Paulo de Medeiros University of Warwick Mare Mortis: The Shipwrecking of Europe on the Rocks of Difference Lord, Lord! methought, what pain it was to drown! What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! What ugly sights of death within mine eyes! Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks; Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon; Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea: Clarence, Richard III, I, iv Speaking in Turin in 1990, Jacques Derrida fundamentally questioned
European identity at the same time that he dared challenge us all to imagine a
different, a better, Europe, in The Other Heading. Twenty-five years later, and
in the face of the horrific deaths suffered by thousands of would-be migrants
to Europe, that challenge has not even begun to be addressed. How could the
Mediterranean, once the proud common space of diverse cultures and
peoples, the Mare Nostrum, turn into a veritable cemetery, a sea of death? In
its current apathy, its denial in the face of utmost tragedy and its wimpish
attempts at preserving a modicum of credibility, the European Union runs the
risk of losing itself, forgetting its common history of suffering and striving for
justice and equality, in its morbid fears of those it deems “different” from itself.
It is urgent that we consider again Derridaʼs challenge to imagine another
heading for Europe if, with Habermas, we still want to think of Europe as an
unfinished project, our only hope for a common future.
1. The summer of our discontent
The writing has been on the wall for a long time now and intellectuals and artists of all political persuasions and from diverse countries and areas of specialization have been insistently clamouring for a change in the direction Europe has been taking, a direction that established politicians all around have been preaching as the only possible one but which by now has shown itself to be a self-­‐destructive and blind route that threatens to undo all the gains of the past half-­‐century. If the writing has been on the wall for the last twenty-­‐five years, it still did not allow us to quite predict the situation we are in right now. Without any dramatization I think we can say that Europe, that is the project for a Europe united and strong as home to cherished principles of democratic rule, the state of law, human rights, and stable economic prosperity, has come crashing down violently. This ship of state, more resembling a ship of fools, has hit the rocks of difference, and, unable to resolve its inner contradictions, is rapidly sinking. When I first accepted the generous invitation to come here today, I was both honoured and intimidated, and thought that however inappropriate I might be for the task at hand, it was imperative that I try to speak to the impending catastrophe that everyone could see unfolding before our very eyes, something I had briefly tried to write about myself and which I thought represented Europe’s crucible, that is, Europe’s inability to deal with its migrant crisis. As we all know and can watch daily in the news, the situation I had initially in mind, the desperation of all of those attempting to cross the ocean to reach the shores of Europe and all that these shores signify in terms of freedom, well-­‐being, and human dignity, has exploded to the point that those dying almost daily are in the thousands. On the 21st April, the Daily Telegraph wrote: “More than 1,750 migrants perished in the Mediterranean since the start of the year -­‐ more than 30 times higher than during the same period of 2014, says the International Organization for Migration”. The toll of about 900 drowned migrants on 19 April made it impossible for anyone to ignore the situation but it was not unique as similar tolls, even if below half a thousand, had also happened in March and February. Dan Hodges, writing in the Telegraph the day after, put it bluntly: “There’s something we need to be clear on. The death of 900 refugees in the Mediterranean over the weekend was not a “tragedy”. The word tragedy implies an accidental calamity. An unfortunate confluence of space and time. 2 There was nothing accidental about the deaths of The 900. They were killed as a direct – and deliberate – act of government policy. EU policy. And British government policy”. The reference obviously is to the decision to terminate the Italian rescue operation code-­‐named Mare Nostrum and replace it with the far more limited one, Triton, which is clearly inadequate. But, to my mind, such discussions as to whether a rescue operation that was cancelled or another one that has finally been agreed upon are just distractions that divert our attention from the real causes of the problem and which go to the very core of what we might imagine to be a European project. As much as I realize that there are immediate and very pragmatic issues to be dealt with, and as much as I am time and over again left with the sinking feeling and the bitter after taste of seeing our elected officials and assorted bureaucrats all miserably failing in the simple duty of common humanity, preferring to hide behind a barrage of numbers, figures and appeals to our ruthless selfishness, I think that it is imperative to address the question of Europe’s radical fear of difference that makes it become more and more of a fortress. And in doing so threatens to keep us inside as prisoners as well, prisoners of our own fears, and of our own government’s ruthless logic of an increased productivity model that has proven itself unsustainable and self destructive, a model moreover that has been refuted by most renowned economists by now. I also said that I felt intimidated upon receiving the invitation to come here today and address you on this topic of Europe’s failure. I am aware of the fact that this very city has a long and difficult history with conflicts based on ideological differences that can so easily tear a whole people apart and justify all forms of cruelty. As such, who I am to address you today? Certainly not an expert and if anything my own personal experience, privileged as it has been all those years, has also taught me the importance of discriminating between wrong and wright and speaking about it. Growing up in a fascist dictatorship – however mild it might have been in comparison to other totalitarian experiences in Europe – formed one either into submission or its opposite as fear, silent and never clear 3 but all the more felt, permeated an entire society. A Portuguese writer, Lídia Jorge, one of the most outspoken voices against the contradictions of contemporary Portuguese society in one of her early works, a brilliant depiction of how the colonial wars waged for thirteen years in Angola, Mozambique and other parts of Africa then under Portuguese control, meant that violence was everywhere and tainted everything anyone ever did or thought (see also the film adaptation by Margarida Cardoso). I am not here to talk about the Portuguese situation – even though that country, for most of the 20th century the sick man of Europe, a dubious honour it has now relinquished to Greece, could also serve as an example. No, what concerns me today is how Europe has become incapable of imagining a future for itself and how in doing so it is condemned to repeat all the mistakes from its past – and we know how catastrophic Europe’s past is. What concerns me today is how through such a failure of the imagination Europe has abdicated its historical responsibility and failed its future generations. Future generations? Well, both future and past judging by the number of old people who are increasingly denied to live their remaining days in dignity, in this one so affluent continent of ours. What concerns me today is how Europe, not unlike the Angel of Progress of Walter Benjamin, refuses to face the future and prefers to stare back into the past, of which nothing but ruins has been left at the same time that the wind blowing from Paradise incessantly hurls him into that very future it refuses to see. We too, like that blind Angel seem to prefer to court the ghastly and bloody ghosts of our nationalistic pasts rather than confront the challenges the future holds in hand for us, starting with the ecological disasters we have created and that if nothing is done will destroy the planet and remove from us the need to decide and act. In a profound irony it is as if Europe, by staring so much into its past and its traditions, has become completely blind. By avoiding the legacies of its postimperial condition, in its refusal to see how that legacy completely determines its present, and in its preference to infantilize its entire population, told alternatively to consume more so as to keep the economy running and to tighten the belt to the point of asphyxiation so as to live within its means, Europe has become a gigantic open air museum bereft of any political significance. But 4 not the less dangerous for it as the sight of a Mediterranean strewn with corpses shows; or, for that matter, how the impending threat of having to mount a gigantic humanitarian aid operation to try and rescue the entire Greek population after its collapse at the hands of Europe also indicates. Yes, I would like to bring these two crises together, and not only because both have to do with the Mediterranean, but because, to me anyway, they are face and reverse of the same coin, the false coin of a Europe still arrogant enough to judge itself superior to the rest of a world it no longer controls while it seems to have lost any self-­‐
control at all. Let us not delude ourselves: forcing Greece out of the Euro is not a simple expedient that would allow the Schäubles of this world to feel they had been pure and severe, nor is it a way for Greece to regain the sovereignty it has lost long ago all along with all other members of the European Union. Rather, forcing Greece out of the Euro, or forcing it to grovel on the ground so as to be allowed to go on being forced into economic chains in perpetuity, which is also not any better, are ways of dismantling the dream of a new Europe arisen out of the ashes of World War II. Greece’s insistence on Germany’s repayment of war damages or the way other European countries and indeed the USA have reminded Germany that it owes its preeminent economic position today in great part to the very forgetting of debt it now refuses to consider for Greece, are not simply strategic calls. They are symptomatic of how much any contemporary idea of Europe is foremost an idea to rebuild Europe out of the utter devastation of World War II. It might seem I am simplifying, and perhaps I am. After all, in the intervening six decades so much has happened that it could appear that to insist on linking today’s European malaise still with the aftermath of World War II would still be yet another entropic gesture, another form of European navel gazing. Yet, even at the level of popular culture the link is inevitably made. The last episode of the Swedish television detective series Arne Dahl under the title of Europe Blues (2010) did not hesitate in linking a case involving old Nazi criminals and the current trafficking of women from Eastern Europe as sexual slaves. An interesting twist had one of the criminals, a Swedish SS doctor having escaped unrecognized for so long by having assumed the identity of one of its victims, while another one had escaped by presenting himself as a sort of Italian Godfather figure. What I find interesting in such a plot twist, beyond its 5 applicability to at least certain historical cases, is the way in which the series quietly but firmly not only establishes a link between World war II and its atrocities and the current crisis in Europe – how else to name the practice of slavery in our century, within our own borders? If you think I exaggerate, the article published in The Guardian on 23 May detailing how 3 thousand Vietnamese children had been trafficked to England alone is sobering. 2. What to do with Europe? Writing in 2001, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas sounded cautiously optimistic about Europe. As a long standing advocate of the need for European unification, not necessarily as a federation of states but certainly as a transnational project, Habermas delved at depth into the question of why Europe needed a constitution and what such a document might be. Read nowadays it seems almost purely utopian and that is a bitter consequence of the recent developments in Europe. If in 2001 Habermas could still ponder on the relative merits of a Europe of varying speeds, or could talk about a “core” Europe, something he frequently mentioned and still does, meaning Great Britain, France and Germany, in varying constellations, this has become increasingly problematic, not to say toxic. Of all the divisive aspects inherent in European politics, perhaps none more so than the question of a Europe divided between a core and a periphery, which is to say, fro all purposes, a Europe divided between North and South, in which North and South are not exclusively geographical markers. If no one would hesitate in assigning Germany and the Netherlands for instance to the North, and Greece and Portugal to the South, where to place Ireland or Italy is already a much more delicate matter. The other divisive question has necessarily to be seen in relation to migration issues, foremost the attempted migration of poor people from Africa and Asia into Europe via illegal channels but also the migration of people within the borders of the European Union, with the emphasis falling on the division between Eastern and western Europe. In that essay of 2001 pleading for the writing of a European constitution Habermas advances a definition of Europe that is worthwhile reflecting on: 6 What forms the common core of a European identity is the character of the painful learning process it has gone through, as much as its results. It is the lasting memory of nationalist excess and moral abyss that lends to our present commitments the quality of a peculiar achievement. (“Why Europe Needs a Constitution”, New Left Review, 2001: 21) Fast forward to 2015 and such a note seems oddly out of place. If in January, in the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, European political leaders would still put on a show of unity in their denouncement of terrorism and people all over Europe decided to express their concern by adopting the slogan proclaiming that they too were Charlie, only a few months later, all such signs of transnational solidarity were gone. Faced with the exponential increase in the death figures for migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean, the various leaders showed their bickering at its best or worst. Even if by now funding levels for humanitarian rescue operations have been tripled and reach what they were before Italy’s “Mare Nostrum” was cancelled, one can only be shocked by the glacial pace at which the European Union moves even in some of the most crucial questions affecting its very own existence and self-­‐professed ideals. In the light of the mounting numbers of casualties that have literally turned our sea into a sea of death, how can Europeans still believe in their institutions? Indeed, given the bitterness of the debate on Greece and the harshness with which a number of European states led by Germany has forced it to accept almost all of the punitive demands for it to still remain in the Eurozone, one must wonder what future does Europe still have. One is reminded of Derrida’s words, in one of his last texts on the notion of sovereignty, concerning the powerful states, which always invent reasons so as to act in the most cruel ways towards the weaker ones. Or, as Habermas has also forcefully expressed it very recently, in an interview for the Guardian of 16 July, Germany is damaging itself while forcing its measures on Greece: “I fear that the German government including
its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political
capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century – and by
“better” I mean a Germany characterized by greater political sensitivity and a
7 post-national mentality”. For some, Germany’s recent actions, the flexing of its
newly found muscles in the European arena, might be just cause to indulge in
old fears about Berlin’s hegemonic desires. And, as such, cause for abandoning
any dreams of a unified Europe in a bitter, disappointed, return to out-dated
forms of nationalism. After all, if Germany has succeed in imposing itself
brutally towards Greece, why should it not do so regarding other countries as
well, especially those other weaker ones such as Portugal, Italy, Spain and so
on? Habermas’ analysis is still exactly right in my view: “Finally, the outcome
[of the talks] is disgraceful because forcing the Greek government to agree to
an economically questionable, predominantly symbolic privatization fund
cannot be understood as anything other than an act of punishment against a
left-wing government. It’s hard to see how more damage could be done”.
Should one just declare the European project bankrupt and spent, its ideals
shipwrecked on the rocks of difference, that is, precisely on that which should
make Europe a different polity, stressing the diversity of cultures, languages,
and perspectives, yet united in its belief in human rights and democratic
values? That which for quite some time now had been denounced as a deficit in
democracy became so evident that it can no longer be brushed aside or denied
in the name of efficiency. As Habermas also notes, and he is far from being
alone, the decision imposed on Greece “means that a helpless European
Council is effectively declaring itself politically bankrupt: the de facto
relegation of a member state to the status of a protectorate openly contradicts
the democratic principles of the European Union”.
3. More Europe but a different Europe
By now it must have become clear, even for conservatives, that the struggle in
Europe is not so much a financial crisis but a political one. What the collapse
of Wall Street in 2008 revealed was not so much how vulnerable advanced
societies under savage capitalism had become in the wake of globalization and
the near universal enshrining of neo-liberal doxa, but rather how the desperate
8 attempts to salvage the financial markets at the cost of the common people
betrayed a fundamental lack of political will. It was as if politicians in the USA
and Europe had all been victims of some body-snatching scheme sometime in
the past and had all been replaced by some form of alien life intent on
subjugating humans to their inhuman caprice under the disguise of financial
accountability. This crippling political failure keeps being felt all across
Europe, be it the prolonged governmental vacuum that forced Belgium to prod
along for 20 months without a government in 2010 and 2011, the inability to
move swiftly concerning the humanitarian crisis forcing migrants to risk
everything to come to Europe or, once in Europe to cross further to the UK, or
indeed, the inability to find a solution to the structural problems affecting
Greek society in particular. Under the pretext of sound financial measures the
“troika”, even when less extreme than in the case of Greece, moves towards a
forced homogenization in Europe that cannot but be perceived as a form of
aggression and foreign occupation. José Gil, one of Portugal’s foremost
contemporary philosophers has recently analysed what he refers to as the “law
of the troika” as forcefully disrupting existing forms of identity and social
cohesion – in the case of Portugal by forcing large segments of the population
into poverty leading to a massive exodus of young, highly educated people to
other European countries such as the UK and Germany and even as far afield
as Brazil and Angola.
My generation is a privileged one. Born at the end of the fifties or beginning of
the sixties, as Europe had already cleared up most of the rubble of World War
II and was confidently intent on establishing processes that would allow for
increased international cooperation, very much following Churchill’s call in his
1946 speech at the University of Zürich calling for a United States of Europe:
“If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there
would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and glory which its 3 or 4
hundred million people would enjoy”. One could say that Europe has never
been more prosperous, and yet there is hardly any happiness to be seen as
9 governments keep stressing fear into all Europeans, fear of economic collapse,
fear of the future, fear of non-Europeans, and fear even of other Europeans.
The motto adopted by the European Union in 2000, “United in Diversity” has
never rung more hollow than at present with a Europe perhaps only united in
its fear and rejection of otherness. Calling the present state an existential crisis
has become frequent in the media. It is that of course, but more. At stake is not
so much whether one member state or another – Greece is currently the target,
but this could soon change – is forced out of the single currency; or even
whether the Euro itself manages to survive as a currency. Rather, what is really
at stake is the survival of the idea of Europe itself. This is not merely an
ideological question – even if it is that too. In other words, and that is why I
think it is important to remember Churchill’s views, the idea of a United
Europe is by no means a left wing project alone. One could even say that
fundamentally, the idea of a European Union is a conservative one born out of
realism and political pragmatism as European countries realized how
insignificant they had become in the arena of global politics after World War
II. Such pragmatism is even more needed now as globalization has accelerated
and no single European country, no matter how large, productive, or
determined, is really a match for global competition. Europe is currently
profoundly divided and its constituent member states as well. Germany is no
exception whether one has in mind the apparent rift between Merkel and
Schäuble or the inner conflicts with the social democrats themselves. If not all
of this could have been predicted, still a large part was plain to see a long time
ago. The creation of a sort of fiscal union lacking the proper back up of a
political union was a recipe for disaster and all that really was unknown was
the time for its detonation.
My generation has benefited from increased access to education and health
care, both of which are under serious threat at the moment. Perhaps it grew too
complacent, hoping that the stock market would keep on increasing everyone’s
fortunes while knowing fully well that all pyramid schemes have one certain
10 outcome. My generation might well have been the last to enjoy the prospects of
continuous growth and prosperity. In its place what the neo-liberal order has
managed to install all across Europe is instability and precariousness. In the
case of Greece, unless something is done, staggering debt will be the only
inheritance of future generations. Under these circumstances turning one’s
back to Europe might seem appealing. Or, as some banners in Athens during
the referendum had it, it might be the only left thing left to do. I understand the
temptation, especially as today’s Europe cannot be anyone’s idea of Europe.
Fundamentally divided, perpetually bickering, a bureaucratic unfeeling
leviathan, today’s Europe is everyone’s nightmare. Without any false hopes,
deluded expectations of federalisms borrowed from abroad or worst, imposed
from above, a different Europe is needed. A Europe that might, once again,
provide hope for the future and assure human dignity. In other words, it is time
to return Europe to its original course, to take stock of the damage – and it is
immense – and work towards its recovery. It must be ironic to think that the
thousands of migrants who risk their lives to cross over into Europe do so
believing in a Europe that has ceased to exist except as a vision and a dream
constantly threatened. If we Europeans want to stop avoiding reality we need to
let go of our postimperial blindness and recognize that a large majority of those
migrants willing to die crossing over here do so out of a desperation with their
lives that has its roots to a great extent still in Europe’s colonial interference in
Northern and sub-Saharan Africa. We must recognize that when the
Mediterranean was called “Mare Nostrum” the communities around it both in
Europe proper as well as on the Middle East enjoyed similar levels of
prosperity and hardship and that, out of their diverse cultures had managed to
forge common identity elements. I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not
nostalgic for any idyllic Mediterranean civilization that lives in golden
splendour in the minds of some. Rather, I am much more concerned with that
fact that we, Europeans, were incapable of recognizing the desire for freedom
and a better life expressed with such force across a number of the Middle
Eastern countries. Or that we seem prepared to spend large sums of money to
11 prevent migrants from reaching Europe’s shores but will not help change their
local living conditions so as to make risking their lives seem like a good
alternative to their current lot. And in our blindness we were incapable of
expressing any solidarity even f it were merely symbolic, in honour of our
professed ideals otherwise so proudly displayed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since
most Europeans have also been incapable of demonstrating any form of
solidarity with the Greek people. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the harshest
critics of the Greeks have been precisely those in countries also deeply affected
by the crisis and also in need of structural funds, such as Portugal and Ireland.
How many more “thousand fearful wrecks”, in Clarence’s words, must we still
endure before waking up to the fact that improving our own lot implies
recognizing all forms of difference and accepting it, without merely rendering
it exotic or fetishizing it? Even if I have no easy solution, who does, to the
current political crisis, I would like to call for more, not less Europe. The idea
of a Constitution for Europe might seem like a pipe dream at the moment and
yet perhaps it is the needed step towards a de facto political union without
which a fiscal union can never survive. Does this imply a surrender of
sovereignty? Only if we forget that a large number of member states have
effectively already surrendered financial sovereignty and that those still
holding on to their own currency, indulge on a show of mirrors and smoke
because, in reality, their economies are as inextricably tied together with the
rest of the other European states as if they too had the single currency.
Furthermore, a move towards a Europe based on concrete, and representative,
that is, elected, transnational political institutions would not mean so much a
surrender of sovereignty as the creation of a new form of sovereignty. Not an
ideal one perhaps, but certainly one that would be more democratic and more
legitimate than the current one. Perhaps if European people felt that they really
had a say in how to control their present they might feel differently about other
people and might welcome their desire to also become European. Perhaps then
one might speak again of a Europe where reality approximates the ideal.
12 Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. [1940]. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Cardoso, Margarida, Dir. The Murmuring Coast. DVD. Lisbon: Atalanta Films, 2004. Churchill, Winston. “I Wish to Speak to You Today About the Tragedy of Europe”. Speech at University of Zürich, 19 September 1946. London: The Churchill Society. http://www.churchill-­‐society-­‐london.org.uk/astonish.html Dahl, Arne. [2011]. Europa Blues. DVD. Nordisk Film, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. [1991]. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Gil, José. Pulsações. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 2014. Habermas, Jürgen. [2008]. Europe: The Faltering Project. London: Polity Press, 2009. Habermas, Jürgen. “Why Europe Needs a Constitution”. New Left Review. 11, September – October, 2011. 5-­‐26. Habermas, Jürgen. “Jürgen Habermas’s Verdict on the Greece/EU Debt Deal – Full Transcript. The Guardian. 16 July 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/16/jurgen-­‐
habermas-­‐eu-­‐greece-­‐debt-­‐deal Hodges, Dan. “The 900 Refugees Drowned in the Mediterranean Were Killed by British Government Policy”. The Daily Telegraph. 20 April 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-­‐election-­‐2015/politics-­‐
blog/11549721/The-­‐900-­‐refugees-­‐dead-­‐in-­‐the-­‐Mediterranean-­‐were-­‐
killed-­‐by-­‐British-­‐government-­‐policy.html Jorge, Lídia. [1989]. The Murmuring Coast. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 13