Europe ‘seen from outside’” “” “

“I’ve travelled through most of the new EU candidate countries. As the ‘great day’ gradually approached, we stopped wishing for the moon. We finally realised that the preliminary requisites imposed by Brussels do not have anything sentimental about them and that no one is willing to close his eyes to the obligation to respect certain conditions. And the anti-European reactions are becoming ever weaker or more limited”. Predrag Matvejevic’ , born in Mostar to a Croat mother and a Russian father, emigrated at the beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia. He has been professor of Slav Studies at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome since 1994. What does Europe look like seen “from outside”? “During my travels in the regions of Eastern Europe I have collected various ways in which the Union is seen from the ‘other Europe’: it would be desirable if it were less eurocentric than that of the past, more open to the others of colonialist Europe, less selfish than the Europe of the nation states, more conscious of itself and less inclined to americanization”. Now that the ten countries from the ‘the Europe’ have become new members of the European Union, is the idea itself of frontier changing? “I see a paradox in the new situation: the same people who yesterday were still living between closed frontiers, are now being asked to become the guards of these same frontiers and strictly control them. But how, for example, would a Slovene behave who is asked to stop a Croat, with whom he shared a common fate in the former Yugoslavia, from crossing the frontier twenty kilometres from Zagreb? The old forms of particularism could easily re-draw the internal frontiers of Europe, encouraged by every type of nationalism, regionalism, ‘localism’, ‘devolution’ and other similar tendencies, hostile to every idea of convergence or synthesis”. But cannot culture help to overcome divisions? “Our planet is having to come to terms, every day more insistently, with the requests being made to it by a humanist, ethical order: the request to abolish the frontiers between people, the frontiers that still divide the well-fed from the starving, the literate from the illiterate. European culture has already been familiar with various movements that have adopted this ideal: the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, ecumenism in the religious field, internationalism in politics. Yes, culture would undoubtedly have a lot to say, were it not being sidelined in the elaboration of the European project, and so seldom called to come to the rescue and only to assuage our conscience”. In the Europe of peoples and cultures, many consider Islam as an element of the ‘clash of civilization’… “What we saw in Europe in the Thirties – when a large part of culture glorified the fascist ideology, fostered it and was impregnated by it – is now happening in some Islamic countries: not Islam as such, but its fanatical application, is the cause of this. We need to recall this when we hear people talking about the ‘clash of civilizations’: it is not the achievements of civilization and culture, but the ideologies that have alienated and deformed them, that are clashing”. Brussels, Strasbourg: don’t you think Europe has too northern an imbalance? “I would simply say that Europe is forgetting or ignoring ‘the cradle of Europe’, the Mediterranean, as if a person could educate himself after having been deprived of his childhood. Fear alone of immigration from the southern shore of the Mediterranean does not suffice to determine a reasoned policy. The two islands of Malta and Cyprus, though occupying a less important space than other countries, represent anchors thrown into the Mediterranean, and this gesture could in future assume a more than symbolic value”.