European fall?

“Some of the claims” upheld in the North-African upheavals “seem to recall the European historical path, although there are also remarkable differences. In fact, the question of Church-State relations, that pertains to ‘traditional’ laicity, is conveyed in completely different forms (that leads to conclude that the intention of ‘clericalising’ Islam, as various European States seek to do, could result in pure anachronism)”. Thus underlined the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice Angelo Scola, during the meeting of the Scientific Committee of the Oasis International network on the Middle East and North Africa that closed on June 22.Tunisian solidarity, European inhospitality. “Even in the North-African revolutions” the question of “laicity”, understood as “the new criteria for regulating the public arena – and not as the separation between the State and religion – is a “present and relevant” issue. With reference to Europe, the Patriarch of Venice said that its response to the upheavals is “weak”, since “the old continent seems to be deadlocked when it comes to address the flow of a few thousand refugees arriving on its coasts”, while “tenfold more are arriving in Tunisia, which is much poorer, and where they are granted a reception that Europe is too tired to convey ”. Msgr. Maroun Elias Nimeh Lahham, Archbishop of Tunis, is on the same wavelength. He said that these are “decisive times”, and underlined “the refugee challenge” along with Europe’s “incomprehensible inhospitality”. “Tunisia”, he added, “hadn’t yet recovered from its political and social tsunami when the neighboring Libya was overcome by an armed revolt that nobody had foreseen. Between 250 thousand to 300 thousand people, from all nationalities, crossed the Libyan-Tunisian border”. “We witnessed wonderful episodes of solidarity and reception”, while “some thousand Tunisians landed in Lampedusa”. The Archbishop thus prompted reflection: “I will try and reason like a Tunisian would: 20thousand Tunisians arrived in Europe in the midst of an ongoing crisis despite its wealth. They were received as if they were a hassle, while over 200 thousand migrants arrived in Tunisia which is not as rich as Europe, and which had just experienced a serious political crisis. Nonetheless, the Tunisian population received them with open arms”. “Seen from the Southern Mediterranean shore” this is “simply incomprehensible”. “Specific” or “European” laicity? According to Dominique Avon, historian at Maine and Science Po University (Paris) this is the central theme of the ongoing debate in Lebanon, a Country that since 2005 is no longer under Syria’s military occupation, but where a young, “polyglot” minority, that has access to higher learning, shows the yearning to free itself from the present situation, both in the political and social environment” which “is opposed by the political leadership and by the religious, fundamentalist hierarchies that view it as the attempt to adopt a ‘Western model’. Avon analyzed the situation in Lebanon and underlined the “malaise of the -minority-upholding the movement for the promotion of laicity and the majority that doesn’t”. In other terms, there are those who defend “European” laicity, whereby “the temporal and spiritual spheres as well as the political and religious environments are separate, where man is placed at the centre and is free to establish a bond with God, thus ensuring true equality”, and those who conversely “warn Arab intellectuals from bringing ‘European culture’ within an ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ context without any kind of adaptation process”.North Africa and Eastern Europe. There preliminary conditions that triggered “the ongoing situation in North Africa and in the Near East, and the events occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s in the past century” are “radically different”. It is the analysis of Nikolaus Lobkowicz, director of the Zimos Institute on Central and Eastern Europe. First of all, the Muslim countries that are experiencing the revolts “may have been dictatorships but were not totalitarian regimes. Their “governors” can be compared “to South-American dictators, but it would be incorrect to compare them with Hitler, Stalin or with neo-Stalinists such as Breznev”. Secondly, “the Countries in question were not the satellites of those Countries, but rather independent political realities”. What we are witnessing today “is not the collapse of a ‘system’ but the citizens’ attempt “to eliminate or destitute their leadership”. According to Lobkowicz the real problem consists “in the fact that these Muslim countries don’t have democratic or even constitutional traditions that can be taken as a frame of reference. Most of all, contrary from what happened in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the great majority of the population has no knowledge of the preliminary conditions leading to a solid and liberal democracy”.