More Europe in the world

In tackling the challenges of globalization Europe has a double chance: “a pluralist experience of the world” and “an original overcoming of nation-states”, says Jean Picq, Professor at the University “Science Po Paris”, in the November number of the review of contemporary culture of the Jesuits in France “Études” (www.revue-etudes.com). Now, he maintains, “to fulfil Europe’s promises we must change our attitude to the world and have faith in ourselves”. Rigour and solidarity. “With 30% of global production, Europe is the world’s main economic power”; the integration of European markets “is very advanced”; and the euro is “the second trading currency in the world and the second reserve currency”, points out Fr. Picq. However, “the veil that covered the economic and fiscal divergences of member states and retarded the adjustments that an economic government of the EU would have imposed has been ripped apart” and “the growth and solidarity pact, a passive instrument of homogeneity founded on strict rules of budget deficits”, has entered into crisis. The imbalance between the German economy and that of the “small countries” and the “grave crisis of the euro” have recalled “the need for rigour and solidarity”. But “if the storm has passed, the European ship, insists Picq, must now begin to steer a new course: the construction of an economic government of Europe to adjust her economy and currency, and to constitute a pole of reference to tackle world financial affairs between the three economic zones: America, Asia and Europe”. It must do so by exploiting and developing the “political assets that the single market conceals” because “there is no market on the one hand and political action on the other”.Research, energy, climate. According to Picq “what has constituted the strength of Europe for the last fifty years, and during the crisis itself, is its social model of welfare state” which has served to “buffer the worst effects of the crisis”. But today this model is itself in crisis “due to the chronic deficit of public accounts, demographic ageing and delays in bringing in the necessary reforms of social policies”. While “each nation has the responsibility to put its own house in order, an effort of European solidarity would give political sense and solidity” to Europe. In the “European project”, according to Picq, “the effort to promote education and research” would seem to be a priority, but it is also indispensable “to find points of realization in other fields: one of the most sensible at the social level is that of energy” in which Europe “is living in a condition of great vulnerability vis-à-vis Russia”. Moreover, Europe “must prepare herself to benefit from the opportunities that the global awareness [of climate change] will end up by imposing in spite of the stalemate of Copenhagen”.Accompanying changes. Lastly, it is on the political level that “Europe must raise her profile and play a more active role”, underlines the author of the article, since “her geographic position, the different diplomatic traditions of her member states, her history” and “the overcoming of national antagonisms” attribute to her a “potential role of mediator in global issues”. Yet “her silence and her impotence in the great conflicts of the planet” are all too clear. “If it is true that Europe, as a power, does not exist, she will be all the more recognizable by others if she decides to take the initiative and act on the basis of bold proposals. Her multicultural situation and need for quality immigration justify that Europe should not limit herself exclusively to a policy of control of migratory flows. The presence of strong communities of immigrants in her member nations, her different traditions of cult recognition, and her capacity for educational and social integration” confer on her a central role “for accompanying changes in the world through the recognition of other cultures. In this regard the handling of the Turkish question is a matter of capital importance”. A “new” attitude”. Europe, in short, “must show she has changed her attitude to the world, and recognises its polyphony. For too long Europe has lived in the conviction of having the privilege of being universal and has ignored the form of universality that proceeds from the mutual listening to and translation of different worlds”. Europe is not alone, affirms Picq: “the other civilizations, they too, have something universal to offer. What Europe now needs is a kind of ‘disappropriation’ of a world of which for too long we felt ourselves to be the sole proprietors”. “This experience of disappropriation” among us Europeans is something “we are experiencing according to a twofold process. The first consists in the construction of a new community: each European, in an area of the free circulation of ideas and cultures, with the common memory of the fundamental civil liberties we have acquired, is forging a new sense of belonging that doesn’t destroy that of the past”. The second, concludes Picq, is situated in the otherness that agitates Europe through the migrants who have chosen to live among us and who can, if culturally integrated, be ‘ferrymen'”, mediators, between the continent “and the worlds from which they come”.