Dfor thirty years, since the West left Bosnia at the mercy of crooked businessmen and criminals, I have persisted in telling the story of Europe. The more I feel it balkanizing and the more I see the ideals of its founding fathers fading, the more the obligation to invoke this name strengthens in me. Europe. I have filled theaters, accompanied youth symphony orchestras, explored monasteries, traveled up rivers and climbed mountains, from the Atlantic to the Caucasus. I have even written about it, in prose and even in verse, evoking the great utopia from which the current alliance was born after the Second World War.
In contact with the public, it has always been easy to arouse love for this common mother that is Europe, capable of bringing nations together. The lack of response is at the top. European institutions have not been and still are not able to provide an anchor for the emotional need for continental belonging. During my wanderings as a storyteller, I have rarely felt the proximity of the higher echelons of the Union. Brussels was far too mired in tangles of interests, balancing acts and negotiations with lobbies to understand the political importance of the story.
On May 9, we celebrate Europe Day, and I wonder what there is to celebrate. Not much, in my opinion. The alliance I believed in is no longer the same. It’s as if I’m staring down an abyss from a precarious railing. Beyond that, I see only emptiness. An ethical, political, strategic, diplomatic, narrative, even lexical void. The very concept of “Europe” seems to have become emptied of its meaning. I have the feeling that, like a meteorological depression, this void of meaning generates turbulence and attracts storms. It shows a land at the mercy of the elements.
Of course, I never would have imagined that the myth of the young princess Europe kidnapped by Jupiter could be betrayed by a woman, a woman called Ursula. To stay in power after the election, the president of the Commission has already invited the sovereignist forces, favored by the polls, to the banquet; the very ones who dream of emptying the Union from within to make it an invertebrate alliance. With it, my land became a heritage bartered for electoral purposes. With it, Europe looks more and more like a fallen beauty, forced to sell its body at the side of the road.
Europe does not only have external enemies, Putin or Islamic radicalism. The collapse of our values as well as our openness to unbridled liberalism also pose a threat to our alliance. The Big Food, Big Pharma and Big Chemical industries as well as the arms dealers now do what they want in Europe. Orwell took over institutions. School, health, transport are collapsing. Poverty is increasing, social protection is falling apart. Except in Denmark, immigration does not find answers capable of reconciling acceptance and discipline. Borders between states are closing. The Mediterranean becomes a barrier. And the most tragic word of the last century – “nation” – is making a devastating return.
If on her posters, Mrs Von der Leyen displays a beautiful maternal smile, this does not reveal that, under her command, the offices of the Commission, once an instrument of democratic consensus, have been transformed into a bunker where blind obedience reigns. , where it is possible to negotiate in secret with pharmaceutical companies and even weaken antitrust law, the only remaining brake on the current predatory voracity of the economy. Ursula, who began her mandate by relaunching the Green Deal and ended it by demolishing it, making the EU a weather vane. Ursula, nicknamed the “American President” for her blind submission to NATO.
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Behind the arguments between the president and the post-fascists, mainly Italian, lies the search for a fatal alliance. That between the Christian Democratic heart of the Union, linked to the technocracy of the big companies which own the media, and an ideology historically ruthless with people who are weak, poor and different. The very ones that the consumer economy considers “superfluous” in the production chain. The return of nations, in exchange for the hegemony of McDonald’s.
This is a pact of mutual convenience. Global powers are cajoling sovereignisms to weaken the last global bastion of rights and rules, to ward off a formidable competitor and to obtain, here too, free rein in the plunder of resources and the use of labor. For their part, sovereignists use social networks, more effective than any baton, to persuade people to submit docilely, by evoking the existence of plots and permanent states of siege. Once again, a “feminine” betrayal, orchestrated by Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and Von der Leyen herself.
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I hear a growing rumble in this European twilight. These are the drums of ethnonationalism, the words of hatred that filter through TikTok and Facebook. Sovereignisms learned, before other political forces, to use the seductive power of the Internet. They proselytized among the miners, preaching hostility to diversity and the need for a supreme leader. But above all, they created in public opinion the idea of an inevitable disappearance of democracy, to the point of forcing moderate forces and even the non-existent left to rally around the sovereignists in terms of language. Tomorrow, even if the right did not win the elections, it would still find itself winning in terms of discourse and average thinking.
Hypnotized by this “twilight aesthetic”, the media continue to underestimate the signs of counter-trend. They are numerous, but rarely make the headlines. Thus, we have not talked enough about the three million Germans who took over the squares to play a role of “firewall” against the return of the Nazis, about the formidable electoral redemption of the Poles against the necrophilic nationalism which dominates them for years, the anger of young pacifists who were clubbed, or worker demonstrations against the exploitation of labor, the dismantling of health care and the retirement system.
We don’t know yet how this will end. It all depends on how we tell the story of Europe. The intellectuals have been too silent. However, their task has never been clearer: to defend the word from the barbaric chatter that attacks it. It is the false alternative between “British” and “European” that led to Brexit. It was the words of the media that pushed Yugoslavia into the abyss. And if today Russia and Ukraine risk self-destruction in an endless conflict, it is also because the European elites do not have the dialectical, or verbal, capacity to weave mediation. The speech is the same for Gaza.
At this stage, it is simply a matter of explaining that sovereignism is the surest way to become vulnerable, to become a land of conquest for multinationals, and therefore to lose one’s sovereignty. Let us remember that because of nationalism, Europe has already committed suicide twice. And that, in its darkest hours, England resisted the Nazi avalanche thanks to the passionate speech of one man, Winston Churchill. It’s about making children understand how lucky they are, how green this earth of ours is and how much nostalgia it arouses when we are far from it. Starting from the myth to rebuild the European dream.
