This is leadership?

When Ursula von der Leyen first faced the European Parliament as Commission President-Elect, she stated that ‘we sometimes forget that our greatest achievements have always come when we are bold.’

As of 2021, to act boldly boils down to the following: allow your Health Commissioner to initiate a war of words with AstraZeneca, leading to embarrassing communication errors and half-arsed vaccine nationalism (imagine, the EU threatening vaccine export controls); throw your Trade Commissioner under the bus over the Ireland protocol Article 16 debacle, despite evidence of your own cabinet being directly responsible for the mishap; and lash out at the UK for accelerating vaccine approval procedures as it goes through a nightmarish mortality crisis.

In the face of backlash, Ms Von der Leyen’s initial strategy has been to release pre-recorded and scripted videos filmed from within an apparently sun-lit Berlaymont (anyone staying in Brussels these days cannot help but wonder whether she resides in a Teletubbies-esque infantile dystopia), appearing to dig in and insisting no fault on her part in the events unfolding over the last weeks.

These releases are doctored and vacuous, not least after having publicly dragged DG Trade through the mud. Crucially, she would not even face questions from journalists, much to the chagrin of the Eurobubble’s press corps. She would only accept a videocall with concerned MEPs, or whenever she’s in the mood, offering preferential access to German media. A craven silo mentality is slipping in at the European Commission.

It appears that we, citizens of the EU, have a ‘leader’ who refuses to take on responsibility, prefers to sacrifice her subordinates on the altar of her own incompetence, who to wants to reinvent the wheel everywhere she goes (no less her botched micro-management of filling in senior Commission positions), and refuses to be held accountable. After fleeing Germany, whereto will she flee now?

It all really begs the question: is the current Commission president out of her depth? Can the European Union afford an Ursula von der Leyen? The same person whose German defence ministry oversaw machine gunners training with broomsticks, resorting to their own vocal cords to mimic the steady discharge of their weapons?

Europe invested billions to help develop the world‘s 1st COVID vaccines & create a global common good.

Now the companies must deliver & honour their obligations. We will set up a vaccine export transparency mechanism.

EU is committed to contribute. But we also mean business. pic.twitter.com/lvq0KkCWJD

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) January 26, 2021

The alternatives that were not meant to be

What makes this author shiver with regret and now dread, is that this scenario could have been averted. Were it a Margrethe Vestager, a Frans Timmermans or Alexander Stubb in charge, facing off with pharmaceutical giants and delivering the same tough messages, we would at least have a Commission President commanding an aura of sincerity, charisma, and proven European leadership.

Margrethe Vestager has a history of successfully facing down large multinationals and the benefit of world recognition and respect. Frans Timmermans is a seasoned polyglot, a successful diplomat, the European Green Deal’s very own champion and unrelenting in his views on the rule of law. Alexander Stubb would have combined academic acumen with experience in the European Council. What exactly did Ms Von der Leyen bring to the table?

The spectre of intergovernmentalism haunts Europe

Our predicament is rather clear: we are shackled by the doctrine of lowest common denominator, rendering our leadership mere puppets of the Member States at best; or incompetent and hapless at worst. In either case, leadership selected on pathetically unimpressive criteria makes the Commission an easy scapegoat in its by-now institutionalised role as the European Council’s overstretched and underfinanced secretariat.

Why else does it seem that the Commission prioritised cost-savings and created the illusion of strong-arming big pharma rather than focussing on swift vaccine development, production, and delivery, regardless of price?

Regrettably, find ourselves in an equilibrium best described by so-called (new) intergovernmentalism, with power concentrated in the (European) Council, whose modus operandi is one of consensus-building rather than democratic accountability. In other words, the least unsatisfactory option to all, whether it be policy or the Commission presidency, is fair game.

The toolbox of this equilibrium? Deliberation and persuasion, giving us the mercurial talent of Ursula von der Leyen, Josep Borell, a commissioner to ‘protect the European way of life’, and of course a ‘geopolitical European Commission’. Instead of a union of values, we are fast becoming a union of platitudes, led by the intellectually vacuous and craven, rather than the entrepreneurial example of Jacques Delors. Oh… what could have been with Margrethe Vestager at the helm.

Democratic federalism

The current state of affairs, one of political eurosclerosis, is lamentable. That does not mean, however, that the European project has plateaued and is bound for steady decline as the rot of the intergovernmental equilibrium takes root. There is a medicine: democratic federalism. It would, however, be a bitter pill to swallow for the Member States and a rude awakening for the institutional set-up we have normalised since Lisbon.

Above all, it would require political courage, especially from the European Parliament in facing off with the Member States. Concretely, the Spitzenkandidaten process must be formalised, and pan-European lists allowing citizens from across the EU to cast one of their votes directly for one of these candidates must become the norm. It is farcical for a political union that preaches democracy and transparency to the world, to have an executive led by a person parachuted in after secretive deliberation between the Member States. Nobody voted, and more importantly, nobody would have voted for Ursula von der Leyen in 2019, yet she ‘leads’.

It is not good enough for the European Union to merely survive. This is the lowest of benchmarks, a craven measure of success worthy only of the conniving, cynical and Janus-faced politicking of intergovernmentalism that is institutionalising a new, political, eurosclerosis. Ursula von der Leyen, European Council, Member States, and European Parliament, when will you be bold?

Until then, steerless, rudderless, and devoid of captaincy, the EU ship is left alone to face the boisterous waves of our time.

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With radical Islam the latest addition to the European terrorist ecosystem, similar discussions are taking place in how best to counter it – particularly in France, which has recently witnessed the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty. Eighteen-year-old radical Islamist, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, is the person responsible for the murder, and the fallout from the crime is still reverberating in French society and politics.

Islam and radicalised communities

The radicalisation of Muslim communities living in Western European countries has deep roots, with old and new grievances and problems contributing to explain the phenomenon. There is little doubt, however, that the most recent shock to the system came from the deteriorating situation and spillover of the Syrian Civil War in Europe. This allowed terrorist groups like ISIS to weaponise modern technology such as social media to radicalise young Muslims in Europe, as well as key people in their communities – such as imams.

The turmoil surrounding the Syrian Civil War and its dislocations has allowed radical groups to establish an ideological foothold in Europe. This radicalisation has triggered episodes of brutality in the streets of cities across Western Europe, with the murder of Samuel Paty setting a sad record on the scale of violence.

The murder of Samuel Paty also broke precedent on such incidents, as it seems that the murder was not strictly motivated by adherence to a radical Islamic movement, but due to sheer intolerance of different opinions, with worrying implications for the prospects of Islam in Europe. This fact also raises concerns over the overall European approach to radicalism, which is essentially laissez-faire, “let-it-be until public opinion turns against it”.

When that switch does happen, responses tend to be knee-jerk and based on populism and stoking anger, rather than mending wounds. It is apparent that this approach simply doesn’t work and the philosophy behind it is fully illogical: central governments voluntarily choose not to use their tools and deliberately ignore the problem of radicalisation, until the popular mood turns so sour that putting forth sensible policies becomes impossible.

Western European states need to find a way to mitigate radicalisation within their Muslim communities. Needless to say, they equally need an effective strategy to defang extremism across the political spectrum, and the rise of right-wing extremism, in particular, poses a serious threat to the future of democracy in countries such as Italy and France. These movements have greatly capitalised on the dislocation caused by the battle against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and have repeatedly made breaches into the mainstream by building their political narrative and cause around these questions.

As mentioned, however, the roots of radicalisation go deeper than just ISIS. Muslim communities in Western Europe were already marginalised and treated as a dangerous foreign community. This marginalisation has deprived people of a sense of belonging – belonging to the country that they were born in, and where they’d spent the majority or entirety of their lives. The insular mentality this has triggered has greatly amplified the power of fundamentalist imams to radicalise their communities. Any effective real-world solution which at once addresses the issue and combats the populist, far-right perspective of the matter, will have to go straight to the root of the problem – and look at successful examples of social cohesion.

A real-world example

The Greek Muslim community living in Western Thrace, on the border with Turkey, is a success story with many lessons for policymakers looking for inspiration. This region has a large Muslim community from a mixed ethnic background, coming at around 33% of the population. The minority enjoys several protections to guarantee an even keel with the Greek majority, including constitutional guarantees of non-discrimination, and political representation.

But where the integration process truly shines is in education: a dense network of minority schools provide education in Greek and Turkish. The schools are state-funded and aimed at minority students, with distinct curricula based on the unique social and cultural context of the local communities. Imams and religious scholars participate in this educational effort, which includes elective secondary education in religious studies in Turkish, and the Quran in Arabic.

This network includes two high schools, located in Komotini and Xanthi – where the concentration of Greek Muslims is highest. Public transportation for students living in isolated, rural or mountainous areas is subsidised by the state, to ensure no one falls through the cracks of the system, and Islamic theological seminaries are available for interested students, with an equal footing with Orthodox seminaries before the law. Additionally, 0,5% of slots in national higher education institutes are reserved to members of the Greek Muslim minority.

This set up has succeeded in keeping radical Islam out of the picture, and unable to get a foothold in a community that sees this arrangement as largely equitable. There are issues, of course. A particular point of contention is the appointment of muftis – currently split between the state and Greek Muslims, with a mufti appointed by the former and another elected by the latter. Controversies regarding citizenship clauses and the ethnic composition of the community are still existent. But these pale in comparison with the fractious relationship between Muslims in Western Europe and their countries.

Western Thrace offers a model for peaceful coexistence far removed from the far right’s cries for deportation or worse. State-funded mosques, a special curriculum in areas with high percentages of Muslims and positive discrimination measures would root out radical Islam and its ideological narrative. If we want to see things to change, we need to take real action and implement real strategies to properly assimilate the Muslim communities and root out the far-right’s rhetoric of radical Islam in Western Europe.

Guest article Aggelos Tzitziras. The author is an 18-year-old university student living in Heraklion, Greece, Member of the Greek Youth Parliament (2017-2018), and Press Secretary of the think tank Symmaxia (Alliance).

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The Situation in Xinjiang

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has reported that in the last three years, the PRC built at least 380 ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang, with the intention to detain Uyghur Muslims and other supposed non-conformists. The official line will state that these camps were set up to help the Uyghurs, re-educate and ‘moderate’ an ethnic minority plagued by Islamic fundamentalism and boost their socio-economic outcomes by moulding them into citizens worthy of the PRC. In other words, the goal is to turn these supposedly hapless and anti-intellectual band of Turkic nomads into Han-Chinese model citizens. Any glance at the PRC’s aptly-named CCTV, or its Pravda-esque newspapers, will simply echo this lie.

What we are actually looking at is the systematic cultural genocide of Xinjiang’s majority Uyghur population and the incarceration of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Muslim Chinese citizens in internment camps, since at least 2017. One does not have to look long to figure out just how inhumane conditions and treatment in these camps are. The reports of brutish psychological torture involving sleep deprivation and threats to one’s family as well as slave labour; other sources have obtained testimonials by on-camp teachers revealing forced sterilisation as well as the brutal rape of female inmates, the details are too gruesome to spell out here. The UN’s own criteria would characterise this brutality as a genocide.

What is the EU doing?

Suffice it to say that Xinjiang’s camps are inhumane and an affront to human dignity as insidious and extensive as anything we have seen since the end of World War II. Surprisingly, we have yet to see an official confrontation or even condemnation on the matter by European leaders. We recently saw prominent European politicians mark Black Ribbon Day, a day on which we commemorate the victims of the 20th century’s violent totalitarian regimes. References to the ongoing repression in Xinjiang were notably absent.

Indeed, any consistent criticism of from Europe’s high political circles seems to originate with outspoken Belgian liberal MEP, Guy Verhofstadt. By contrast, his liberal compatriot Charles Michel, now president of the European Council, had little more to offer than happy musings about European cheese and wine during and after a recent virtual Europe-China summit, with human rights issues assuming a relative backstage role, being labelled under ‘International affairs and other issues’, by the Council website. The Commission President, Ursula Von der Leyen, at least made sure to save space in a tweet about the event for ‘fundamental values’. It seems that our Union of Values is all bark and little bite when it comes to the most pressing human rights issue of our time.

Taking part in our video conference with Chinese President Xi. Looking forward to frank & open discussions. Engagement at the highest level with China is crucial if we are to promote European economic interests, protect our climate & defend fundamental values and rights. #EUChina pic.twitter.com/n3eyWwckKO

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) September 14, 2020

No concrete steps have been taken to leverage a Chinese shift in policy regarding the Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Of course, the bloc’s armoury of policy instruments in external affairs is limited, but it can still rely on access to its internal market as a ploy. For instance, the EU could apply a surgical tariff, or ideally ban, on all goods imported from the PRC that are suspected or have been confirmed to have involved forced labour from Xinjiang.

For all his faults, President Trump is moving in the right direction, by considering to label what is happening in Xinjiang a genocide. Should he lose November’s election, his likely successor Joe Biden would do the same. Would it be too much for the EU to follow suit, or even go a few steps further? The EU’s economic soft power can easily be provided with a hard edge should access to its internal market be weaponised against transgressions demeaning human decency, including at the very least the cultural genocide being perpetrated in Xinjiang. Again, the US has already led the way in this regard, as the House of Representatives has voted in favour of banning import from Xinjiang over forced labour concerns.

The Economic Problem

The stumbling block, as per usual, appears to be internal. In this case, it appears to be of a Teutonic nature. Germany’s economy has become increasingly dependent on exports to China over the last few decades (€100bn alone last year). Increasingly as well, its car-manufacturing corporations are basing nodes of their value chains in the PRC. Most insidious amongst these must be Volkswagen’s factory in Xinjiang. As far as Berlin is concerned, Europe’s relationship with China is ‘complicated’ and ‘nuanced’, but most of all one defined by business interests.

This author is not an anti-globalist but does question the usefulness of paying lip-service in voicing concerns over human rights abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang, while German companies (read: Volkswagen) allegedly benefit from forced labour practices in the PRC. Are we not a Union of Values? Why has the European Parliament’s call to apply targeted sanctions and freeze assets been ignored so far in the Council? Why is it that Germany is able to mobilise a moral spine in order to threaten a veto on the Mercosur deal on deforestation grounds, but not on any future deal with a communist regime perpetrating cultural genocide?

Instead, active European leadership on the matter has been reliant on Sweden’s H&M banning Xinjiang cotton yarn from its production chain. At a political level, however, the EU’s inaction on the issue, as with other policy fields, is determined too much by Germany’s lack of geostrategic intelligence and backbone. Domestic political costs associated with cancelling a deal with China are eroding the EU’s veneer of international leadership in the Asia-Pacific.

Our Responsibilities

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, a (European) house divided simply cannot stand. In this case, it is unacceptable for the EU to turn its nose from the pungent smell of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, where the most heinous crime against humanity of our lifetimes is being perpetrated. What is being done, is an attempted ethnic cleansing at a scale and cold-hearted sophistication we have not seen since the 1940s. Hannah Arendt once said that ‘we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.’ I fear that it might already be too late for Xinjiang’s Uyghurs.

Guest article by Adam Hall. The author is pursuing a PhD at the VUB in Brussels.

The post Europe’s Long March of Indifference: The Great Sinicisation of Xinjiang appeared first on My Country? Europe..

Let’s get straight to the point: the EU is losing the war of hearts and minds in its struggle against COVID-19, the newest strand of the coronavirus family. Despite its suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact, its joint coordination of production and distribution of direly needed medical equipment, the earmarking of billions to struggling SMEs, and the ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme, the Union is being out PR’ed by the Chinese, Cubans, and Russians.

The EU and the Novel Coronavirus Response

The medical personnel and supplies sent by these countries were accompanied by lots of cameras eager to capture the physical manifestations of their respective countries’ benevolence in aiding an ailing Italian healthcare system. Never mind reports of domestic chaos in Russia, the Chinese government’s complicity in aggravating the early stages of this coronavirus pandemic, or the rather negligible impact of the handful of Cuban doctors. The tsunami of pictures and musically-edited videos was enough to sway swathes of the Italian (and European) population of this aforementioned benevolence.

Where was, or rather is, the European Union in all this? No one saw masks and doctors being dispatched under EU flags, followed by Euronews cameras during the course of the coronavirus pandemic for now. That is exactly because healthcare – including pandemic public health interventions is, by treaty, not an exclusive EU competence on subsidiarity grounds. It is allowed to coordinate, aid, and assist in R&D, but it is not the final decision-maker nor implementor of health policy. As such, we have arrived at the crux of a problem which neofunctionalists might dub a ‘spillover’ effect, particularly in addressing a pandemic. In this respect, the subsidiarity test needs to be revisited.

A Lack of Coordinated Efforts?

The reality of our borderless internal market necessitates a coordinated effort in tackling the pandemic and future outbreaks. If anything, the stark contrast between the respective responses of the Dutch and Belgian governments epitomises the necessity of a movement towards more centralised and comprehensive pandemic response capabilities at the EU level: as Belgium went into lockdown, many of its citizens enjoyed the many restaurants and bars its neighbour’s provinces of Zeeland, Brabant, and Limburg had to offer. Moreover, the initial choice for herd immunity in the Netherlands, in a region as compact and integrated as the Benelux, threatened to nullify Belgium’s relatively stringent containment attempts. Were it not for Dutch PM’s Mark Rutte’s pivot to social distancing, Belgium could have been the victim of ‘coronavirus-leakage‘.

That being said, the Belgian-Dutch case exposes a fundamental obstacle to European integration in rapid pandemic response policy: namely the split between virologists who espouse a more Darwinian herd immunity approach; and those who prefer the long-term game of (intermittent) social distancing until a vaccine arrives on the scene. How comfortable are Europeans with these decisions being taken by national bureaucrats, let alone Brussels? Yet surely the case must be made for a science-based European capacity of intervention that escapes the conniving politicking of the Member States.

Policy, Public Health and Further Questions

A more salient problem for the EU is that healthcare is one of the few policy domains that still justifies the continued existence of nation-states in an increasingly globalised world. Does this, however, hold true for pandemic public health interventions including during the current coronavirus one? Taking decisions about how we want to take care of our elderly and sick, defines us, or so the popular interpretation goes. These decisions serve as cultural markers of identity, of continental solidarity.

More importantly, health policies – or rather, how much you’re willing to spend on healthcare – is the alpha and omega of electoral cycles. The political sacrifice that would entail giving up this policy field to Brussels, would simply be too high a cost for our current courageous generation of intergovernmental leadership to give up. Yet, the subsidiarity principle demands us revisiting the status quo.

Guest article by Adam Hall and Cristobal Adurno. The authors are both pursuing an advanced Master’s at the College of Europe in European Public Policy Analysis.

The post The New Coronavirus: A Very European Tragedy appeared first on My Country? Europe..

Common values

Sharing a common identity would not be possible without the existence of a shared set of values. This is an essential tenet of civic nationalism, and in many ways it’s part of the ontology of many different countries. To put it in very simplistic terms, the United States cherish the value of personal freedom, Canada the value of tolerance, Japan the value of hard work, and this works for any country on Earth. But the idea of a similar value-set acting as the cornerstone of European identity remains as hotly debated as it is vague.

The most common answers would be respect of human rights, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, pluralism, tolerance, justice, etc. These values also appear in the Eurobarometer polls when asking Europeans what they personally value the most. As philosopher Claude Obadia wrote in an article for La Croix, these values follow three maxims: “First maxim: being proud of being democratic and secular. Second maxim: being proud of believing in dignity of the person without distinctions of sex, religion or opinion. Third maxim: assert that these values aren’t negotiable”. The third maxim explains perhaps why the European Union is inflexible when it comes to its values when its citizens are concerned in subjects such as Brexit.

One might argue that these values are more humanistic than European, and it is true that many countries across the globe share these ideals. However, geographical, political, historical and social context create significant differences in these values. Europeans have a more social approach to many questions (healthcare, transport, education, etc), are more liberal on social issues (abortion rights, death penalty, etc), believe strongly in multilateralism and international institutions, and support a much higher level of secularism within public spheres. Ecological concerns is also much higher within Europe than in other parts of the world, with 71% of European citizens thinking it is important to prioritise environmental protection, as shown by Eurobarometer polls.

Christian roots, History and common culture

European identity can also be partly defined by the continent’s past, as well as the modern cultures built on that legacy. While this is not an exhaustive list by any means, a number of developments left a lasting impression on the whole of, or at the very least most of Europe: Greek philosophy, Roman laws, Judeo-Christian spirituality, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and more.

Whether one adheres to Christianity or not, it is undeniable that its influence shaped Europe as it is today. For instance, even though Europe does not have any clear geographical border, people often refer to the continent as the geographical zone of Latin Christianism during the XI^th century. Indeed, “Christendom” was the first conception of a wider European political community. Moreover, the various Kings, Lords or other various leader of the time used religion as a way to gather unity around them and across their territory. And for a long time, clerks and other religious officials could cross the different territories carrying ideas regardless where they came from. This is a clear indicator that Christianity acted somewhat as a “supra-national” common identity, as much as supra-national makes sense in a feudal context, where polities were not nation-states.

On the flip side, religion also provided justification for plunging Europe into countless wars. The most famous example, the Thirty Years’ War, takes the unenviable prize of being one of the bloodiest pre-industrial wars in history. However, the end of the war saw Catholic France ally with Protestant rebels against the Catholic Habsburgs, proving that even religious wars were ultimately subordinated to the very secular concept of great power competition.. Finally, the peace of Westphalia (1648) put an end to such wars, reducing religious strife in Europe. It also created the European state system as we know it today, and its impact is still foundational to the present-day world.

However, this is only a part of the common European legacy. The Renaissance, for example, which was a European revolution in many ways saw the creation of modern concepts such as capitalism, market economy, representative and liberal democracy, nation-states, universities in the modern sense, etc. Without such a European event, the European Union as we know it would never have existed.

Common legacy and culture can also be explored further if one looks at the various languages across the continent. Almost all of them – with some notable exceptions – have Indo-European roots. But the goal is not to praise a common language that existed before the invention of writing, but to praise the diversity, the richness of multilingualism. Opening minds, understanding the language of a political neighbour and understanding the world through different lenses  can only help develop a deeper sense of belonging to Europe.

Neo-liberalism’s role in this identity

European integration and institution-building have also, over time, contributed to a new sense of identity. Initiatives such as the common market and Schengen, which ease movement between Member States and outright eliminate internal barriers, have had an impact. Photographs of peaceful country towns technically split in half by inter-European borders are numerous on the internet nowadays. The Euro furthers this sense of unity, the sense of a European community, and necessarily a European identity. Even after the Great Recession, the Greek economic implosion and the Euro debt crisis, this new identity did not falter. And while Brexit specifically challenges it, the EU presently seems to enjoy more internal cohesion than Great Britain does.

When it comes to European cultural projects that are instrumental to building a common identity, the Erasmus student exchange programme definitely takes the cake. By providing students from different backgrounds with the opportunity to access education anywhere in Europe, the programme has massively contributed to the creation of a kindred spirit among the youth.

European identity has been built on several European successes of the past few decades, chiefly on political stability and a high standard of living. Most national identities, even within Europe, are older – and largely based on language, culture, or history. The two identities can easily coexist, since they operate on entirely different levels. That is not always the case, and as Brexit has shown, opposition to a common European identity can also be a political rallying cry, although whether such a political exploit is possible on the mainland remains an unanswered question at present.

Every European Member State today is fertile ground for this European identity to develop. The European Union has proven to be a good catalyst for a shared set of civic values, around which most citizens of the continent are willing to gather together.

Guest article by Valentin Dantec. This content does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of My Country? Europe. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the author. 

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Helping Others, Building Europe

Originally from Romania, I am currently in a small Swedish town enjoying the opportunities that come with working with youth. With a little under 50.000 inhabitants, Östersund is neighbouring the 5th largest lake in Sweden and is the most important cultural and economic landmark in the region of Jämtland. Thanks to the organisation I am volunteering for, Navigatorcentrum, I work daily with youth with the goal to get them more active in 4 areas: mobility, health, culture and community life. We organise activities to stimulate our participants’ motivation for personal growth, improve physical and mental health, raise awareness on crucial matters and enjoy the cultural mix we’re in.

I have a lovely German partner also my age, Eva, and together we are adventuring into the learning process of our lives. Our motivation to make a change in the small community we’re in and our values in our lives are keeping us together and are making us stronger. This experience is also shaping us more and more every day. Our goal is to share our knowledge and skills and help youth find their way to the labour market, a healthier more balanced life and eventually to their dreams. Together with our supervisors in the organisation, we are a fantastic force. Between Swedish, Romanian, German and Italian, we can enjoy a variety of interesting exchanges about our cultures and the things that we have in common.

A Swedish Fika

Culturally adjusting to a more relaxed work environment, a linear hierarchy and toned-down organizational culture with a strong focus on work relationships have opened a whole new world of productivity for us. During fika, which in Sweden is a small coffee or tea break usually accompanied by something sweet, we gather by the couches in the lunchroom and everything becomes 70% cosier. We get new ideas, find out insights from our colleague’s work, share movie recommendations or events we’ve heard of and, most importantly, our opinions.

In the beginning, the days were much shorter and with a warm cup in hand and dim lights you could take the perfect 20-minute break. We found ourselves admiring our coworkers’ relaxed attitudes, and their habit of walking around the office in socks became our own dear habit. I guess it takes at least 3 to fika, but we do our own fruit plates in the office when we want to work through it.

My country? Europe!

As well as improving the employability of youth in our Swedish community, we also periodically invite new people to hang out and learn new things about each other’s cultures. The most recent event we’ve had was an International Café. Here, we talked about the myth of Europe, the forming of the EU, and learned some interesting facts about the continent we live in. Did you know there are fragments of temperate rainforest in southern Norway and northern Spain?

We also reflected upon hardships that come with the complexity of the EU and acknowledged the opportunities we benefit from. There was a mutual unspoken agreement that even far from perfect, the EU is a good place to live in and to strive for growth. Before everybody goes home, we ask them to write down a thought, a wish or an opinion about Europe and leave it with us.

Act of Solidarity

Five months into my one-year-journey, time is measured in learning experiences, in small changes in my daily life and in big perspective shifts. I have ice skated on the lake, disagreed with my partner only to find new ways of working, started yoga and changed my eating habits. It is time for a lot of new beginnings.

I chose to volunteer here because I felt that this is a setting where I can be myself and contribute to something meaningful. Solidarity is a two-way road: you give and you receive. Along with the game of expectations and reality, I started playing with my hobbies and interests, joining them with work, developing workshops and activities for our target group.

Volunteering for me it’s the chance to explore my interests in different work environments without having the same rigour of a job. I’ve worked more as a volunteer than I did for money so far. I am becoming the best possible version of myself. Having the time and space to discover my qualities and make mistakes (which happens a lot) is very precious for development. I work around 34 hours a week, and at least 17 of those hours are spent learning something new. The other 17  are spent using improving skills I already have. It’s something a hefty salary for fresh-out-of-university-graduate can’t buy.

In the spirit of solidarity, I leave you with a song about the Swedish fika.

Guest article by Raluca Stan. You can follow her and Eva’s adventures also on Instagram. The author can be contacted at the following email address: raluca.gstan@gmail.com.

The post My European Solidarity Corps Experience: Volunteering for the Better appeared first on My Country? Europe..

During a Model European Union, you will essentially roleplay as a Member of the European Parliament or a Minister sitting in the Council. Other positions are usually available too, depending on the event in question – journalists and lobbyists are typical alternatives. During the simulation, your task will be to simulate political wrangling over two real-life legislative proposals by the European Commission, proposing amendments that reflect the interests of your Member State or wider political affiliation, and voting on the final proposal once it is ready.

Getting Started

You might think all this sounds great – but how does one find an MEU, in practice? Well, for a start, you can head over to this calendar to check dates and locations for Model European Union simulations. These take place all over the continent at various points during the year – for example, applications for MEU Netherlands (July 2021) will open in the spring. Each MEU has distinct application processes, requirements, and conditions – so once you pick a likely MEU, make sure to read everything carefully!

What to Expect from a Model European Union

So you’re going to your first Model European Union. There are a plethora of motivations that could have inspired you to apply – maybe you love debating and you were looking for an event to practice. Maybe you are interested in the EU and want to learn more. Maybe you found an ad somewhere that piqued your curiosity. Or maybe a friend made you come along.

Either way, the first day is very much the same for everyone – you come to a city that you’ve never been to, and possibly a completely new country. Of course, you’ve prepared as best as you could, you’ve read the legislative proposal, googled some sources to simulate a realistic position, and you’ve put together a position paper. But you’re still not really sure how all that will turn out, and that’s fine, because at this stage, no first-time participant is.

Filled in equal measures with excitement and anxiety, you get to the meetup place, only to find formally dressed people that shower you in information and equipment. You get a name tag, some goodies, your room number and key, and a reminder that a so-called Eurofeast is scheduled for the evening! But first, you get to know the other participants. some are really talkative – maybe even annoying? – others are a bit shy. You tell them your role during the simulation and they tell you theirs, but you don’t really have a clue how that helps you in any way.

Now, on the first day, there is the formal opening of the event, maybe some speeches from politicians and personalities endorsing the simulation, or a podium discussion, but certainly workshops to get you even better acquainted with your topic. You’re quite happy that you recognise most of the stuff that the Commissioners are talking about – but maybe you also notice that some of the things you wrote in your position paper missed the mark a bit. Luckily, you can still quietly change your position.

Now, the Eurofeast is always on the first evening of a Model European Union. Every participant brings some food or drink from their home country and then you share it all. There are the most random and exotic things but also some well-known specialities. You have been warned that you should go easy on the alcohol, especially on the first evening; you want to make an impression on the first day of debate, after all.

The Simulation Is Underway

On day two, the simulation proper gets underway. You get to your spot for the first time, and take a look around your assigned chamber – it’s either the European Parliament or the Council – where you will be working on the laws of the EU for the coming days. A few faces are already familiar to you, some may already be new friends. And then the chairs (that’s the name for the people who preside over the chamber) open the debate. At first, it’s a bit difficult to keep track of all the rules of procedure. Remembering how you can use each point or motion is your first real lesson in how EU laws are made! The chairs are patient and explain whenever there are questions about what’s going on.

As the day progresses, you start making policy. You know what you want and you soon find allies. You want to change the proposal so that it better suits your position and your interests, and you submit amendments to the proposal to that effect. Making sure to find enough supporters for your ideas, you think that you have a good chance that some of your amendments will even get a majority. After a tiring day of cajoling and negotiating, the evenings offer no rest. You explore the city with local participants and with your new friends from all over Europe, you go to the craziest social events, and generally have a good time. But in the mornings, it’s formal attires and negotiating and cajoling again.

By this time, you feel like you’re getting a hang of this. You negotiate your way through the topics, article by article, amendment by amendment, and before you know it the final votes are fast approaching. Some of your amendments did actually make it into the final text! And now that just needs to pass the Parliament and the Council. Will it, though? That is the dramatic, climactic moment of every Model European Union simulation.

Sometimes, your amendments fail. Sometimes, they succeed. Either way, elation or disappointment soon give way to a different kind of feelings as the simulation winds down. That same evening, you will attend the most melancholic and fraternisation-inducing occasion of the whole simulation – the goodbye party. You’ve made friends in many countries that you just have to meet again – maybe at another Model European Union. But until then, it’s goodbye.

It’s an evening full of hugs, stories of the past and plans for the future. And then you’re back at the airport, and you feel like somebody who just ran a marathon for the first time. You feel like you’ve really accomplished something – and we’re not necessarily referring to the tangible things like the number of amendments you helped pass. You’ve learnt about others and thereby learnt about yourself. Because after all, a law is just something that several people can agree on.

You loved it. And you’ll come back. Because now, you’re hooked.

Guest article by Mathias Quickert, Deputy Director-General for MEU Netherlands 2021. This content does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of My Country? Europe. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the author. 

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Media, Disinformation, and Fake News

On the eve of the 21st century, a conflict on European soil erupts involving an essential weapon: the media. The instantaneity of modern media played a huge role in spreading propaganda and waging war in the minds of the citizens, in addition to waging it on the ground. A large amount of the public has instant access to it, controlling narratives and thus the masses. The manipulation of the Yugoslav population started with a regional media war.

The Federation of Yugoslavia had a federalised radio diffusion system, but lacked control over regional media, allowing each belligerent to promote their propaganda against other ethnicities within the same country. It was organised to create division and conflict within the general public in order to achieve nationalistic cohesion and justify the need for the war. National rhetoric became omnipresent and any initiative taken by the central government or by local authorities became highly politicised.

Waging a war can only be achieved successfully when the population supports it or gets involved. This is exactly how the political parties used the media to spread their ideology and foster the demonisation of their enemies, emphasising on existing tensions.

Several well-known propaganda techniques were used during the period of the war, such as cognitive dissonance, disinformation, scapegoating and name-calling to create tensions, and the creation of false stereotypes to influence the mind of the public. Nenad Pejić, author of the paper Media’s Responsibility for the War in Former Yugoslavia outlines a personal experience during the war: it demonstrated that educated adults were unable to discern false information from facts. There are countless examples of the media showing corpses and telling the public that they were Serbian victims killed by the Croats before the actual identification of the corpses had even begun.

This analytical failure in the public’s thoughts was partly due to the “CNN effect” which the Balkans suffered from. Immediate information and shocking images made the headlines every day and disappeared the next, without properly displaying facts. Svetlana Slpašak explains in her paper The War Started at Maksimir: Hate Speech in the Media that “no information of any importance had reached the public without comment or interpretation. The public was continuously kept in the state of mental adolescence”. It shocks public opinion and gives no in-depth explanation due to the shortening of attention span. Moreover, the media also used emotion to foster reactions from the public and played on hatred or fear, in the same way as clickbait and fake news do.

How ethnicity was used to justify war to the public

Insofar as there were no federal media, each faction started propagating information according to which side they were on, using ethnical arguments to reach this goal. In Serbian media, the Croats, the Albanians and the Muslims were portrayed as the masterminds of a conspiracy against Serbia, placing the Serbians in the role of the oppressed. On the other hand, Western media, which was mostly anti-Serbian, chose to only publish photos of Bosnian Muslims crying, refugees, and similar scenes. Serbian victims were never portrayed sympathetically, only as an aggressor, trivialising the Bosnian Serb victims of the war.

This trivialisation from both sides led to another consequence. Every individual is no longer an “individual”, but merely one of many in an ethnic group it belonged to, without individual responsibility. As Mr Pejić quoted Slavenk Drakulić: “This is what the war is doing to us – reducing us to one dimension. Before, I thought I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character and -yes- my nationality too. Now I feel stripped of all of that”.

As a consequence of this depersonalisation, some Serbians committing atrocities will commit them in the name of all Serbians and all Serbians will partially bear that responsibility. Reaching this level of association requires important preparation of the messages propagated and reduces the individuals into basic and simple stereotypes, denuded of anything personal to create more hatred. This partly explains the scale of the cleansing. Mass media fuels participation to mass ethnic violence, involving citizens in the fight. A parallel may be drawn between the actions perpetrated in Rwanda and the use of radio to push every citizen to fight. No government is responsible, everybody is: it has become a civil war.

In the years following Tito’s death leading to the breakup of the Federation, all sides started glorifying their past, especially Serbia, which created a past filled with symbols and heroism against the Ottoman invader. The Serbian media called the Bosnian Muslims “Turks” because of their religion and called the Serbian heroes because of their fight against them, generating more violence.

Long-term effects and the current use of media in ex-Yugoslav countries

As much as this series of events belongs to the past, the effects of mass manipulation still have an impact in ex-Yugoslavia. Not only the stereotypes created during the war remain in citizens’ minds, but the media continues to publish such information in each country, showing little interest in peace-building.

Croatia now has an issue with nationalist rhetoric with the revival of a certain nostalgia of the Ustaše regime. There are several reports in the country of ethnic-related violence towards Serbians in public places. Mixed marriages, recurrent before the war, led to family disputes and domestic violence.

Serbia’s media remains the government’s propaganda medium as proven by independent organisations such as Reporters Without Borders. The State remains a strong actor in the media market by attributing funds non-transparently to those who support the government.

Bosnia’s situation remains divided along ethnic lines. The media in the Bosnian Federation supports the Bosnian State and cohabitation, while the media in the Republic Srpska supports the interests of ethnic Serbians.

This article has focused on the Croatian and the Bosnian Wars, but it is notable that anti-Kosovo rhetoric in Serbia remains high, just as there is anti-Serbia rhetoric in Kosovo. Serbia witnesses tenacious ethnic related violence against Kosovars and Albanians. Each media outlet in both Serbia and Kosovo portrays the normalisation talks as a zero-sum game, as if each step was a victory against the enemy. As in every war, propaganda messages are spread to give legitimacy to one side or the other to receive public support from the masses, and Yugoslavia was no exception.

Guest article by Valentin Dantec. This content does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of My Country? Europe. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the author. 

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The Morning After

In the run-up to the Brexit vote, I passionately campaigned for Remain in the London constituency of Lewisham & Deptford. I became firm friends with the core group with whom I had campaigned. In fact, almost four years later, we still keep in regular touch.

But it all seemed to be utterly pointless when a majority of British voters opted to leave the EU. I was in Palestine on 24^th June 2016. I went for a sunrise walk around Bethlehem before coming back to the news notification: UK votes to leave EU by 51.9% to 48.1%. It felt like a body blow, a punch to the gut. In some ways, it felt as though the Britain that I thought I knew, that I thought I had grown up in, was gone. In fact, I was left wondering if it had ever even existed.

Je Suis Européen

At this precise moment in time, it may seem extraordinary that a Briton is saying that he feels European. In fact, at the time of the Brexit vote, I did not feel at all European. To my mind, a ‘European identity’ was simply something espoused by pro-EU politicians. How could anyone possibly feel any sort of connection to an entire continent?

A large part of my change of mind has been the response to Brexit from across the EU. That body blow, that sense of deep loss that I felt on 24^th June 2016 has since been echoed across the entire union. As one person put it to me, “it’s as if my dull but sensible aunt has started drinking a bottle of vodka every night and staying out until 4 am” – blunt, but succinct. But the first time when I would feel a true sense of being European came on 23^rd June 2018, the second anniversary of the Brexit vote.

The fledgeling anti-Brexit organisation People’s Vote organised a march in order to mark the day. My friends and I went as a group. To my astonishment, 100,000 of us filed through central London to Parliament Square. Alongside me were EU citizens, Britons and non-EU citizens alike. All parts of the EU and beyond were represented in central London that day. We were a single European entity. We were not there to overturn the vote. We were not attempting to disrespect or push aside Leave voters. We were there because we wanted more democracy for our country.

Once we got to Parliament Square, MPs, high-profile grassroots activists and former Leave voters who had changed their minds addressed a crowd far larger than any of us could have realistically anticipated. None of us could then have known, but 100,000 would turn out to be the smallest attendance at a People’s Vote march.

A Deafening Chorus

On 15^th January 2019, MPs resoundingly rejected Theresa May’s dreadful Brexit deal. A large part of the scale of the rejection was due to grassroots Remainers, backed by People’s Vote, winning over undecided MPs. People’s Vote were coordinating the various factions of the Remain movement into one voice – and it was loud. I was at rallies in Parliament Square when the deal was rejected for the first two times, surrounded by my fellow Europeans as we cheered the rejection of May’s small-minded, nasty deal. I was at home with my staunchly Remain parents when Brexit was twice delayed. We celebrated with a cheer, some Belgian chocolate and some French wine. But the best was yet to come.

On 23^rd March 2019, mere days before Brexit was originally scheduled to happen, roughly 1,000,000 people descended on central London. It cannot be known for certain, but the Put It to the People march might well be the largest in British history. This was democracy at its finest. These were, like me, ordinary people – many of whom had never been politically active before – who just wanted to be heard. This was democracy and it was beautiful to see. Sadly, I could not make it to that march as I was in Kiev, but to see the images of it being beamed across the world made me incredibly proud of the movement that Remain had built – from the mere 50 who had attended the first post-referendum rally to 1,000,000 in just two-and-a-half years.

Democracy is not a moment in time. It is not a “once-and-forever” beast. It is not immutable. Democracy is fluid. It is an ongoing and ever-evolving process. 23^rd June 2016 was a moment in time. 1,000,000 people marching for their country and their collective future was the fluidity. Seeing those images broadcast whilst I was in Ukraine made me understand this. Democracy is an evolution, not an event.

Ultimately, we were not successful. In the autumn of 2019, we came agonisingly close to getting a people’s vote. But then the election came. All of that was swept aside. Brexit became a certainty. Much like Brexit itself, there is no one root cause for the election result being what it was, but there are a lot of “what ifs”.

The Fight Goes On

We did not get to put Brexit back to the people. It may seem as though we in the Remain movement have just wasted four years of our lives – but I beg to differ. The world and, more importantly, our European family now know that millions and millions of Britons are being dragged out of the EU against our will – not to mention two of the UK’s four nations. It is a great irony that a country that is leaving the EU is home to the largest grassroots pro-EU movement anywhere in Europe.

The message from this is simple but clear: politics may mean that the UK is turning its back on the EU, but many millions of Britons are not. Many millions of us are proudly European. On the morning of 1^st February 2020, I am sure that a ‘re-join’ movement will begin. It will grow, it will be beautiful and I hope that it will be successful.

I hope that ‘Re-join’ succeeds where Remain could not. I hope that those who will doubtlessly work tirelessly on it are successful in taking Britain back into the EU. But I will not be a part of it. Quite simply, I am too tired of fighting and not succeeding. ‘Re-join’ will require new life, new faces and breaths of fresh air. When it finds these, it will become unstoppable – and Britain shall be back in its rightful place in our family of nations once more.

About the Author: Luke Sandford is a Brit living in Sweden. He studies MA European Studies at Lund Univeristy. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Education from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Before you ask, he voted Remain. His English is passable; his Swedish is less-so.

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Around 1975, things started to change. Math and Science began to replace Greek-Latin as the main focus of the Lycee. Philosophical communication lost its common idiom. Intellectual discourse on subjects other than science became more fragmented. Nevertheless, a nod to philosophy was still made in the baccalaureate programs of many countries.

Many of the major themes of philosophy in the continental tradition came directly from Plato and Aristotle. These themes in metaphysics, ontology and epistemology focused on creating a clear definition of our world through knowledge. Such knowledge was guaranteed by the existence of a deity who assured the rationality of the world, our perception of it and our place in existence. This tradition was vastly dominant, to the detriment of any other until the time of Kant.

Change Comes With Kant

With the thought of Kant (1724 -1804) the reliability of our sensual perception of the universe began to be challenged.  In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant found it necessary to postulate ideas as common as space and time, as a priori. These were not given to our senses to discover or experience, but innately given to us. Kant’s historic departure meant that reason, aided by God, was no longer sufficient to know the world.  Even though an older Kant tried to bring things back to God’s purview, the genii was out of the box.

English philosophy, which had up until this point marched in lock step with continental traditions, began to diverge. The English tried to keep intact the paradigm of a rational knowable universe and began relying more and more on the scientific tradition, excluding speculative and theoretical philosophy. Philosophers in the Anglo Saxon tradition, like the Irishman George Berkeley, were the exception. In Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge he denied pre-Kant any existence beyond perception. Aside from these exceptions, English philosophy remained firm in the traditional beliefs and progressively lost all interest in philosophy, replacing it with logic and analytics, as the much celebrated Bertrand Russell.

Post-Kant philosophy saw important traditions emerge on the continent. They set our ideas of the universe topsy-turvy and turned back western thought towards the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, away from Plato and Aristotle.  These ideas developed slowly over the 19^th century but blossomed fully between the two World Wars and thereafter.

The 19^th Century itself was a rich philosophical period. Hegel and the young Hegelians spawned movements providing justification for the revolutions spanning all across the century and later leading to the development of Marxism.  Both Hegel and Marx’s philosophies were constructed on schemas of knowledge drawing from the Aristotelian. Unlike their model of inspiration, though, they replaced static ideas with those of the dialectic. It’s only several years later that reformed Hegelian Schelling, along with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, began to prepare the way for the post-Kantian revolution in thought.

The News of the 20th Century

Phenomenology was one of the first major post-Kantian breaks with the traditional paradigms of knowledge. Husserl (1859-1938) broke with mathematics, his first discipline, to attempt to re-envisage the rapport between man and nature. He emphasized the uniqueness of the observed phenomenon as the first step in attaining knowledge. In France Merleau Ponty (1908 – 1961) embraced Phenomenology in turn.

Between the two wars and during World War II the intellectual upheaval in Europe was on par with that of the wars. Heidegger’s Being and Time (Zein und Zeit) turned his attention away from metaphysics and transcendence to focus on the immediate and phenomenal.  Phenomenology inspired Heidegger and in turn took inspiration from him, placing emphasis on the observation and uniqueness of the individual phenomenon.

Heidegger replaced the traditional philosophical notion of being (Zein) with being there (DaZein), “being as we find it where it is being”.  He did not pretend that any universal truth existed, rejecting them as did the pre-Socratics. In the famous teaching of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: you can’t step into the same river twice”. The nature of all things in the universe is eternally changing. Nothing is constant, a view diametrically different to Plato and Aristotle.

The relativization of thought and existence was to be given a boost by the scientific discoveries and theories of the period.  Heisenberg revolutionary theories in quantum mechanics, circa 1927, stated the impossibility of determining  place and mass simultaneously, as they were in constant flux on the particle level.  More science followed, with string theory and parallel universes found necessary to render Newton’s theory of gravitation consistent.  But although these scientific confirmations were welcomed, they did not seem to be the point of the new/old speculative philosophy.

An Impact on Language

Language itself was to suffer from the assault on traditional ways of knowing. Wittgenstein worked with English Positivists and logicians in London and Cambridge. Despite this, he made a one hundred eighty degree turn from his early writings in Tractus Philosophicus. In his youth, he tried to establish the logical structure of language and thought. He came to believe, in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, in spite of Russell and the positivists at Cambridge, that language was a “game”. As such, it had multiple meanings and approximations dominating any clear notion of what we can even try to say.

As Wittgenstein’s very radical observations were becoming more popular,  semiology, deconstruction and other schools of French criticism began to break down traditional schemas for seeing the world.  Notable leading figures include Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, among many others. These schools of criticism sought to deconstruct many of the traditional paradigms into their constituents or phenomenological parts.

Post-War Philosophy

After the wars, in addition to the fertile schools of French criticism, ‘existentialism’ further unabated these tendencies.  Sartre set the tone in Being and Nothingness (1943). He placed experience and human agency at the center of existence and fate. In the meantime, Simone de Beauvoir furthered the advance of feminism in the journals Les Temps Modernes and through personal activism.

Older rationalist traditions spawned from Hegel, like Marxism or Structuralism, found it necessary to adapt. Within the Marxist canon philosophers like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) relativized traditional, rigidly deterministic, materialistic ideas.

Schools of sociology sought to demonstrate how ideas of domination moved through and disseminated within social and class structures. The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory sought to explain the interplay of ideology and class in its dominant but indeterminate nature. Amongst the representatives of this school, which departed from traditional Marxism, we can remember Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer, and Marcuse.

Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and Lyotard in France, already liberated from traditional Marxism, developed further theories of social interaction. These new sociologists replaced observed and predetermined events with events codetermined with human agency, in unending feedback loops.

Meanwhile, in the Anglosphere

The Anglo-Saxon world was not completely immune to all that was going on in thought.  Karl Popper, though of Vienese origins, lectured and taught in England for most of his career, having fled there before the war. Popper is best known in popular thought for his Open Society and Its Enemies and the anti-Hegelianism that he developed when he rejected his youth’s Marxism.

Regarding philosophy of science, he tried to introduce the uncertainity that had developed since Kant into Anglo-Saxon thought – if only partially. He replaced Kant’s a priori ideas, time and space, with their equivalent as working scientific hypothesis. The belief in a firmly grounded reality, if not entirely proveable, lurked under Popper’s notion of science.

It did so too in sociology, although Popper refused to accept what many felt were the implications of his thought: the impossibility of sociology as an unproveable endeavour. He preferred to embrace the limited cases where experimentation was possible. Foucault’s idea of the projection of interpretation onto social and historical reality fell short for him. Most Anglo-Saxon thinkers followed his thought, also detaching from experimental reality.

By the time Fukuyama published The End of History in the US in 1992, his Hegelian interpretation of the ‘age of democracy’ as the final stage of history, had become totally absurd.  He was the last one to find out, as earlier political philosophers like Benedetto Croce in History, Its Theory and Practice (Selected Essays) had long ago debunked any rational interpretation of history and in particular that of Hegel.  Though democracy appeared triumphant at the time, history had already proven that it was not to be kept in the ‘reason’s’  box.

Where do We Go From Here?

A purely rational or materialistic understanding of the universe now seems dead. With Nietzsche announcing the ‘death of God’ as early as the end of the 19^th century in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the icing on the cake of doubt was spread.

It is hard to believe in the spiritual in the age of science, when almost all would prefer the choice of medical treatment to prayer. But in doing away with spiritual forces, the light only shone more brightly on the deficiencies of reason. At least in European philosophy, reason has not stood the test.

The new theories and interpretations of human perception, though less reassuring to many, do open the door to enormous possibilities.  There is no Church or Science to guide us. We have become free to observe the splendid variety of phenomena that appear in front of us daily. One has also become free to impose interpretation, subject only to real world constraint and the reversals of fortune.

Philosophy has unchained imagination, available now to construct new ways of doing and experiencing things. This has already occurred with the definition and practice of human sexuality.  The interplay between the ‘real’ and the ‘as of yet unsubstantiated possibilities’ as was the case with additional sexual identities, like XXY, beyond the previously limited ‘XY’, ‘XX’, is a complex field.  Since we can not ‘know’ reliably according to the new philosophies, additional possibilities remain open. But since reality imposes ever changing constraints, we are not totally free to impose our will or vision. We are in a relationship with our universe that is mutually deterministic in a unique new way.

We find ourselves in an exciting period of exploration. On the continent of Europe, the Church, religion, science and tradition are all behind us; the human and the unexplored remain.

About the Author: Stephen Sposato speaks a number of European languages (English, French, Dutch and some German). He has read and inquired about philosophy since his adolescence.  He has managed to read and enjoy most of the philosophical classics over a lifetime, while practicing a career in economic development.

If you liked this article you may also like: The Roman Concept of “Humanitas” or The idea of Cosmopolitanism in European philosophical tradition.

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