislation) were not already a reality. Political Europe will not be built in this way, but rather through the creation of a transnational public space. For the past eight years, through collaborative journalism, our magazine has been rising to meet this very challenge. These transnational points of view are rich with multicultural perspectives to which 300,000 Internet users respond monthly. Thanks to the Erasmus generation, a European public opinion is being born. It must be heard.
A real world education
Heleen Terwijn
Psychologist and founder of the IMC Weekendschool
Ask Americans about Europe, and many say: “history”. Ask Europeans about Europe, and many say: “Brussels”. This seems odd, as if a bureaucracy blinds Europeans. But this is not the case. European culture simply slips away in any attempt to define it. This implies a great asset, if only we’d involve our students in the right stuff. European school children learn about Plato as “Greek”, Descartes as “French” and Goethe as “German”. Although the shreds of history intertwine into distinguishable European patterns, students do not explicitly learn about “European values”, let alone “European identity”. They learn to relate history to their own societies, and if they are lucky, to their own lives. With the euro as about the only practical European symbol, there is not much to encourage European identity. Nobody cheers for the European soccer team (there is none), or pledges allegiance to the European flag. Europe is a set of hazy boundaries, cultural diversity with lots of history, and “Brussels”. Is this a threat for Europe? No. Rather, it is an opportunity. European students are well aware of cultures other than their own. They learn about the winding roots of their societies, they learn to live together with the many other cultures in Europe, and many speak more than two languages, especially immigrants. The next step would be to cherish European students’ already existing ability for cultural comparison and tolerance, but not by locking them up in a forced “European identity” that would exactly oppose their abilities. We should involve students in world issues, like migration, religious diversity, climate change and social injustice. Precisely, while discovering the world, they will find out for themselves how “European” they are. As my experience with the Weekend Schools shows, once education is organized around this principle, children are extremely eager to learn. And, as Sajjaad, an alumnus said: “At the Weekend School I learned to dare to think.” “One single European identity” is not one of those. In scaling up our students’ abilities to the world level, we embrace the best in European tradition, notably that of exchange and tolerance.
Old Europe has a bright future
Hubert Joly
CEO of Carlson
In this century of globalization and integration, Europe is ideally situated to play a leadership role in this new multipolar world. Much was said at the end of the twentieth century about the center of gravity of the world moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This was arguably driven by the emergence of Asia as a new economic powerhouse and by the high rate of growth on the west coast of the US. The theory was that this would leave Europe on the sidelines as trade and communication were essentially going to move away from Europe. Not so fast… Europe’s geographic situation gives it a unique advantage. Leading a global organization can be in certain ways easier from Europe than from any other place in the world. Flights from Europe to Asia are more convenient than from the US. For example, flying to Delhi from Paris takes 9 hours versus 15 hours from New York or 20 hours from Los Angeles. While office hours overlap between Europe and Asia and Europe and the US, they do not between the US and Asia (Singapore is 12 hours ahead of New York, but only 6 hours ahead of Europe). This makes communication and collaboration easier from and with Europe… Additionally, Europe’s nature gives Europeans from their youngest age a great sense of cultural diversity, an advantage for those trying to grasp and deal with the subtleties of people, cultural norms, and customs of this multipolar world. So, Charles De Gaulle may have been prescient when he said, “It will not be any European statesman who will unite Europe: Europe will be united by the Chinese.”
Adriano Farano
Cofounder of cafebabel.com
A new generation is born, the daughter of student mobility, the single currency and low-cost flights. It’s the first generation that is really experiencing Europe on a daily basis. Its goal within the construction of Europe is not to finally restore peace on the Old Continent. That goal – noble and oh, how difficult! – was accomplished by the founding fathers. For us, Erasmus children, Europe’s role is to broaden the horizons of its citizens. To offer everyone greater possibilities for life, work, business, travel, discovery and – why not – love. Whenever they make a new city their own, exploring its bars and centers of life; whenever they feel a new language quiver on their lips, discover other methods of study, or let themselves be swept away by a love that does not seem so foreign, the Erasmus students experience an extraordinary feeling of freedom. It’s this magic of Erasmus, wonderfully depicted in Cédric Klapisch’s film, L’Auberge Espagnole, a film that took us by storm in the fall of 2000, when, with a group of students from 12 European countries, we founded cafebabel.com, the first European current events magazine entirely translated into six languages. To meet the enormous challenges of the twenty-first century, our national societies need a breath of fresh air; they need to open themselves up to one another, to speak to each other. But as she acquires new proficiencies, the European Union suffers from a terrible democratic deficit that alienates it from its citizens. Thus, it becomes pressing to create a European public opinion, with its debates, its catalysts for ideas, its multilingual media. This is our day-to-day work: exclusive coverage, unique interviews, forums and blogs that open up debate. The Erasmus generation is the first to have successfully wagered on this. Because this generation “thinks and speaks” European, as opposed to the leaders of different countries who increase their plans of national revival, confront each other on foreign policy issues, and act “as if” the sharing of the sovereignty (currency, borders, legislation) were not already a reality. Political Europe will not be built in this way, but rather through the creation of a transnational public space. For the past eight years, through collaborative journalism, our magazine has been rising to meet this very challenge. These transnational points of view are rich with multicultural perspectives to which 300,000 Internet users respond monthly. Thanks to the Erasmus generation, a European public opinion is being born. It must be heard.
A real world education
Heleen Terwijn
Psychologist and founder of the IMC Weekendschool
Ask Americans about Europe, and many say: “history”. Ask Europeans about Europe, and many say: “Brussels”. This seems odd, as if a bureaucracy blinds Europeans. But this is not the case. European culture simply slips away in any attempt to define it. This implies a great asset, if only we’d involve our students in the right stuff. European school children learn about Plato as “Greek”, Descartes as “French” and Goethe as “German”. Although the shreds of history intertwine into distinguishable European patterns, students do not explicitly learn about “European values”, let alone “European identity”. They learn to relate history to their own societies, and if they are lucky, to their own lives. With the euro as about the only practical European symbol, there is not much to encourage European identity. Nobody cheers for the European soccer team (there is none), or pledges allegiance to the European flag. Europe is a set of hazy boundaries, cultural diversity with lots of history, and “Brussels”. Is this a threat for Europe? No. Rather, it is an opportunity. European students are well aware of cultures other than their own. They learn about the winding roots of their societies, they learn to live together with the many other cultures in Europe, and many speak more than two languages, especially immigrants. The next step would be to cherish European students’ already existing ability for cultural comparison and tolerance, but not by locking them up in a forced “European identity” that would exactly oppose their abilities. We should involve students in world issues, like migration, religious diversity, climate change and social injustice. Precisely, while discovering the world, they will find out for themselves how “European” they are. As my experience with the Weekend Schools shows, once education is organized around this principle, children are extremely eager to learn. And, as Sajjaad, an alumnus said: “At the Weekend School I learned to dare to think.” “One single European identity” is not one of those. In scaling up our students’ abilities to the world level, we embrace the best in European tradition, notably that of exchange and tolerance.
Old Europe has a bright future
Hubert Joly
CEO of Carlson
In this century of globalization and integration, Europe is ideally situated to play a leadership role in this new multipolar world. Much was said at the end of the twentieth century about the center of gravity of the world moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This was arguably driven by the emergence of Asia as a new economic powerhouse and by the high rate of growth on the west coast of the US. The theory was that this would leave Europe on the sidelines as trade and communication were essentially going to move away from Europe. Not so fast… Europe’s geographic situation gives it a unique advantage. Leading a global organization can be in certain ways easier from Europe than from any other place in the world. Flights from Europe to Asia are more convenient than from the US. For example, flying to Delhi from Paris takes 9 hours versus 15 hours from New York or 20 hours from Los Angeles. While office hours overlap between Europe and Asia and Europe and the US, they do not between the US and Asia (Singapore is 12 hours ahead of New York, but only 6 hours ahead of Europe). This makes communication and collaboration easier from and with Europe… Additionally, Europe’s nature gives Europeans from their youngest age a great sense of cultural diversity, an advantage for those trying to grasp and deal with the subtleties of people, cultural norms, and customs of this multipolar world. So, Charles De Gaulle may have been prescient when he said, “It will not be any European statesman who will unite Europe: Europe will be united by the Chinese.”
Europe, religious or secular
Friday, December 4 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 2 comments
A shining example of unity
and diversity
Rabbi Arthur Schneier
President of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, Senior rabbi, Park East Synagogue, New York
It is difficult to comprehend how the very same continent which gave rise to great universal ideals of liberty and freedom could also be the birthplace of nationalism, Communism and Fascism. Europe has been at the center of creating the ideas and events that have determined much of the story of modernity. Unfortunately, so many of her great scholastic and cultural achievements have been overshadowed by the wars she has fought with herself and her neighbors. As a Vienna-born Holocaust survivor, I experienced the best and worst of what Europe had to offer. Happily, I lived to see Europe emerging from the ravages of World War II focused on learning and helping teach others the harsh lessons of history. From the establishment of the European Community through Maastricht, she now looks to curb nationalist tendencies with continental agreements and international cooperation. Requirements for entry into the European Union are a commitment to democratic governance and respecting the dignity of every human being. The great moral and ethical challenge facing Europe today is how she will show understanding and respect of the other and cope with cultural and religious differences. For over a millennium, Jews have resided in European lands, making their contribution to society in culture, the arts, medicine, the sciences, yet enduring persecution and acts of discrimination. Until the Holocaust, expressions of cultural exclusion and hatred were largely ignored, contrary to what some may like to think they still color too much of contemporary Europe. Regrettably, rabid nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism have resurfaced, particularly at this time of instability and economic hardship. We live in an age of multiple identities. Europe can become a shining example of unity and diversity as its demographic makeup continues to evolve. To preserve the timeless values of Western civilization, while respecting the dignity of a heterogeneous population, it will be essential to foster interreligious cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Although the focus of world attention has shifted somewhat in the past half century, away from Europe and toward Asia, I believe Europe still has the opportunity to play a leading role in transatlantic partnership with the United States as a guardian of democracy for a world in transition.
The spiritual foundations of Europe
Bernd Posselt
President of Pan-Europa Deutschland, member of the European Parliament for Munich
The debate about enlargement and its limits, but also about the constitutional treaty, has brought to light the question of the spiritual foundations of the EU. The first German federal president, Theodor Heuss, a liberal, once said that European culture was built on three hills: the Acropolis, the Capitol and Golgotha – in other words on Greek philosophy, on Roman legal concepts and Christianity. Looking at European cities and villages, with churches in their midst, one immediately sees that Europe never would have arisen without Christianity. But we don’t want to make a Christian museum out of Europe, but rather to live out our faith today, in our times. Christians are no longer the majority in many parts of Europe, even though European culture is still influenced by Christianity. Those who believe religion is a sideshow will have difficulties in reasonably organizing the coexistence of peoples in a world in which religiosity plays an ever-increasing role. Not just discussions about faith, but faith itself plays a growing role in greater Europe. And independently from the personal beliefs of individuals, the number of people who believe, or at least feel, that Europe has no future as a peninsula of unbelievers, and that faith rightly understood does not split and feed conflicts, but instead, can bring people together in mutual respect, is also growing.
Modern Europe and its Union
Bekir Karliga
Professor, doctor, adviser to the prime minister in Istanbul, Chairman of the Turkish Coordination Committee of the Alliance of Civilizations
Modern Europe goes beyond a mere geographical space. It’s an experience, a history and a cultural patrimony. The latter is not the fruit of a single society, nation, region, language or religion. It formed and developed during centuries, from the contributions of numerous populations stemming from various geographical locations and speaking different languages. This is why it is, in a certain sense, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and even American. In the same way, it is equally Christian, Jewish, Muslim or even atheist. If all these cultures wouldn’t have been able to develop, would European culture be what it is today? However, it has very skillfully internalized the heritage of other cultures; it has even become one of its components. Thus, its values acquired a universal character. Whenever it attempted to impose its values forcefully on other societies, it barely obtained any satisfying results. But when it presented those values freely as a model, the values became very much in demand. Throughout her history, Europe has known how to find the suitable middle ground between extremes. Disposing of ideologies, she had the courage to look from different perspectives and was then able to achieve great accomplishments that paved the way for humanity. On the other hand, when she fell prey to obscurantism – especially when it was religiously and ideologically motivated – she could not avoid being at the mercy of a destructive vandalism. The Europe of the future should avoid these impasses from now on, and move forward on the path of reason. Without either selfishness or brutality, she should desire and meet these objectives, not only for herself but for all of humanity. This is what I expect of Europe, and it is why I ardently make the case for my country entering the European Union.
Rabbi Arthur Schneier
President of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, Senior rabbi, Park East Synagogue, New York
It is difficult to comprehend how the very same continent which gave rise to great universal ideals of liberty and freedom could also be the birthplace of nationalism, Communism and Fascism. Europe has been at the center of creating the ideas and events that have determined much of the story of modernity. Unfortunately, so many of her great scholastic and cultural achievements have been overshadowed by the wars she has fought with herself and her neighbors. As a Vienna-born Holocaust survivor, I experienced the best and worst of what Europe had to offer. Happily, I lived to see Europe emerging from the ravages of World War II focused on learning and helping teach others the harsh lessons of history. From the establishment of the European Community through Maastricht, she now looks to curb nationalist tendencies with continental agreements and international cooperation. Requirements for entry into the European Union are a commitment to democratic governance and respecting the dignity of every human being. The great moral and ethical challenge facing Europe today is how she will show understanding and respect of the other and cope with cultural and religious differences. For over a millennium, Jews have resided in European lands, making their contribution to society in culture, the arts, medicine, the sciences, yet enduring persecution and acts of discrimination. Until the Holocaust, expressions of cultural exclusion and hatred were largely ignored, contrary to what some may like to think they still color too much of contemporary Europe. Regrettably, rabid nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism have resurfaced, particularly at this time of instability and economic hardship. We live in an age of multiple identities. Europe can become a shining example of unity and diversity as its demographic makeup continues to evolve. To preserve the timeless values of Western civilization, while respecting the dignity of a heterogeneous population, it will be essential to foster interreligious cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Although the focus of world attention has shifted somewhat in the past half century, away from Europe and toward Asia, I believe Europe still has the opportunity to play a leading role in transatlantic partnership with the United States as a guardian of democracy for a world in transition.
The spiritual foundations of Europe
Bernd Posselt
President of Pan-Europa Deutschland, member of the European Parliament for Munich
The debate about enlargement and its limits, but also about the constitutional treaty, has brought to light the question of the spiritual foundations of the EU. The first German federal president, Theodor Heuss, a liberal, once said that European culture was built on three hills: the Acropolis, the Capitol and Golgotha – in other words on Greek philosophy, on Roman legal concepts and Christianity. Looking at European cities and villages, with churches in their midst, one immediately sees that Europe never would have arisen without Christianity. But we don’t want to make a Christian museum out of Europe, but rather to live out our faith today, in our times. Christians are no longer the majority in many parts of Europe, even though European culture is still influenced by Christianity. Those who believe religion is a sideshow will have difficulties in reasonably organizing the coexistence of peoples in a world in which religiosity plays an ever-increasing role. Not just discussions about faith, but faith itself plays a growing role in greater Europe. And independently from the personal beliefs of individuals, the number of people who believe, or at least feel, that Europe has no future as a peninsula of unbelievers, and that faith rightly understood does not split and feed conflicts, but instead, can bring people together in mutual respect, is also growing.
Modern Europe and its Union
Bekir Karliga
Professor, doctor, adviser to the prime minister in Istanbul, Chairman of the Turkish Coordination Committee of the Alliance of Civilizations
Modern Europe goes beyond a mere geographical space. It’s an experience, a history and a cultural patrimony. The latter is not the fruit of a single society, nation, region, language or religion. It formed and developed during centuries, from the contributions of numerous populations stemming from various geographical locations and speaking different languages. This is why it is, in a certain sense, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and even American. In the same way, it is equally Christian, Jewish, Muslim or even atheist. If all these cultures wouldn’t have been able to develop, would European culture be what it is today? However, it has very skillfully internalized the heritage of other cultures; it has even become one of its components. Thus, its values acquired a universal character. Whenever it attempted to impose its values forcefully on other societies, it barely obtained any satisfying results. But when it presented those values freely as a model, the values became very much in demand. Throughout her history, Europe has known how to find the suitable middle ground between extremes. Disposing of ideologies, she had the courage to look from different perspectives and was then able to achieve great accomplishments that paved the way for humanity. On the other hand, when she fell prey to obscurantism – especially when it was religiously and ideologically motivated – she could not avoid being at the mercy of a destructive vandalism. The Europe of the future should avoid these impasses from now on, and move forward on the path of reason. Without either selfishness or brutality, she should desire and meet these objectives, not only for herself but for all of humanity. This is what I expect of Europe, and it is why I ardently make the case for my country entering the European Union.
Europe's roots...
Friday, November 20 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 5 comments
Europe’s marathon run
Jean-François Rischard
Former vice president of the World Bank
How come the people of Europe, this small assemblage of tribes and territories at the fringe of much bigger regions, ended up reading from the same script and making such a remarkable contribution to humanity? Over the years, I have sifted through many possible explanations, but the one that puts it all together for me is that of Europe’s association with the worldview of the Greeks. Emerging some 3,000 years ago, this view held that life down here on earth was pleasant, interesting, and worthy of study, whereas the gods up there were not to be taken too seriously – in contrast with the other, more ancient worldview that considers life on earth to be mostly wretched and at any rate inferior to the more perfect life in the divine paradise above or afterlife beyond. The point is that by espousing the new, boldly different worldview, the people of Europe extracted themselves from the older worldview’s human potentialsapping corollary: credulous populations kept in line by brutal strongmen occupying their position at the top of their respective hierarchies by dint of their supposed exclusive communication links with the divine upstairs. So the way I see it, Europe took in the oxygen of the genial Greeks’ worldview and ran with it across the centuries, working its way to eventually becoming the world’s beacon for precisely the opposites of credulity and brutal rule: the two big ideas of empirical enquiry and democracy. But millennia of incessant wars made this anything but a smooth marathon run: for long stretches of time, there were few runners left; and then Europe had to shake off two types of wars that kept slowing it down. For one, it had to snuff out a remnant of the other worldview – senseless wars around competing religious claims; it did this at some point through another big idea: the separation of church and state. Mostly, Europe had to put an end to its real bane: reckless wars around competing real estate claims. Since the three prior big ideas alone would not do the job, Europe made the possibility of such wars a nonissue by inventing a fourth big idea: that of Europe – the world’s first true and durable union of nation-states. And now, as we test the planet’s limits and must find new ways to solve burning global problems, maybe the time has come for the people of Europe to do an encore, and contribute the new worldview and big ideas that will carry humanity through its next 3,000 years.
Europe’s mystique
Katherine Marshall
Senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs
To love one’s homeland seems part of the human condition. This love has a special poignancy today, as we move, change, take off and land each day in a new place, each corner of the earth, every people and culture accessible to discovery. Breaking ties to inherited identities and the bonds of birthplace can be liberating and welcome. But there is a special and enduring European flavor to spatial love, anchored in physical space that breathes culture and history. We all feel a deep resonance in savoring the beauty of the Seine as the sun sets, and timeless barges pass under its bridges, strolling down Roman streets where past and present mingle, pausing in a Swiss village where the crisp green of vineyards contrasts with soaring mountains while peaceful cowbells peal a distinct if distant music, or feeling the energy on London’s bustling streets where red telephone booths and black taxis seem like timeless icons. Those dimensions of Europe belong to us all. But for Europeans, the love of Europe’s beauty goes beyond the sheer glory of the place and its meaning in history and culture. And that bond of spatial love seems to endure. A special European mystique involves place and culture, inextricably linked. If God created the earth with loving care, fashioning each curve and color, perhaps He or She lingered lovingly a bit longer over Europe, creating its contrasting and eternal beauties. Europe is about the physical space and the space seems bound to people, the place to history, and Europe to the indefinable magic of its diverse cultures. The ways in which identity and place, culture and destiny are linked, is plainly changing, but a special attachment and love of place seems a lasting part of what keeps Europe Europe and makes it different and distinct.
Contemporary Europe, a pioneer experience
Amin Maalouf
Novelist and journalist
From my perspective, the experience of contemporary Europe indicates to the whole of humanity the road to follow: leaving behind, little by little, accumulated hatred, territorial quarrels, age-old rivalries; allowing the sons and daughters of those who killed each other to hold hands and conceive the future together; thinking about organizing a life in common, for six nations, then for nine, 12 or 15, then for about 30; going beyond the diversity of cultures while never trying to do away with it, so that one day, from many ethnic homelands, an ethical homeland is born. Throughout history, every time a voice was heard saying that the different nations of the planet should reconcile, get closer to one another, manage their common space in solidarity, or imagine a future together, it was inevitably accused of naivety for daring to advocate such a utopia. The European Union offers us in fact the very example of a utopia that is materializing. It is, as a result, a pioneer experience, a plausible foreshadowing of what a reconciled humanity could be tomorrow, and proof that the most ambitious visions are not necessarily naive. That said, the endeavor is not without flaws. All those participating in it express doubts at times. I myself experience a certain impatience with it. I would like Europe to set an example of coexistence among her founding people as well as among the immigrants she takes in; I would like her to take much more care of her cultural dimension, to much better organize her linguistic diversity. I would like her to resist the temptation to become a “club” of Christian, white and rich nations, and to dare conceive herself as a model for all humans. And I would also like her to dare to build, on the institutional plan, one single democratic entity, a European equivalent to the United States of America, with the states endowed with a larger cultural specificity and concerned with protecting and promoting it, but with federal leaders elected on the same day throughout the whole continent, and whose authority is recognized by all, Yes, I worry about the excessive prudence I perceive, and about a certain moral myopia. But the reservations I express in no way diminish my faith in the exemplary value of the “laboratory” that the construction of Europe represents at the crucial stage in which humanity finds itself. Text selected by the author for Europe à la carte, excerpt from the book Le Dérèglement du monde, Grasset, 2009.
Jean-François Rischard
Former vice president of the World Bank
How come the people of Europe, this small assemblage of tribes and territories at the fringe of much bigger regions, ended up reading from the same script and making such a remarkable contribution to humanity? Over the years, I have sifted through many possible explanations, but the one that puts it all together for me is that of Europe’s association with the worldview of the Greeks. Emerging some 3,000 years ago, this view held that life down here on earth was pleasant, interesting, and worthy of study, whereas the gods up there were not to be taken too seriously – in contrast with the other, more ancient worldview that considers life on earth to be mostly wretched and at any rate inferior to the more perfect life in the divine paradise above or afterlife beyond. The point is that by espousing the new, boldly different worldview, the people of Europe extracted themselves from the older worldview’s human potentialsapping corollary: credulous populations kept in line by brutal strongmen occupying their position at the top of their respective hierarchies by dint of their supposed exclusive communication links with the divine upstairs. So the way I see it, Europe took in the oxygen of the genial Greeks’ worldview and ran with it across the centuries, working its way to eventually becoming the world’s beacon for precisely the opposites of credulity and brutal rule: the two big ideas of empirical enquiry and democracy. But millennia of incessant wars made this anything but a smooth marathon run: for long stretches of time, there were few runners left; and then Europe had to shake off two types of wars that kept slowing it down. For one, it had to snuff out a remnant of the other worldview – senseless wars around competing religious claims; it did this at some point through another big idea: the separation of church and state. Mostly, Europe had to put an end to its real bane: reckless wars around competing real estate claims. Since the three prior big ideas alone would not do the job, Europe made the possibility of such wars a nonissue by inventing a fourth big idea: that of Europe – the world’s first true and durable union of nation-states. And now, as we test the planet’s limits and must find new ways to solve burning global problems, maybe the time has come for the people of Europe to do an encore, and contribute the new worldview and big ideas that will carry humanity through its next 3,000 years.
Europe’s mystique
Katherine Marshall
Senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs
To love one’s homeland seems part of the human condition. This love has a special poignancy today, as we move, change, take off and land each day in a new place, each corner of the earth, every people and culture accessible to discovery. Breaking ties to inherited identities and the bonds of birthplace can be liberating and welcome. But there is a special and enduring European flavor to spatial love, anchored in physical space that breathes culture and history. We all feel a deep resonance in savoring the beauty of the Seine as the sun sets, and timeless barges pass under its bridges, strolling down Roman streets where past and present mingle, pausing in a Swiss village where the crisp green of vineyards contrasts with soaring mountains while peaceful cowbells peal a distinct if distant music, or feeling the energy on London’s bustling streets where red telephone booths and black taxis seem like timeless icons. Those dimensions of Europe belong to us all. But for Europeans, the love of Europe’s beauty goes beyond the sheer glory of the place and its meaning in history and culture. And that bond of spatial love seems to endure. A special European mystique involves place and culture, inextricably linked. If God created the earth with loving care, fashioning each curve and color, perhaps He or She lingered lovingly a bit longer over Europe, creating its contrasting and eternal beauties. Europe is about the physical space and the space seems bound to people, the place to history, and Europe to the indefinable magic of its diverse cultures. The ways in which identity and place, culture and destiny are linked, is plainly changing, but a special attachment and love of place seems a lasting part of what keeps Europe Europe and makes it different and distinct.
Contemporary Europe, a pioneer experience
Amin Maalouf
Novelist and journalist
From my perspective, the experience of contemporary Europe indicates to the whole of humanity the road to follow: leaving behind, little by little, accumulated hatred, territorial quarrels, age-old rivalries; allowing the sons and daughters of those who killed each other to hold hands and conceive the future together; thinking about organizing a life in common, for six nations, then for nine, 12 or 15, then for about 30; going beyond the diversity of cultures while never trying to do away with it, so that one day, from many ethnic homelands, an ethical homeland is born. Throughout history, every time a voice was heard saying that the different nations of the planet should reconcile, get closer to one another, manage their common space in solidarity, or imagine a future together, it was inevitably accused of naivety for daring to advocate such a utopia. The European Union offers us in fact the very example of a utopia that is materializing. It is, as a result, a pioneer experience, a plausible foreshadowing of what a reconciled humanity could be tomorrow, and proof that the most ambitious visions are not necessarily naive. That said, the endeavor is not without flaws. All those participating in it express doubts at times. I myself experience a certain impatience with it. I would like Europe to set an example of coexistence among her founding people as well as among the immigrants she takes in; I would like her to take much more care of her cultural dimension, to much better organize her linguistic diversity. I would like her to resist the temptation to become a “club” of Christian, white and rich nations, and to dare conceive herself as a model for all humans. And I would also like her to dare to build, on the institutional plan, one single democratic entity, a European equivalent to the United States of America, with the states endowed with a larger cultural specificity and concerned with protecting and promoting it, but with federal leaders elected on the same day throughout the whole continent, and whose authority is recognized by all, Yes, I worry about the excessive prudence I perceive, and about a certain moral myopia. But the reservations I express in no way diminish my faith in the exemplary value of the “laboratory” that the construction of Europe represents at the crucial stage in which humanity finds itself. Text selected by the author for Europe à la carte, excerpt from the book Le Dérèglement du monde, Grasset, 2009.
Not so long ago, a wall separated us
By Europe à la Carte | 12 comments
A map of reconciliation
Maria-Cristina Necula
Writer
My father made Europe’s acquaintance while trying to escape its Eastern grasp. As a top microprocessor specialist and associate professor at the Bucharest Polytechnic University, he was allowed an outing beyond the Iron Curtain at a workshop in London in January 1985. Fueled by thoughts of escape from a life in Romania that abused his talents and crushed him to conform to Communist party rules, he stepped on British soil and defected. Unable to apply for the US visa from the UK, he went to Vienna. Wisely avoiding the Romanian refugees camp – where even priests had the “habit” of serving as informants for the Securitate (Romanian secret police), my father tried to blend into Viennese life, working part-time at the Technical University, while waiting for the US visa. For him, Vienna became an unfriendly waiting room filled with loneliness, fear, the occasional kindness of acquaintances and the absurd treatment of some European embassies that rejected his attempts at seeking refuge in those particular countries by asking him to obtain approval from the Romanian embassy first. On the Eastern side of the Curtain, my mother’s waiting room stretched as wide as two and a half years and as tormenting as some winter nights, when Bucharest residents had no electricity or heat, especially those who were labeled as wives of traitors to the regime. The sound of the telephone became the sound of terror, like an experiment in conditioning rats through electrical shocks. Every week, the dreaded phone call would summon my mother to the headquarters of the Securitate where she would enter an interrogation room to face psychological games of various degrees. From: “Your husband abandoned you and your child because that’s not really his child; you’re a whore!” to “He may have a car accident” to “We know he’s a good guy; we’ll forgive him if he returns” to “You really think he’s ok? He’s begging under bridges” to “He found another woman” – these were variations on the weekly themes my mother heard for a year while giving written statements to answer the same two questions: “How did he escape?”, “How much did you know about his plans?” Soothing her fear as best she could, my mother never let me perceive any hint of terror, trying to make life around me fun, and taking me to the opera. We sat in the Bucharest Opera on May 15, 1985, and Mr. Mozart pacified our souls. That performance of Le Nozze di Figaro was the first step into a magical world that became a welcome alternate reality, while we waited to join my father, who, after nine months in Vienna, finally arrived in New York. More than 50 interrogations and over 100 opera performances later, the letter came. It was a letter signed by 44 members of the US Congress asking for our release and addressed to Ceausescu personally – my father’s effective final effort to dislodge the regime’s grip on us. The letter got my mother and me out of Romania and into the United States, where we began a life away from Europe, but very much steeped in our Eastern European roots. For my mother and father, it meant starting over at 45 and 47 respectively, leaving behind them a life of restriction, and a vision of a Europe divided where the East longed for the West’s standard of living and availability of choices. My parents’ road to personal and professional fulfillment was a road that drifted off the map of Europe to forge new paths across the geography of an unfamiliar culture and landscape. Now their steps resound all over the European map on their many travels – travels that are as much voyages of discovering Europe as they are journeys of reconciliation with the past.
From fairy tale to hope
Maria-Cristina Necula
Writer
My childhood vision of Europe was of a Europe divided between reality and magic. I lived behind the Iron Curtain. The European countries beyond that curtain seemed fairy-tale lands filled with the intoxicating fragrance and sweetness of Nina Ricci perfumes and Toblerone chocolate – the few Western goodies that would occasionally make their way to Romania. I lived with the idea of Europe as a myth – steeped in my childhood fascination with Greek mythology – the image of Europa as a beautiful woman kidnapped and loved by Zeus endowed the awareness of living in Europe with a sense of wonder. But the idea of Europe as a continent, and a whole, only presented itself to me thousands of miles away when I arrived in the United States with my parents. At 12, I finally learned about the Iron Curtain, and at 14, I watched, glued to CNN, as that curtain crumbled in a domino-like effect throughout Eastern Europe. After college, I lived for a year again in Romania – a curtain-free, wide-eyed and confused Romania. Then through repeated returns, I saw Romania timidly and somewhat clumsily approaching integration into the European Union. My subsequent travels throughout Europe took me to those magical lands I had only dreamt of as a child – that beautiful Europa loved by Zeus. In the 20 years since the revolution in Romania, I observed this mythical personage – Europa – reaching out her arms across the pulsating gap left by the Iron Curtain and gradually embracing her altered manifestations throughout Eastern Europe. When Romania was at last welcomed into that embrace, I realized what Europe had symbolized most for me all these years: hope.
Cheering for Europe
Ulf Gartzke
Director of the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation’s Washington Office
Growing up in West Germany during the 1980s, I distinctly recall asking my parents whether I should be cheering the many gold medals won by East German athletes at various Olympic games. While neither my father nor my mother held out much hope for German reunification, their unequivocal answer was “Yes, we are one people”. As a kid, the question about who to cheer for during major international sports events was probably the first time that I thought about the notion of national identity. In essence, it was rather simple, “Who is part of my team and who isn’t?” Of course, matters were made much more complicated by the fact that Germany had been divided into two antagonistic and hostile states for more than 40 years. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is truly amazing to see how far Europe has come in the past two decades. The Cold War is over, Germany is reunified, and the European Union project has successfully expanded the community of free and democratic nations to include many members of the former Warsaw Pact. At the same time, we have also witnessed the emergence of a genuine European identity, a growing emotional attachment to the common values we hold dear. For sure, during times of crisis and economic turmoil in particular, nation states still do command the ultimate allegiance of most citizens. And, of course, during future Olympic games and international sports events, my young children will certainly cheer for Germany’s competing athletes. However, I will also tell my kids that when it comes to Europe, “We are one continent composed of many different nations that share a common history, common values and, ultimately, a common destiny.” It’s important for all of us to cheer for Europe!
My Europe
Andras Löcke
Adjunct editor-in-chief of the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság Zrt.
When I was young, there used to be two Europes. There was us, poor Eastern Europe and the other one, the glittering West. Most young people in Hungary, like me, hardly knew the West. We, the inhabitants of “the merriest barracks” in the East, held two passports: with the red passport we could travel to the fellow Eastern countries, any time. With the other one, the blue passport, we could travel to the West, in fact most countries of the world – but we received an exit visa only once in three years. This was the best arrangement in the Eastern bloc. From Honecker’s German Democratic Republic only retirees were able to travel to the West. I remember my first Western holiday in 1979, at the age of 17. I hitchhiked to my cousin, a defector from Communist Hungary to West Germany, a German citizen by then. We traveled together from West Germany to Spain. For the journey I needed a West German, a French and a Spanish visa. In Spain we had lots of quarrels on how to spend our holidays. My cousin’s girlfriend, a German girl in her late twenties, wanted to have sun, fun, nothing to do but the sea. I wanted to hurry from city to city, from museum to museum, because I wanted to see everything in Spain in two weeks, as my next opportunity to go to the West was three more years away. Changes in Hungary from Communism to democracy were slow and gradual, there was no single cathartic moment in it for me. However, tears came out of my eyes in such cathartic moments, when the Berlin Wall came down and when Ceausescu, arguably the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, was put down. On my first journey to the United States, I realized that there really is such a thing as “European-ness”. I realized that Portuguese and Hungarians, Poles and Dutch have more in common than we Europeans have with Americans. We Europeans seem to have more social responsibility, we are more ready to think that this or that the task of the state, than Americans. But I could see also that we Americans and Europeans also have more in common than we transatlantic friends have with the rest of the world. We appreciate scientific thinking and what we like to call “development”. Now young people don’t even remember East and West Germany, they don’t know what the Iron Curtain was and they can travel to Spain not only without a visa, but without a passport. An estimated 400,000 fellow citizens of mine work in the old EU countries, i.e., Western Europe. The biggest chunk of Hungarian banking and industry is in Western hands. Europe is definitely one now, although the old East-West divide lives on in a milder form. We, in the East, are the employees, they, in the West, are the employers. We, albeit poor, are the irresponsible spenders, they are the wiser moneymen raised on Protestant ethics. The economic crisis has shattered Europe as a whole, and the continent will never be the same. However, with our Eastern eyes, the West is still the home of the normality we miss so much.
Maria-Cristina Necula
Writer
My father made Europe’s acquaintance while trying to escape its Eastern grasp. As a top microprocessor specialist and associate professor at the Bucharest Polytechnic University, he was allowed an outing beyond the Iron Curtain at a workshop in London in January 1985. Fueled by thoughts of escape from a life in Romania that abused his talents and crushed him to conform to Communist party rules, he stepped on British soil and defected. Unable to apply for the US visa from the UK, he went to Vienna. Wisely avoiding the Romanian refugees camp – where even priests had the “habit” of serving as informants for the Securitate (Romanian secret police), my father tried to blend into Viennese life, working part-time at the Technical University, while waiting for the US visa. For him, Vienna became an unfriendly waiting room filled with loneliness, fear, the occasional kindness of acquaintances and the absurd treatment of some European embassies that rejected his attempts at seeking refuge in those particular countries by asking him to obtain approval from the Romanian embassy first. On the Eastern side of the Curtain, my mother’s waiting room stretched as wide as two and a half years and as tormenting as some winter nights, when Bucharest residents had no electricity or heat, especially those who were labeled as wives of traitors to the regime. The sound of the telephone became the sound of terror, like an experiment in conditioning rats through electrical shocks. Every week, the dreaded phone call would summon my mother to the headquarters of the Securitate where she would enter an interrogation room to face psychological games of various degrees. From: “Your husband abandoned you and your child because that’s not really his child; you’re a whore!” to “He may have a car accident” to “We know he’s a good guy; we’ll forgive him if he returns” to “You really think he’s ok? He’s begging under bridges” to “He found another woman” – these were variations on the weekly themes my mother heard for a year while giving written statements to answer the same two questions: “How did he escape?”, “How much did you know about his plans?” Soothing her fear as best she could, my mother never let me perceive any hint of terror, trying to make life around me fun, and taking me to the opera. We sat in the Bucharest Opera on May 15, 1985, and Mr. Mozart pacified our souls. That performance of Le Nozze di Figaro was the first step into a magical world that became a welcome alternate reality, while we waited to join my father, who, after nine months in Vienna, finally arrived in New York. More than 50 interrogations and over 100 opera performances later, the letter came. It was a letter signed by 44 members of the US Congress asking for our release and addressed to Ceausescu personally – my father’s effective final effort to dislodge the regime’s grip on us. The letter got my mother and me out of Romania and into the United States, where we began a life away from Europe, but very much steeped in our Eastern European roots. For my mother and father, it meant starting over at 45 and 47 respectively, leaving behind them a life of restriction, and a vision of a Europe divided where the East longed for the West’s standard of living and availability of choices. My parents’ road to personal and professional fulfillment was a road that drifted off the map of Europe to forge new paths across the geography of an unfamiliar culture and landscape. Now their steps resound all over the European map on their many travels – travels that are as much voyages of discovering Europe as they are journeys of reconciliation with the past.
From fairy tale to hope
Maria-Cristina Necula
Writer
My childhood vision of Europe was of a Europe divided between reality and magic. I lived behind the Iron Curtain. The European countries beyond that curtain seemed fairy-tale lands filled with the intoxicating fragrance and sweetness of Nina Ricci perfumes and Toblerone chocolate – the few Western goodies that would occasionally make their way to Romania. I lived with the idea of Europe as a myth – steeped in my childhood fascination with Greek mythology – the image of Europa as a beautiful woman kidnapped and loved by Zeus endowed the awareness of living in Europe with a sense of wonder. But the idea of Europe as a continent, and a whole, only presented itself to me thousands of miles away when I arrived in the United States with my parents. At 12, I finally learned about the Iron Curtain, and at 14, I watched, glued to CNN, as that curtain crumbled in a domino-like effect throughout Eastern Europe. After college, I lived for a year again in Romania – a curtain-free, wide-eyed and confused Romania. Then through repeated returns, I saw Romania timidly and somewhat clumsily approaching integration into the European Union. My subsequent travels throughout Europe took me to those magical lands I had only dreamt of as a child – that beautiful Europa loved by Zeus. In the 20 years since the revolution in Romania, I observed this mythical personage – Europa – reaching out her arms across the pulsating gap left by the Iron Curtain and gradually embracing her altered manifestations throughout Eastern Europe. When Romania was at last welcomed into that embrace, I realized what Europe had symbolized most for me all these years: hope.
Cheering for Europe
Ulf Gartzke
Director of the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation’s Washington Office
Growing up in West Germany during the 1980s, I distinctly recall asking my parents whether I should be cheering the many gold medals won by East German athletes at various Olympic games. While neither my father nor my mother held out much hope for German reunification, their unequivocal answer was “Yes, we are one people”. As a kid, the question about who to cheer for during major international sports events was probably the first time that I thought about the notion of national identity. In essence, it was rather simple, “Who is part of my team and who isn’t?” Of course, matters were made much more complicated by the fact that Germany had been divided into two antagonistic and hostile states for more than 40 years. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is truly amazing to see how far Europe has come in the past two decades. The Cold War is over, Germany is reunified, and the European Union project has successfully expanded the community of free and democratic nations to include many members of the former Warsaw Pact. At the same time, we have also witnessed the emergence of a genuine European identity, a growing emotional attachment to the common values we hold dear. For sure, during times of crisis and economic turmoil in particular, nation states still do command the ultimate allegiance of most citizens. And, of course, during future Olympic games and international sports events, my young children will certainly cheer for Germany’s competing athletes. However, I will also tell my kids that when it comes to Europe, “We are one continent composed of many different nations that share a common history, common values and, ultimately, a common destiny.” It’s important for all of us to cheer for Europe!
My Europe
Andras Löcke
Adjunct editor-in-chief of the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság Zrt.
When I was young, there used to be two Europes. There was us, poor Eastern Europe and the other one, the glittering West. Most young people in Hungary, like me, hardly knew the West. We, the inhabitants of “the merriest barracks” in the East, held two passports: with the red passport we could travel to the fellow Eastern countries, any time. With the other one, the blue passport, we could travel to the West, in fact most countries of the world – but we received an exit visa only once in three years. This was the best arrangement in the Eastern bloc. From Honecker’s German Democratic Republic only retirees were able to travel to the West. I remember my first Western holiday in 1979, at the age of 17. I hitchhiked to my cousin, a defector from Communist Hungary to West Germany, a German citizen by then. We traveled together from West Germany to Spain. For the journey I needed a West German, a French and a Spanish visa. In Spain we had lots of quarrels on how to spend our holidays. My cousin’s girlfriend, a German girl in her late twenties, wanted to have sun, fun, nothing to do but the sea. I wanted to hurry from city to city, from museum to museum, because I wanted to see everything in Spain in two weeks, as my next opportunity to go to the West was three more years away. Changes in Hungary from Communism to democracy were slow and gradual, there was no single cathartic moment in it for me. However, tears came out of my eyes in such cathartic moments, when the Berlin Wall came down and when Ceausescu, arguably the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, was put down. On my first journey to the United States, I realized that there really is such a thing as “European-ness”. I realized that Portuguese and Hungarians, Poles and Dutch have more in common than we Europeans have with Americans. We Europeans seem to have more social responsibility, we are more ready to think that this or that the task of the state, than Americans. But I could see also that we Americans and Europeans also have more in common than we transatlantic friends have with the rest of the world. We appreciate scientific thinking and what we like to call “development”. Now young people don’t even remember East and West Germany, they don’t know what the Iron Curtain was and they can travel to Spain not only without a visa, but without a passport. An estimated 400,000 fellow citizens of mine work in the old EU countries, i.e., Western Europe. The biggest chunk of Hungarian banking and industry is in Western hands. Europe is definitely one now, although the old East-West divide lives on in a milder form. We, in the East, are the employees, they, in the West, are the employers. We, albeit poor, are the irresponsible spenders, they are the wiser moneymen raised on Protestant ethics. The economic crisis has shattered Europe as a whole, and the continent will never be the same. However, with our Eastern eyes, the West is still the home of the normality we miss so much.
Europe from America
Saturday, November 14 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 10 comments
European state of mind
Craig Kennedy
President of the German Marshall Fund of the United States
Politics in the European Union are inherently filled with conflict and tension, but this obscures the fact that a truly continental mindset transcending nationalities and nationalism is emerging. It may not yet have the coherence one finds in the United States, but there is a growing sense among both young and old of what it means to be European and for what Europe, as a political concept, stands. For those outside Europe, and especially in the United States, this new sense of “Europe-ness” can disappoint and even aggravate. Indeed, this emerging commitment to an independent “European path” in international affairs may cause serious problems for the transatlantic relationship. But given the history of tension and conflict throughout the continent, the world, nevertheless, is better off because of this growing sense of unity.
Freedom triumphs
Paula Jon Dobriansky
Former US undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs during President George W. Bush’s administration
The day the Berlin Wall fell, news reports that throngs of people – young, old, German, international – were at the Berlin Wall, painting it with word “Freedom” and tearing down bits of the old Cold War concrete and iron edifice, were most memorable to those of us watching and listening in the West. For me, what happened in Berlin that day was also something profoundly personal. It was the end of a journey, which began with my father’s lifelong struggle for human dignity and freedom, begun in the 1950s. My father, Dr. Lev Dobriansky, a wellknown Ukrainian-American leader and author, was, of course, desirous of seeing an independent Ukraine take its rightful place among the European family of nations. He was a patriot of freedom and human dignity and had instilled in me both an unshakable conviction that human beings desired above all else to be free and that this profound yearning for freedom and dignity will triumph over tyranny. Over the decades, both before the Wall fell and thereafter, common American and European values have provided a strong foundation on which we have built effective and durable structures to give substance to our cooperation. Freedom triumphed. We have been and remain crucial partners in establishing a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. While the end of the Cold War was a major step toward that goal, subsequent history has shown us that it was not the final step. We continued to work together to secure peace in the Balkans. Significantly, our partnership extends well beyond Europe. We are allies every day in the fight against terrorism and are cooperating globally in areas ranging from humanitarian assistance to international trade to climate change to nonproliferation. We also share the world’s largest economic relationship. If greater integration has been the hallmark of developments in Europe during the past 10 years, greater integration has also been the hallmark of relations between the US and the EU. The goals agreed to in the New Transatlantic Agenda of 1995 remain constant – promoting peace, democracy and development throughout the world, expanding world trade, responding to global challenges and building bridges across the Atlantic. In the twenty-first century, our relationship will not only continue to endure but grow. I know the importance of our strong and historic bond of shared values and objectives, which underpin our transatlantic relationship, and am committed to its future.
Europe’s common quest
Michael Adams President,
Fairleigh Dickinson University President-Elect, International Association of University Presidents
At Fairleigh Dickinson University, we prepare students to become world citizens who understand the opportunities and dangers of living in an increasingly interconnected world and who can collaborate with those from different countries and cultures. But skeptics claim that national bonds supersede all other considerations and that we will always live in a world divided by “us” and “them”. I tell them there is hope. I tell them there already exists a place where fierce, national rivalries have been diminished, where broader expressions of citizenship are being formed, and where a generation is growing up comfortable balancing national roots and supranational commitments. That place is Europe. The formation of the European Union is a rare, magical development in the history of humanity. Fierce rivals who had only recently torn each other apart pledged to unite to further their common concerns. As the European Union grew and evolved, specific rights and duties developed that spread beyond national interests. At the same time, distinctive cultural traditions continue to thrive, proving that integration does not lead to the destruction of local variety. The spirit of compromise and cooperation underlying the European Union holds promise for those who seek to come together to overcome the problems that plague all people. Just as political and economic considerations drove European nations together, today, global challenges and crises compel us to think outside our nations and to consider the entire planet. And while we may not need or desire a formal planetary union, we most certainly need a global consciousness. Toward this goal, the European Union offers us an inspiring example of unity. It also builds a bridge to a future where world citizens can join together in a common quest for security, liberty and justice.
Craig Kennedy
President of the German Marshall Fund of the United States
Politics in the European Union are inherently filled with conflict and tension, but this obscures the fact that a truly continental mindset transcending nationalities and nationalism is emerging. It may not yet have the coherence one finds in the United States, but there is a growing sense among both young and old of what it means to be European and for what Europe, as a political concept, stands. For those outside Europe, and especially in the United States, this new sense of “Europe-ness” can disappoint and even aggravate. Indeed, this emerging commitment to an independent “European path” in international affairs may cause serious problems for the transatlantic relationship. But given the history of tension and conflict throughout the continent, the world, nevertheless, is better off because of this growing sense of unity.
Freedom triumphs
Paula Jon Dobriansky
Former US undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs during President George W. Bush’s administration
The day the Berlin Wall fell, news reports that throngs of people – young, old, German, international – were at the Berlin Wall, painting it with word “Freedom” and tearing down bits of the old Cold War concrete and iron edifice, were most memorable to those of us watching and listening in the West. For me, what happened in Berlin that day was also something profoundly personal. It was the end of a journey, which began with my father’s lifelong struggle for human dignity and freedom, begun in the 1950s. My father, Dr. Lev Dobriansky, a wellknown Ukrainian-American leader and author, was, of course, desirous of seeing an independent Ukraine take its rightful place among the European family of nations. He was a patriot of freedom and human dignity and had instilled in me both an unshakable conviction that human beings desired above all else to be free and that this profound yearning for freedom and dignity will triumph over tyranny. Over the decades, both before the Wall fell and thereafter, common American and European values have provided a strong foundation on which we have built effective and durable structures to give substance to our cooperation. Freedom triumphed. We have been and remain crucial partners in establishing a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. While the end of the Cold War was a major step toward that goal, subsequent history has shown us that it was not the final step. We continued to work together to secure peace in the Balkans. Significantly, our partnership extends well beyond Europe. We are allies every day in the fight against terrorism and are cooperating globally in areas ranging from humanitarian assistance to international trade to climate change to nonproliferation. We also share the world’s largest economic relationship. If greater integration has been the hallmark of developments in Europe during the past 10 years, greater integration has also been the hallmark of relations between the US and the EU. The goals agreed to in the New Transatlantic Agenda of 1995 remain constant – promoting peace, democracy and development throughout the world, expanding world trade, responding to global challenges and building bridges across the Atlantic. In the twenty-first century, our relationship will not only continue to endure but grow. I know the importance of our strong and historic bond of shared values and objectives, which underpin our transatlantic relationship, and am committed to its future.
Europe’s common quest
Michael Adams President,
Fairleigh Dickinson University President-Elect, International Association of University Presidents
At Fairleigh Dickinson University, we prepare students to become world citizens who understand the opportunities and dangers of living in an increasingly interconnected world and who can collaborate with those from different countries and cultures. But skeptics claim that national bonds supersede all other considerations and that we will always live in a world divided by “us” and “them”. I tell them there is hope. I tell them there already exists a place where fierce, national rivalries have been diminished, where broader expressions of citizenship are being formed, and where a generation is growing up comfortable balancing national roots and supranational commitments. That place is Europe. The formation of the European Union is a rare, magical development in the history of humanity. Fierce rivals who had only recently torn each other apart pledged to unite to further their common concerns. As the European Union grew and evolved, specific rights and duties developed that spread beyond national interests. At the same time, distinctive cultural traditions continue to thrive, proving that integration does not lead to the destruction of local variety. The spirit of compromise and cooperation underlying the European Union holds promise for those who seek to come together to overcome the problems that plague all people. Just as political and economic considerations drove European nations together, today, global challenges and crises compel us to think outside our nations and to consider the entire planet. And while we may not need or desire a formal planetary union, we most certainly need a global consciousness. Toward this goal, the European Union offers us an inspiring example of unity. It also builds a bridge to a future where world citizens can join together in a common quest for security, liberty and justice.
Europe and the Mediterranean
Tuesday, November 10 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 10 comments
Europe is bored
A need for Europe on the other side of the Mediterranean
Bassma Kodmani
Director of the Arab Reform Initiative
Europe is bored but she doesn’t know it. Her citizens live comfortably and for a long time. They were told that happiness is the satisfaction of their personal needs and desires, and that the European project was to succeed in building Europe as an entity. In order to be happy, however, the individual needs a project greater than himself or herself, and Europe will be fulfilled only when projecting herself into a more universal future. On the other side of the Mediterranean, there is a need for Europe. A political, economic, cultural need. From Turkey to Morocco, from Egypt to Palestine, governments and societies are finding that Europe’s promise is late in its realization. Waiting, people are desperately trying to accede to it. By responding to this wait, Europe will not only prove to be more generous. She will also be happier.
For a migratory ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community)
Hakim el-Karoui
Director at the Rothschild Bank, founder and president of the 21st Century Club
Thanks to the genius of Jean Monnet, Europe’s strength lies in having been able to invent new ways to unite people. Yet, one of the key issues of the twenty-first century will be to keep a worried Western world and an Arab-Muslim world moving on their search for an identity. Through its geography, history and culture, Europe is the political space best located to encourage mutual understanding and dialogue with the Arab-Muslim area. It needs to devise solutions commensurate with the Schuman declaration of May 9, 1950, which stated: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it. The contribution which an organized and living Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.” The first fruit of these creative efforts was the establishment of the solidarités de fait (de facto solidarity) based on mutual interests. This glorious example should inspire us to identify complementarities, and find a balanced mechanism of exchange. Europe is getting old and needs immigrants. The Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) is young, its number of graduates is beginning to increase and it urgently needs opportunities for experienced professionals to transmit their know-how. A migratory ECSC would allow the migrations to be handled in common, through a controlled opening of the borders for young Maghrebian graduates, and the large expatriation financed and coordinated by European executives in order to facilitate a transfer of technologies in administration and private projects. This would pertain to everyone, including retirees or those who are about to retire. It would be an excellent opportunity for them to continue their activities while training future young talent. The idea can seem provocative in view of Europe’s fears concerning Muslim immigration. But, in the near future, Europeans will understand that they have more affinities with Maghrebians – with whom they’ve mingled since antiquity – than they have with Asians, for example. Based on the European Commission model, a high authority of Euro-Mediterranean migration would be charged with defining the general common interest of member countries accordingly by a supranational power. Jean Monnet said: “The Schuman proposals are either revolutionary or they are nothing. Their fundamental principle is the delegation of sovereignty within a more decisive limited domain.” What was true for Europe yesterday is true for the Euro-Mediterranean today. Perhaps therein lies Europe’s identity, in any case the identity that my wishes conjure up: the constant capacity for invention.
So that Europe finds her South again
André Azoulay
Adviser to King Mohammed VI President of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation
When, from Rabat or Essaouira, we look north, our gaze rests first on your shores in Europe, nourished by centuries of common destiny. We Moroccans know it, and many of us have had no qualms in integrating this plural dimension in the writing and the reading of our history. Some did it out of romanticism, others out of realism, but in no case have we been tempted by a fractured identity that would have been forged a bit lazily at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the moment. And yet, are we amnesiacs to the point of having forgotten that, during three or four millennia, the migrations did in the North what they did in the South, determined by history, richness and the unity of the Mediterranean. This Mediterranean that has never ceased to attract people coming from elsewhere. This Mediterranean that, thanks to the circulation of people and values, constituted the most fertile, the most creative and the boldest social, cultural and spiritual space of all times. Moreover, this space belongs to humans, like everything else. Who can still remember that those golden fruits, oranges or lemons, attributed to our regions, are strangers from the Far East, brought to the Mediterranean region by the Arabs? The eucalyptus bears a Greek name but has an Australian passport, and the cypress has a Persian identity, as the tomato is Peruvian, and the chili pepper Guyanese. Yet, all of that has become the very landscape of the Mediterranean. Can one imagine Andalusia without oranges or Tuscany without cypress trees? If one was putting together a catalogue of the people of the Mediterranean – those born on its shores or those that navigated its waters and all the newcomers that invaded it one after the other – wouldn’t one get the impression of cataloguing its plants and fruits? This observation is, happily, one of the past. A recent past certainly, but henceforth sublimated by the Union’s historical perspective of the Mediterranean. A Union that, for the first time in the annals of contemporary history, puts forth a future that will be one of common destiny, and will bring the most coherent, most lucid, and most realistic response to the political, economic and human challenges confronting this grand ark of nations and peoples stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar to the edges of the Persian Gulf. Everyone will get his or her share, and along the way, Europe will have found her South again to present to the community of nations this reconquered and reconciled space of all possibilities and richness.
Bassma Kodmani
Director of the Arab Reform Initiative
Europe is bored but she doesn’t know it. Her citizens live comfortably and for a long time. They were told that happiness is the satisfaction of their personal needs and desires, and that the European project was to succeed in building Europe as an entity. In order to be happy, however, the individual needs a project greater than himself or herself, and Europe will be fulfilled only when projecting herself into a more universal future. On the other side of the Mediterranean, there is a need for Europe. A political, economic, cultural need. From Turkey to Morocco, from Egypt to Palestine, governments and societies are finding that Europe’s promise is late in its realization. Waiting, people are desperately trying to accede to it. By responding to this wait, Europe will not only prove to be more generous. She will also be happier.
For a migratory ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community)
Hakim el-Karoui
Director at the Rothschild Bank, founder and president of the 21st Century Club
Thanks to the genius of Jean Monnet, Europe’s strength lies in having been able to invent new ways to unite people. Yet, one of the key issues of the twenty-first century will be to keep a worried Western world and an Arab-Muslim world moving on their search for an identity. Through its geography, history and culture, Europe is the political space best located to encourage mutual understanding and dialogue with the Arab-Muslim area. It needs to devise solutions commensurate with the Schuman declaration of May 9, 1950, which stated: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it. The contribution which an organized and living Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.” The first fruit of these creative efforts was the establishment of the solidarités de fait (de facto solidarity) based on mutual interests. This glorious example should inspire us to identify complementarities, and find a balanced mechanism of exchange. Europe is getting old and needs immigrants. The Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) is young, its number of graduates is beginning to increase and it urgently needs opportunities for experienced professionals to transmit their know-how. A migratory ECSC would allow the migrations to be handled in common, through a controlled opening of the borders for young Maghrebian graduates, and the large expatriation financed and coordinated by European executives in order to facilitate a transfer of technologies in administration and private projects. This would pertain to everyone, including retirees or those who are about to retire. It would be an excellent opportunity for them to continue their activities while training future young talent. The idea can seem provocative in view of Europe’s fears concerning Muslim immigration. But, in the near future, Europeans will understand that they have more affinities with Maghrebians – with whom they’ve mingled since antiquity – than they have with Asians, for example. Based on the European Commission model, a high authority of Euro-Mediterranean migration would be charged with defining the general common interest of member countries accordingly by a supranational power. Jean Monnet said: “The Schuman proposals are either revolutionary or they are nothing. Their fundamental principle is the delegation of sovereignty within a more decisive limited domain.” What was true for Europe yesterday is true for the Euro-Mediterranean today. Perhaps therein lies Europe’s identity, in any case the identity that my wishes conjure up: the constant capacity for invention.
So that Europe finds her South again
André Azoulay
Adviser to King Mohammed VI President of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation
When, from Rabat or Essaouira, we look north, our gaze rests first on your shores in Europe, nourished by centuries of common destiny. We Moroccans know it, and many of us have had no qualms in integrating this plural dimension in the writing and the reading of our history. Some did it out of romanticism, others out of realism, but in no case have we been tempted by a fractured identity that would have been forged a bit lazily at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the moment. And yet, are we amnesiacs to the point of having forgotten that, during three or four millennia, the migrations did in the North what they did in the South, determined by history, richness and the unity of the Mediterranean. This Mediterranean that has never ceased to attract people coming from elsewhere. This Mediterranean that, thanks to the circulation of people and values, constituted the most fertile, the most creative and the boldest social, cultural and spiritual space of all times. Moreover, this space belongs to humans, like everything else. Who can still remember that those golden fruits, oranges or lemons, attributed to our regions, are strangers from the Far East, brought to the Mediterranean region by the Arabs? The eucalyptus bears a Greek name but has an Australian passport, and the cypress has a Persian identity, as the tomato is Peruvian, and the chili pepper Guyanese. Yet, all of that has become the very landscape of the Mediterranean. Can one imagine Andalusia without oranges or Tuscany without cypress trees? If one was putting together a catalogue of the people of the Mediterranean – those born on its shores or those that navigated its waters and all the newcomers that invaded it one after the other – wouldn’t one get the impression of cataloguing its plants and fruits? This observation is, happily, one of the past. A recent past certainly, but henceforth sublimated by the Union’s historical perspective of the Mediterranean. A Union that, for the first time in the annals of contemporary history, puts forth a future that will be one of common destiny, and will bring the most coherent, most lucid, and most realistic response to the political, economic and human challenges confronting this grand ark of nations and peoples stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar to the edges of the Persian Gulf. Everyone will get his or her share, and along the way, Europe will have found her South again to present to the community of nations this reconquered and reconciled space of all possibilities and richness.
Europe from the Arab world
Friday, November 6 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 11 comments
Europe and the Arab world
The complementarities
Amr Mahmoud Moussa
Secretary-General of the League of Arab States Former Egyptian foreign minister
Between the shores of Europe and the Arab world lies the the Medi-terre-nean, i.e., the middle of the earth... For years its waves carried ships of students and ships of soldiers; ships of fruit and ships of guns; those who sought knowledge and bread and those who sought war and gold. The output of this flow was a relationship of love and conflicts and a symbiosis of infinite colorful, creative and vivid elements. Located in the middle of this most used sea, the Arab world had always been a principal partner of Europe. The treaty signed between Charlemagne king of the Franks and Haroun al-Rachid is the best example for understanding this partnership. This treaty gave birth to diplomatic and trade agreements to the extent that by the end of the Middle Ages, trading towns had emerged such as Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Amalfi in Italy, or Marseilles and Barcelona in France and Spain; as well as a chain of prosperous ports like Alexandria, Beirut, Tunis, Tripoli and Istanbul. These towns served as centers of trade transit between Europe and the Orient and a final destination for the caravans coming from Africa and Asia. Trade was a bridging factor, but even more than its great impact on the mobility of people, the promotion of cultural exchange and influences on everyday life, it was accompanied by a better opening onto other cultures and was associated with technical, intellectual and scientific knowledge transfer. ”When science spoke Arabic” was a metaphor used until the Renaissance when great thinkers like Gerard of Cremona and Roger Bacon spoke Arabic and when the schools of medicine in Europe founded their curricula on the works of Avicenna. Science and the acquisition and transmission of the Enlightenment were the project of Arab institutions, whose respect was earned in Europe; cultivating universal values such as tolerance and justice which are today called human rights, as well as scientific thinking, the principles of trade, all of which were the subject of European admiration. It was no coincidence that centuries ago Hegel said that “science and knowledge came to the Occident from the Arabs”. Let us base our work of today on treaties like that of Charlemagne and Haroun al-Rachid. The genesis of this old Occidental view of Arab achievements and values should enhance our dialogue today. Arabs and Europeans are going through a historical moment of intercultural dialogue with the aim of restoring trust and creating a world of harmony and coexistence as a base for our common future.
The tree of civilization
His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal
Founder and trustee of the King Faisal Foundation Former ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States
Europe is the repository and incubating chamber of what emanates from the Middle East. It was, and is, the bank from which the Middle East drew and draws credits in ideas, technology and skills. The Greeks, the first European people of culture, drew on pharaonic, Phoenician, and Persian cultures, which they then conferred on the succeeding Roman culture, which, in turn, bequeathed it back to the peoples of the Middle East. They took their alphabet from Phoenicia; and Euclid and Archimedes, Socrates and Aristotle learned from the Egyptian Imhotep, and Hammurabi and Xerxes. From Anatolia to Syria to Nabatean Arabia to North Africa, Greco-Roman artifacts and architecture dot the landscape. When Muslim Arabs superseded the Byzantium and Persian empires, in the seventh and eighth centuries, they distilled Byzantium-Persian culture through translation and produced the building blocks of what became the European Renaissance from Andalusía, Sicily, the Balkans and Venice. Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haythem and al-Khwarazmi taught Europeans Socratic and Aristotelian logic, Hippocratic medicine and Euclidean geometry. They also introduced into Europe Arabic numerals, including the concept of “zero”, algebra and logarithms, as well as the dissection of cadavers, glass lenses, water clocks, astrolabes and the compass, paper and gunpowder, Chinese silks and porcelain, Damascus cloth and steel. Arab-Muslim architecture, irrigation, plants and herbology, medicines and pharmacology were all transferred into Europe through the Iberian peninsula, the Crusades, and Norman Sicily. The Ottomans introduced Europe to coffee and chocolates; the fez became the fashion in the seventeenth century in Vienna and Krakow. Pope Sylvester II, who introduced Arabic numerals into Europe, was called the Muslim pope. Thomas Aquinas, Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus and Descartes learned from Arab-Muslim scholars, and built on that knowledge. Today, the trend has been reversed. Arabs and Muslims migrate to Europe to find jobs and sustenance. Students from Arab and Muslim lands seek knowledge and skills in European universities. Science and finance, philosophy and religion, are exchanged unstoppably. Europe and the Arab-Muslim world are umbilically linked.
Europe: continent or goddess?
Ghida Fakhry-Khane
News anchor at the Al Jazeera television station
In schools the world over students are taught that “Europe” is one of the world’s continents and yet, Europe is probably the only one that is not a continent. It is an idea that evolved throughout history. Today maybe more than ever, it remains an idea – grand and potentially noble. Yet, this notion of Europa is an achievement in and of itself as Europa has had a rather fragmented and particularly bloody past. Looking at Europe’s unity today it is hard to imagine that at one point, Europe was composed of a myriad of tribes, divided by language, culture and ethnicity. Later, during the colonial wars, European powers continued to battle each other. Europa was the theatre of the Hundred Years’ War and the cauldron of World War I and II. It is thus unfathomable that Europa morphed into what it is today. The debate over EU expansion, however, objurgates that Europe is not exclusively a homegrown, indigenous achievement and outcome but the culmination of millennialong historical processes in which European emporiums looked outward to enlarge their power base, colonize peoples and enrich their coffers. The Greek empire looked eastward to reach the confines of Persia, India and Afghanistan. The Roman Empire looked to the south and subjugated North Africa. The Spanish and Portuguese empires went westward to colonize Central and South America and in the more recent past the French and British empires went to conquer North America, Africa and parts of Asia. And least we forget, the Islamic armies occupied Spain and half of France reaching the city of Poitiers in the eighth century, and almost taking Vienna in the seventeenth century. These imperial conquests and colonial ventures can be seen in some respects as what we call in today’s parlance the precursors of globalization. The introduction of faith as an EU accession criterion shocked many in Europe who grew accustomed to the separation of religion and state. The more cogent argument to oppose Turkey’s EU bid may have been that it is, in spite of its small European enclave, part of the Asian continent and not, therefore “European”. But then, how can its full participation since 1949 in the Council of Europe be explained? What does it mean for Kosovo, Albania or Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what would be said of EU members in which a majority of the population is or may become primarily atheist or agnostic? Would they really cease to be European? Europa should remain a goddess, truthful to its noble ideas of unity and progress rather than succumb to concepts alien to its founding documents. If it does, Europa can pride itself as the only continent that is a grand idea and not merely a tectonic plate.
Amr Mahmoud Moussa
Secretary-General of the League of Arab States Former Egyptian foreign minister
Between the shores of Europe and the Arab world lies the the Medi-terre-nean, i.e., the middle of the earth... For years its waves carried ships of students and ships of soldiers; ships of fruit and ships of guns; those who sought knowledge and bread and those who sought war and gold. The output of this flow was a relationship of love and conflicts and a symbiosis of infinite colorful, creative and vivid elements. Located in the middle of this most used sea, the Arab world had always been a principal partner of Europe. The treaty signed between Charlemagne king of the Franks and Haroun al-Rachid is the best example for understanding this partnership. This treaty gave birth to diplomatic and trade agreements to the extent that by the end of the Middle Ages, trading towns had emerged such as Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Amalfi in Italy, or Marseilles and Barcelona in France and Spain; as well as a chain of prosperous ports like Alexandria, Beirut, Tunis, Tripoli and Istanbul. These towns served as centers of trade transit between Europe and the Orient and a final destination for the caravans coming from Africa and Asia. Trade was a bridging factor, but even more than its great impact on the mobility of people, the promotion of cultural exchange and influences on everyday life, it was accompanied by a better opening onto other cultures and was associated with technical, intellectual and scientific knowledge transfer. ”When science spoke Arabic” was a metaphor used until the Renaissance when great thinkers like Gerard of Cremona and Roger Bacon spoke Arabic and when the schools of medicine in Europe founded their curricula on the works of Avicenna. Science and the acquisition and transmission of the Enlightenment were the project of Arab institutions, whose respect was earned in Europe; cultivating universal values such as tolerance and justice which are today called human rights, as well as scientific thinking, the principles of trade, all of which were the subject of European admiration. It was no coincidence that centuries ago Hegel said that “science and knowledge came to the Occident from the Arabs”. Let us base our work of today on treaties like that of Charlemagne and Haroun al-Rachid. The genesis of this old Occidental view of Arab achievements and values should enhance our dialogue today. Arabs and Europeans are going through a historical moment of intercultural dialogue with the aim of restoring trust and creating a world of harmony and coexistence as a base for our common future.
The tree of civilization
His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal
Founder and trustee of the King Faisal Foundation Former ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States
Europe is the repository and incubating chamber of what emanates from the Middle East. It was, and is, the bank from which the Middle East drew and draws credits in ideas, technology and skills. The Greeks, the first European people of culture, drew on pharaonic, Phoenician, and Persian cultures, which they then conferred on the succeeding Roman culture, which, in turn, bequeathed it back to the peoples of the Middle East. They took their alphabet from Phoenicia; and Euclid and Archimedes, Socrates and Aristotle learned from the Egyptian Imhotep, and Hammurabi and Xerxes. From Anatolia to Syria to Nabatean Arabia to North Africa, Greco-Roman artifacts and architecture dot the landscape. When Muslim Arabs superseded the Byzantium and Persian empires, in the seventh and eighth centuries, they distilled Byzantium-Persian culture through translation and produced the building blocks of what became the European Renaissance from Andalusía, Sicily, the Balkans and Venice. Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haythem and al-Khwarazmi taught Europeans Socratic and Aristotelian logic, Hippocratic medicine and Euclidean geometry. They also introduced into Europe Arabic numerals, including the concept of “zero”, algebra and logarithms, as well as the dissection of cadavers, glass lenses, water clocks, astrolabes and the compass, paper and gunpowder, Chinese silks and porcelain, Damascus cloth and steel. Arab-Muslim architecture, irrigation, plants and herbology, medicines and pharmacology were all transferred into Europe through the Iberian peninsula, the Crusades, and Norman Sicily. The Ottomans introduced Europe to coffee and chocolates; the fez became the fashion in the seventeenth century in Vienna and Krakow. Pope Sylvester II, who introduced Arabic numerals into Europe, was called the Muslim pope. Thomas Aquinas, Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus and Descartes learned from Arab-Muslim scholars, and built on that knowledge. Today, the trend has been reversed. Arabs and Muslims migrate to Europe to find jobs and sustenance. Students from Arab and Muslim lands seek knowledge and skills in European universities. Science and finance, philosophy and religion, are exchanged unstoppably. Europe and the Arab-Muslim world are umbilically linked.
Europe: continent or goddess?
Ghida Fakhry-Khane
News anchor at the Al Jazeera television station
In schools the world over students are taught that “Europe” is one of the world’s continents and yet, Europe is probably the only one that is not a continent. It is an idea that evolved throughout history. Today maybe more than ever, it remains an idea – grand and potentially noble. Yet, this notion of Europa is an achievement in and of itself as Europa has had a rather fragmented and particularly bloody past. Looking at Europe’s unity today it is hard to imagine that at one point, Europe was composed of a myriad of tribes, divided by language, culture and ethnicity. Later, during the colonial wars, European powers continued to battle each other. Europa was the theatre of the Hundred Years’ War and the cauldron of World War I and II. It is thus unfathomable that Europa morphed into what it is today. The debate over EU expansion, however, objurgates that Europe is not exclusively a homegrown, indigenous achievement and outcome but the culmination of millennialong historical processes in which European emporiums looked outward to enlarge their power base, colonize peoples and enrich their coffers. The Greek empire looked eastward to reach the confines of Persia, India and Afghanistan. The Roman Empire looked to the south and subjugated North Africa. The Spanish and Portuguese empires went westward to colonize Central and South America and in the more recent past the French and British empires went to conquer North America, Africa and parts of Asia. And least we forget, the Islamic armies occupied Spain and half of France reaching the city of Poitiers in the eighth century, and almost taking Vienna in the seventeenth century. These imperial conquests and colonial ventures can be seen in some respects as what we call in today’s parlance the precursors of globalization. The introduction of faith as an EU accession criterion shocked many in Europe who grew accustomed to the separation of religion and state. The more cogent argument to oppose Turkey’s EU bid may have been that it is, in spite of its small European enclave, part of the Asian continent and not, therefore “European”. But then, how can its full participation since 1949 in the Council of Europe be explained? What does it mean for Kosovo, Albania or Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what would be said of EU members in which a majority of the population is or may become primarily atheist or agnostic? Would they really cease to be European? Europa should remain a goddess, truthful to its noble ideas of unity and progress rather than succumb to concepts alien to its founding documents. If it does, Europa can pride itself as the only continent that is a grand idea and not merely a tectonic plate.
Europe From Asia, by Ban Ki-moon, Pan Guang, Tioulong Saumra and Dominique Girard
Tuesday, November 3 2009 By Europe à la Carte | 10 comments
The power of Europe’s example
Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General of the United Nations
The old division of Europe into “East” and “West” two decades ago, has today given way to the modern European Union. Europe has thus become less a geography than an idea – an ideal, even, of the power of integration as an engine of prosperity and social advancement. This shining success has not been lost on the rest of the world. Latin Americans and North Americans have long dreamed of creating a free-trade zone. The African Union aspires to become more than the sum of its parts; some even speak of a United States of Africa. Only in Asia, and most especially north-east Asia, for all its dynamism, has this idea not taken hold. Why? I can recite the customary litany of reasons, from differences of history and culture to unresolved territorial and political disputes and the fact of two centers of power. But the main reason is that we have not tried. As an Asian secretary-general, I hope to see this change. I hope, one day, to see an Asia that is both better integrated and more internationally engaged, quicker to bring its skills and record of success to bear on the most pressing global issues of the day. I hope for an Asia, in other words, that comes to recognize the power of Europe’s example. But this is not only my hope; it is also Asia’s obligation.
A Chinese view of Europe
Pan Guang
Director and professor of the Shanghai Center for International Studies
“Europe” is a pluralistic and ever-changing concept, not only for me, but also for most Chinese I believe. Europe in history. The Silk Road was the first tie to connect Europe and China, unfolding a historical relationship of two sides more or less on an equal footing at the beginning. When Marco Polo walked along the Silk Road all the way to China, he found China very prosperous and well-governed, apparently more advanced than Europe in numerous aspects. However, when the Europeans reached China in warships centuries later, Europe became synonymous with colonialism.
In the eyes of my grandfather and father and their generations, the decline of China and the sufferings of her people were closely related to European colonialism. Nevertheless, the Chinese also learned a lot from Europe: modern science and technology; concepts of freedom, liberty, fraternity and parliamentary democracy; and even Marxism that came to guide the Chinese Communists.
The Europe of the Cold War era. During the Cold War era, China faced serious threats from the two superpowers, especially first the United States and later the Soviet Union. In the minds of many Chinese, including its leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, China and Europe were like two strategic allies, being both under the pressure of the superpowers. The UK was the first Western country that recognized the new China, and Hong Kong was once the chief bridge between China and Europe. I clearly remember to this day how excited the Chinese were on hearing the
establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France in January 1964. Indeed, Charles de Gaulle thereafter became an immortal hero in the hearts of the Chinese. The Chinese were also persistently supportive of the reunification of Germany and European integration, which explains why they feel so agitated when some German or other European politicians endorse the Dalai Lama’s efforts to seek Tibetan independence. Europe in the era of China’s reform and openingup. Sino-European relations were given a great spurt when China embarked upon her journey of reform and openingup under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The two sides established a strategic partnership encompassing sectors of trade, science and technology, education, healthcare, energy, transportation, environmental protection, judicial
practice, etc. Large numbers of young Chinese went to Europe to study, while even more Chinese traveled to Europe for business and sightseeing purposes. Likewise, more and more Europeans visited China for investment, academic exchange, as well as tourism and study. That was indeed a “honeymoon” in the Sino-European relationship, with both sides interacting with, and learning from, each other in equal partnership. One may say that a new “Silk Road” was paved between China and Europe. The Europe of 2008. 2008 was a year of pride and excitement for the Chinese hosting the Beijing Olympics. However, some European streets were witness to violent acts against the Olympic torch, with some Europeans
not only showing support for such acts, but also waving the snow lion flag that symbolized Tibetan secession. The enraged Chinese asked, “We consistently supported German reunification, and have always been in favor of European integration. But why do these guys insist on splitting a unified China?” A student of mine, who has read quite a lot of European history, remarked, “Tibet became part of China as early as the thirteenth
century, much earlier than Corsica became part of France and Germany was unified. If they want the Chinese to leave
Tibet, doesn’t it mean that all the white people should leave the US, Canada and Australia?”
By the end of 2008, when the routine summit meeting between the Chinese and EU leaders was cancelled as a result of the French president’s interview with the Dalai Lama, almost all the Chinese expressed their support for the decision of their government. Many Chinese believe that if a Chinese leader carried out a high-profile interview with the leaders of the Irish, Basques (Vasco) or Corsican separatists, European leaders would take similar actions. Later on, when certain people chose to politicize the auction of Chinese relics once seized from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, a lot more Chinese were angered. They asked, “If we robbed cultural relics from the Louvre and then told the French that
they would be returned if Corsica were allowed to become independent, how would the French think about it?” So in a matter of one year, the image of “Europe” sank drastically among the Chinese, coming once again to be associated with “colonialism”, “imperialism” and “power politics”. The Europe of the future. Most Chinese believe that, while European integration remains an inevitable process, it is still difficult to achieve a single “European identity”, particularly given the fairly wide gap between the so-called “Old Europe” and “New Europe”. Yet almost all the Chinese are convinced that a unified Europe will play an increasingly important role in world affairs, even though they are far from being unanimous regarding the positive or negative implications for China of such an integrated European role. Some think that a unified and strengthened Europe
will develop a stronger sense of power expansion, therefore very likely to lead to new attempts at transforming China in its own image, and consequently to more conflicts between the two sides. But more people hold the view that, despite all the differences both existing and potential, China and Europe can clearly “seek the common ground while putting aside differences” in this pluralistic world and furthermore, should in every
way promote the common development of both sides and the whole world through joint cooperation. For me, I definitely endorse the latter view, and sincerely expect that this kind wish can be turned into a reality as soon as possible.
Europe fascination
Tioulong Saumura
Cambodian Parliament member
For us, inhabitants of countries living under authoritarian regimes and often in poverty, persecuted by leaders under whose yoke people suffocate, Europe is the symbol of democracy, economic development in social justice and modernity, in which the power of the central state diminishes for the benefit of a supranationality and regionalism. The euro is an extraordinary example of the limitations of national sovereignty.
She fascinates us, she surprises us. How did they do it – the Europeans? How did they reconcile and conquer the demons of the past? Didn’t two world wars begin in Europe? Not to mention the Hundred Years’ War, religious wars and so many other conflicts that have torn Europe apart. While we remain entangled in our old quarrels without being able to move forward. Europe fascinates us, she commands our admiration
because she was born out of the triumph of civilization and reason over man’s savage instincts henceforth curbed by the rule of law, respect for the other, the spirit of tolerance.
Europe fascinates us, she inspires hope. This big sister will certainly guide us on the path of coexistence with the other in harmony, for the prosperity of all. Because Europe is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, the social justice of Scandinavian countries, social democracy German-style, the juxtaposition of giants like England, Germany and France with Lilliputians like Luxembourg, Slovenia and the Baltic States.
Europe fascinates us, she disappoints us. As if ignoring her own strength and the influence of European values, she doesn’t dare to move forward on the international stage, and she takes care only of herself, of her construction still underway, of her expansion that doesn’t end.
Yet, it is Europe’s duty to respond to the new American order, to the rise of militant Islam, to the emergence of Communist China. Not making the symphony of European values resound in the concert of nations, Europe ignores her obligations as a top global economic power, Europe fascinates us, she outrages us. Europeans, stop being self-absorbed! The rest of the world is in need of you, of humanist principles and of
Europe’s knowledgeable minds.
Europe and Asia: indispensable to one another
Dominique Girard
Executive director of the Asia Europe Foundation
Seen rom a little higher, the Europe I see is as a hand pointing to the West, towards the future, obviously. However, at its East and at its strong and formidable base is Asia: enormous, intimidating, indispensable. My adult life, that of a diplomat obstinately attached to an Asia whose
ineluctable importance in the history of mankind I could never quite ignore, has always been but a happy journey throughout the four corners of the Asian continent. Even when it perpetually seemed condemned to misery and war, or when the poor appeared to be forgotten in the midst of its frivolous consumption patterns, this Asia never ceased to be a source of marvel and only confirmed that my ignorance, and hence my disposition to learn evermore, still remained intact.
My youth, nonetheless, was a European one and has provided me with the few certainties on which to found my Asian quest. Kant amongst others… Colonial injustice. The reconciliation between France and Germany as well as European construction. Freedom to be sought in the respect for others. A sense of doubt. A taste for history. A desire for peace and a rejection of cowardice. And the unease also when, confronted with globalisation and the market order, the value of things takes over the value of people. Today, at the head of the Asia Europe Foundation, I find myself facing the challenging yet exhilarating task of building and strengthening those bridges between civil societies in Asia and Europe. To diminish mutual indifference, to dissolve those political and cultural prejudices related to the past and to distance, to identify and facilitate the most fertile grounds for cooperation amongst individual or institutions, to highlight the central points where political decision-makers can and should exercise their power for the common good of both continents… The existence of such a vast programme can only prove that Asia and Europe have understood that each others’ rapports can no longer be limited to the sole management of their interests, however
similar they may be.
Sceptics may ridicule the sustainability of this relationship, starting with the denial that “one” Asia and “one” Europe exist. However, within their extreme diversity, their millennia-long histories and within the enormity of the sufferings endured by their peoples, both Europe and Asia find nowadays the same willpower to develop and thrive in peace and stability. It is this important acknowledgement, more than the volume of their economic exchanges that renders them irreversibly indispensable to one another.
Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General of the United Nations
The old division of Europe into “East” and “West” two decades ago, has today given way to the modern European Union. Europe has thus become less a geography than an idea – an ideal, even, of the power of integration as an engine of prosperity and social advancement. This shining success has not been lost on the rest of the world. Latin Americans and North Americans have long dreamed of creating a free-trade zone. The African Union aspires to become more than the sum of its parts; some even speak of a United States of Africa. Only in Asia, and most especially north-east Asia, for all its dynamism, has this idea not taken hold. Why? I can recite the customary litany of reasons, from differences of history and culture to unresolved territorial and political disputes and the fact of two centers of power. But the main reason is that we have not tried. As an Asian secretary-general, I hope to see this change. I hope, one day, to see an Asia that is both better integrated and more internationally engaged, quicker to bring its skills and record of success to bear on the most pressing global issues of the day. I hope for an Asia, in other words, that comes to recognize the power of Europe’s example. But this is not only my hope; it is also Asia’s obligation.
A Chinese view of Europe
Pan Guang
Director and professor of the Shanghai Center for International Studies
“Europe” is a pluralistic and ever-changing concept, not only for me, but also for most Chinese I believe. Europe in history. The Silk Road was the first tie to connect Europe and China, unfolding a historical relationship of two sides more or less on an equal footing at the beginning. When Marco Polo walked along the Silk Road all the way to China, he found China very prosperous and well-governed, apparently more advanced than Europe in numerous aspects. However, when the Europeans reached China in warships centuries later, Europe became synonymous with colonialism.
In the eyes of my grandfather and father and their generations, the decline of China and the sufferings of her people were closely related to European colonialism. Nevertheless, the Chinese also learned a lot from Europe: modern science and technology; concepts of freedom, liberty, fraternity and parliamentary democracy; and even Marxism that came to guide the Chinese Communists.
The Europe of the Cold War era. During the Cold War era, China faced serious threats from the two superpowers, especially first the United States and later the Soviet Union. In the minds of many Chinese, including its leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, China and Europe were like two strategic allies, being both under the pressure of the superpowers. The UK was the first Western country that recognized the new China, and Hong Kong was once the chief bridge between China and Europe. I clearly remember to this day how excited the Chinese were on hearing the
establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France in January 1964. Indeed, Charles de Gaulle thereafter became an immortal hero in the hearts of the Chinese. The Chinese were also persistently supportive of the reunification of Germany and European integration, which explains why they feel so agitated when some German or other European politicians endorse the Dalai Lama’s efforts to seek Tibetan independence. Europe in the era of China’s reform and openingup. Sino-European relations were given a great spurt when China embarked upon her journey of reform and openingup under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The two sides established a strategic partnership encompassing sectors of trade, science and technology, education, healthcare, energy, transportation, environmental protection, judicial
practice, etc. Large numbers of young Chinese went to Europe to study, while even more Chinese traveled to Europe for business and sightseeing purposes. Likewise, more and more Europeans visited China for investment, academic exchange, as well as tourism and study. That was indeed a “honeymoon” in the Sino-European relationship, with both sides interacting with, and learning from, each other in equal partnership. One may say that a new “Silk Road” was paved between China and Europe. The Europe of 2008. 2008 was a year of pride and excitement for the Chinese hosting the Beijing Olympics. However, some European streets were witness to violent acts against the Olympic torch, with some Europeans
not only showing support for such acts, but also waving the snow lion flag that symbolized Tibetan secession. The enraged Chinese asked, “We consistently supported German reunification, and have always been in favor of European integration. But why do these guys insist on splitting a unified China?” A student of mine, who has read quite a lot of European history, remarked, “Tibet became part of China as early as the thirteenth
century, much earlier than Corsica became part of France and Germany was unified. If they want the Chinese to leave
Tibet, doesn’t it mean that all the white people should leave the US, Canada and Australia?”
By the end of 2008, when the routine summit meeting between the Chinese and EU leaders was cancelled as a result of the French president’s interview with the Dalai Lama, almost all the Chinese expressed their support for the decision of their government. Many Chinese believe that if a Chinese leader carried out a high-profile interview with the leaders of the Irish, Basques (Vasco) or Corsican separatists, European leaders would take similar actions. Later on, when certain people chose to politicize the auction of Chinese relics once seized from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, a lot more Chinese were angered. They asked, “If we robbed cultural relics from the Louvre and then told the French that
they would be returned if Corsica were allowed to become independent, how would the French think about it?” So in a matter of one year, the image of “Europe” sank drastically among the Chinese, coming once again to be associated with “colonialism”, “imperialism” and “power politics”. The Europe of the future. Most Chinese believe that, while European integration remains an inevitable process, it is still difficult to achieve a single “European identity”, particularly given the fairly wide gap between the so-called “Old Europe” and “New Europe”. Yet almost all the Chinese are convinced that a unified Europe will play an increasingly important role in world affairs, even though they are far from being unanimous regarding the positive or negative implications for China of such an integrated European role. Some think that a unified and strengthened Europe
will develop a stronger sense of power expansion, therefore very likely to lead to new attempts at transforming China in its own image, and consequently to more conflicts between the two sides. But more people hold the view that, despite all the differences both existing and potential, China and Europe can clearly “seek the common ground while putting aside differences” in this pluralistic world and furthermore, should in every
way promote the common development of both sides and the whole world through joint cooperation. For me, I definitely endorse the latter view, and sincerely expect that this kind wish can be turned into a reality as soon as possible.
Europe fascination
Tioulong Saumura
Cambodian Parliament member
For us, inhabitants of countries living under authoritarian regimes and often in poverty, persecuted by leaders under whose yoke people suffocate, Europe is the symbol of democracy, economic development in social justice and modernity, in which the power of the central state diminishes for the benefit of a supranationality and regionalism. The euro is an extraordinary example of the limitations of national sovereignty.
She fascinates us, she surprises us. How did they do it – the Europeans? How did they reconcile and conquer the demons of the past? Didn’t two world wars begin in Europe? Not to mention the Hundred Years’ War, religious wars and so many other conflicts that have torn Europe apart. While we remain entangled in our old quarrels without being able to move forward. Europe fascinates us, she commands our admiration
because she was born out of the triumph of civilization and reason over man’s savage instincts henceforth curbed by the rule of law, respect for the other, the spirit of tolerance.
Europe fascinates us, she inspires hope. This big sister will certainly guide us on the path of coexistence with the other in harmony, for the prosperity of all. Because Europe is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, the social justice of Scandinavian countries, social democracy German-style, the juxtaposition of giants like England, Germany and France with Lilliputians like Luxembourg, Slovenia and the Baltic States.
Europe fascinates us, she disappoints us. As if ignoring her own strength and the influence of European values, she doesn’t dare to move forward on the international stage, and she takes care only of herself, of her construction still underway, of her expansion that doesn’t end.
Yet, it is Europe’s duty to respond to the new American order, to the rise of militant Islam, to the emergence of Communist China. Not making the symphony of European values resound in the concert of nations, Europe ignores her obligations as a top global economic power, Europe fascinates us, she outrages us. Europeans, stop being self-absorbed! The rest of the world is in need of you, of humanist principles and of
Europe’s knowledgeable minds.
Europe and Asia: indispensable to one another
Dominique Girard
Executive director of the Asia Europe Foundation
Seen rom a little higher, the Europe I see is as a hand pointing to the West, towards the future, obviously. However, at its East and at its strong and formidable base is Asia: enormous, intimidating, indispensable. My adult life, that of a diplomat obstinately attached to an Asia whose
ineluctable importance in the history of mankind I could never quite ignore, has always been but a happy journey throughout the four corners of the Asian continent. Even when it perpetually seemed condemned to misery and war, or when the poor appeared to be forgotten in the midst of its frivolous consumption patterns, this Asia never ceased to be a source of marvel and only confirmed that my ignorance, and hence my disposition to learn evermore, still remained intact.
My youth, nonetheless, was a European one and has provided me with the few certainties on which to found my Asian quest. Kant amongst others… Colonial injustice. The reconciliation between France and Germany as well as European construction. Freedom to be sought in the respect for others. A sense of doubt. A taste for history. A desire for peace and a rejection of cowardice. And the unease also when, confronted with globalisation and the market order, the value of things takes over the value of people. Today, at the head of the Asia Europe Foundation, I find myself facing the challenging yet exhilarating task of building and strengthening those bridges between civil societies in Asia and Europe. To diminish mutual indifference, to dissolve those political and cultural prejudices related to the past and to distance, to identify and facilitate the most fertile grounds for cooperation amongst individual or institutions, to highlight the central points where political decision-makers can and should exercise their power for the common good of both continents… The existence of such a vast programme can only prove that Asia and Europe have understood that each others’ rapports can no longer be limited to the sole management of their interests, however
similar they may be.
Sceptics may ridicule the sustainability of this relationship, starting with the denial that “one” Asia and “one” Europe exist. However, within their extreme diversity, their millennia-long histories and within the enormity of the sufferings endured by their peoples, both Europe and Asia find nowadays the same willpower to develop and thrive in peace and stability. It is this important acknowledgement, more than the volume of their economic exchanges that renders them irreversibly indispensable to one another.
Autor and Contributors
By Europe à la Carte | no comment
Jean-Christophe Bas has led the pan-European dialogue at the World Bank for 10 years.
Involved, in the 1980s, in the Solidarnosc movement and working with Lech Walesa, the Nobel
Peace Prize winner for the democratization of the Central European countries, he started his
career in the European Parliament during the same period, where he worked with Simone Veil,
before becoming a journalist and the first director of the Aspen Institute. He now lives in New
York and works at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.
Contributors :
Michael Adams
Antoine Assaf
André Azoulay
Jean-Paul Bailly
Ban Ki-moon
Daniel Barenboim
Pierre Calame
Philippe Cayla
Hywel Ceri Jones
CharlElie
Job Cohen
Michel Derdevet
Paula Jon Dobriansky
J. Christer Elfverson
Corinne Evens
Prince Turki al-Faisal
Ghida Fakhry-Khane
Adriano Farano
José María Figueres Olsen
Monica Frassoni
Angela Mariana Freyre
Ulf Gartzke
Dominique Girard
Jean-Dominique Giuliani
Xavier Godinot
Vartan Gregorian
Pan Guang
Simon Xavier Guerrand-Hermès
Diego Hidalgo
Christophe Jaffrelot
Hubert Joly
Bekir Karliga
Hakim el-Karoui
Craig Kennedy
Bassma Kodmani
Charles Konan Banny
William Lacy Swing
Ahmed Larouz
Andras Löcke
Amin Maalouf
Yoyo Maeght
Norbert Mao
Katherine Marshall
Candido Mendes De Almeida
Michael Meyer
Amr Mahmoud Moussa
Besnik Mustafaj
Maria-Cristina Necula
T. N. Ninan
Pierre Nougué
Ana Perona-Fjeldstad
Bernd Posselt
Viviane Reding
Jean-François Rischard
Jorge Sampaio
Inés Sastre
Tioulong Saumura
Rabbi Arthur Schneier
Justine Smith
Bård Vegar Solhjell
Lino Spiteri
Heleen Terwijn
Yvon Thiec
Ben Turok
Benoît Vermander, s.j.
Tanguy de Wilde d’Estmael
Contributors :
Michael Adams
Antoine Assaf
André Azoulay
Jean-Paul Bailly
Ban Ki-moon
Daniel Barenboim
Pierre Calame
Philippe Cayla
Hywel Ceri Jones
CharlElie
Job Cohen
Michel Derdevet
Paula Jon Dobriansky
J. Christer Elfverson
Corinne Evens
Prince Turki al-Faisal
Ghida Fakhry-Khane
Adriano Farano
José María Figueres Olsen
Monica Frassoni
Angela Mariana Freyre
Ulf Gartzke
Dominique Girard
Jean-Dominique Giuliani
Xavier Godinot
Vartan Gregorian
Pan Guang
Simon Xavier Guerrand-Hermès
Diego Hidalgo
Christophe Jaffrelot
Hubert Joly
Bekir Karliga
Hakim el-Karoui
Craig Kennedy
Bassma Kodmani
Charles Konan Banny
William Lacy Swing
Ahmed Larouz
Andras Löcke
Amin Maalouf
Yoyo Maeght
Norbert Mao
Katherine Marshall
Candido Mendes De Almeida
Michael Meyer
Amr Mahmoud Moussa
Besnik Mustafaj
Maria-Cristina Necula
T. N. Ninan
Pierre Nougué
Ana Perona-Fjeldstad
Bernd Posselt
Viviane Reding
Jean-François Rischard
Jorge Sampaio
Inés Sastre
Tioulong Saumura
Rabbi Arthur Schneier
Justine Smith
Bård Vegar Solhjell
Lino Spiteri
Heleen Terwijn
Yvon Thiec
Ben Turok
Benoît Vermander, s.j.
Tanguy de Wilde d’Estmael
Presentation
Tuesday, October 27 2009 By Europe à la Carte | no comment
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall “fell”. A generation of young Europeans
has grown up since then. 
For them, the East-West separation of the world and
of Europe, the French-German reconciliation, the emergence of democracy
on European territory, the elimination of borders result more from history
books and historical pieces of evidence.
This “Erasmus generation”, brought up with the Internet, took to the roads of a
Schengen Europe without borders, thanks to low-cost airlines, and developed
its vision of Europe through the prism of globalization. Young people who
nevertheless ask themselves: what are Europe’s place and role in the global
world? Is she an aging superpower condemned to decline? What are her assets
as she faces the full-blown rise of emerging countries? Would the explosion
of migratory flows modify the cultures and identities of European societies?
What about the challenges of diversity? Europe, what for?
From Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations to the virtuoso
pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, through Inès Sastre, a Lancôme
top model; Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the League of Arab States;
the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf; the European commissioner, Viviane
Reding; the editor of the top Indian economic magazine, T. N. Ninan… almost
70 great decision-makers, role-players and innovators of the whole world
answer these questions sharing visions of “their Europe”. This book also
gives a voice to young leaders, still relatively unknown to the general public.
They are the rising generation and their opinions – often ruffling – provide
the keys to understanding Europe’s new assets.
A “Europe à la carte”, a surprising mosaic, enhanced by previously
unpublished and unusual maps whose pertinent features illuminate today’s
realities; maps that often have more to say than long analyses. A book of
curiosities that will most certainly awaken in the reader a new “desire for
Europe”.