The mental frontiers” “

In the aftermath of the enlargement of the European Union, with the entry of ten new countries sanctioned by the recent Copenhagen Summit, we publish a comment by Jean-Dominique Durand, professor of contemporary history at the University of Lyons. Observed from outside, Europe presents a clear cultural unity : a European never feels himself more European than when he finds himself outside Europe, and travels through other continents. Yet Europe presents considerable internal diversity which demands, on the part of the observer, a great attention to its geographical realities, to its cultures, to the millstone of its history, often too heavy for present-day citizens to bear, caught as they are in the trap of the past and of memory. Jacques Maritain, on arriving in New York for the first time, felt an overpowering sensation of freedom, of emancipation from history. He wrote: ” For a European long immersed in the turmoil of the events of the past, the hatreds of the past, the habits of the past, the glories of the past and the diseases of the past that together form a kind of crushing historical legacy, the first contact with America is liberating; it causes a kind of drunken delight in a freedom born anew”. This comparison drawn by the French philosopher between the old Europe and the young America underlines how much the identity of Europe is also linked to its internal frontiers, which have been constructed in the course of time. These frontiers are very rigid. They are political and religious, but they are also economic, and the new limits fixed for the enlargement of the European Union have further emphasized them by the exclusion of Orthodox nations such as Romania in the name of another orthodoxy, that of the markets. To the continent’s political hopes and needs the Union gives technocratic responses. Bishop Vsevolod Chaplin, vice-president of the Department for External Relations of the Patriarchate of Moscow, recently noted: “The Iron Curtain has given way to a Silver Curtain” . The internal frontiers also traverse the minds of Europeans. It is possible to distinguish the barriers imposed by words, linked to the difficulty of translating concepts that take a different meaning from one point of Europe to another : words like nation, nationality, people, the lay state cover, below a common vocabulary, very different realities. The frontiers dictated by places still remain : viewed from Rome, from Moscow, from Constantinople, from Geneva, from Canterbury, people do not see the same Europe, because from one capital to another the historical memories change; they conflict with each other. There is the Jewish memory, imbued with suffering, from the expulsion from Spain to the Shoah, the memories of the schisms, of the massacres, of the persecutions, the memory of Christian martyrdom, the national memories from Kosovo Polje to Verdun, from Vittorio Veneto to Stalingrad. Even when the events in question happened a long time ago, the memories remain very much alive. For the Orthodox, the fall of Constantinople in 1204 is an ever-present reality; it’s as if it happened yesterday. One of the problems of the European identity is the lack – apart from a flag and an anthem – of any real common memory, of common places of memory. Yet the history of the last half century demonstrates that the hope in being able to overcome the difficulties and build a common home is real: men of frontiers, precisely because they were men of frontiers, who had understood very clearly that war is the mother of all evils, men of state like Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, took the political decision, in the aftermath of a terrible war, to give a new destiny to Europe. Men, who lived their faith deeply, demonstrated that the tragic is not necessarily the destiny of Europe. From this point of view, the changing relations between France and Germany since the 1950s are a measure of what can be achieved by a political will nourished by faith and by a certain idea of the human person. This fundamental evolution of the recent history of Europe confirms that it is possible to make a fresh start, on condition that memory be turned into a positive basis for constructing the future of our peoples. What we need to do is not to forget, but to historicize, the past, and hence memory. For as Paul Ricoeur remarked, “history is the willingness to understand without accusing”. It’s a way to cancel the mental frontiers that are, of all frontiers, the most dangerous for European unity.