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I read a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen during the days in which the “no” to Europe emerged from the ballot boxes of France and Holland: I re-read it thinking of Terry Schiavo and of the Italian referendum on Law 40. I pondered on it while listening to the news from Darfur or from the Middle East… The fairy tale tells of two children, Kay and Gerda, victims of the Queen of the Snows, who locks up the little boy Kay in a castle, after having injured him, deprived him of his sight and robbed him of his memory. The little boy is promised freedom only if he were able to compose the word “eternity” with ice cubes, an enterprise practically impossible under those conditions. The tears of Gerda succeed however in liberating Kay from the sorcery and together the two children write the word and regain their freedom. How would things change for us if we learned once again to write the word “eternity”?! It seems, on the contrary, that contemporary man is the prisoner of a spell that freezes his eyes and his heart, making him incapable of recognising faces or escaping from his own futile games that lead nowhere. And perhaps even those the believers who ought to have chosen eternity and freedom as the measure of their own life, then prefer, in effect, to live imprisoned in themselves at the risk of no longer being credible when they propose their own ideals, models and positions in public. That’s how the battle of those who wanted to insert the mention of God and/or the Christian roots in the Constitutional Treaty was lost. That how the appeals to peace in moments when tensions and hostilities find their solution in arms fail. That’s how the invitations to solidarity, to lifestyles that reject consumerism and the aggression on natural resources, often remain empty words, without being transformed into concrete and incisive economic and political decisions at the global level… In the years to come Europe will find herself committed to formulating a new model of democracy. The French and Dutch “no” to the Treaty are the voice of a feeling of discontent and are a reminder to deepen reflection on Europe, on its significance and objectives, on its role in the world order. It would be an error to re-erect the barriers as a response to the fear (even if those who are afraid usually barricade themselves in diffidence, in aggressiveness and self-isolation). But it is also an error to indulge in the rhetoric on values, on the unity of our continent, on the advantages of community life, unless one is able to found all this in a credible way, unless one is able to demonstrate politically and economically that the tears of my friend, his interest for me, can have a thaumaturgical power on my blindness and self-isolation. Modern man has acquired many small liberties of moving, of thinking, of choosing, of purchasing what he wants, of finding small daily satisfactions of his desires, of changing his own loves and even of producing ‘designer children’ but he does not know how to experience greater sources of freedom: of accepting diversity, of responding to difficulties, of coming to terms with suffering and death, of seeking deeper and more enduring happiness perhaps because he is no longer able to measure the value of things and of his own being with the yardstick of eternity.
