Stitched Panorama

Since the Maastricht agreement in 1992 and the establishment of the euro as single European currency the EU has become a techno-oligarchic structure where religion (the cult of the market), political economy, politics, ideology, converge towards the construction of a society that — while unable to be as prosperous as it is presumed to be, given the crisis started in 2008 — blocks Europe inside a vision of the world and of the socio-economic structure as devoid of any alternative: the ordoliberal dogma and its results, i.e. the shattering of society into individual «athoms», the subsumption of every life under the law of the market, social inequality, and emergency policies. The authentic political energy of the Old continent is neutralized and extinguished by the techno-economic uniformity of a single-thought. That political energy consisted of the capacity of mobilizing the present, transcending the existing institutions, imagining the future through the competition of ideas, classes and nations.

The EU is too powerful (because it is too close-knit) and too fragile (because it is not able to face difficulties, contestations, alternatives). The EU gives up the future insofar as it denies its own past, and this is all the more so the more it speaks of that past using the language of «roots», «identity», «values», «heritage». However, the vitality of that past lies in the understanding of Europe as a space of risky openness towards the future through conflict. Thus, this Union cannot bear the fact of being questioned, and must therefore deny the existence of problems also beyond any evidence. In this way, it lets extremisms intensify, producing further wounds, anti-European closures, and abandonments. Even a considerable part of the terrorism that afflicts us nowadays dresses with the clothes of islamic religion has endogenous origin.

While it is affected by an internal crisis in its ideology and in its technocratical structures, the EU is not able to manage the geopolitical challenges and lets them be managed by the emergency policies of the States, that build up walls and fences in order to turn the smooth space realized by the Schengen agreement into a maze where migrants escaping the collapses of the Near East, Northern Africa and the Horn of Africa are trapped like mice.

No. This EU is definitively not the future of Europe, but rather its denial. It can neither inspire trust from the citizens, nor act as a source of political legitimacy. Its constitutional architecture, its economic structure, its ideal legitimacy must be completely rethought. Élites, parties, citizens, unions, cultural associations and even the States are called to take a new and radical responsibility. The Europe of the future needs a new path and a new «Great Idea»: it must be nurtured – without any nostalgic attachment – by the Europe of the past, its critical force, its internal dialectic, in order to be an alternative to the painful fragmentation and the sad failure that we are experiencing today.

 

L’articolo è stato pubblicato nella rivista greca «Frear», n. 16-17, 2016, pp. 460-461.