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rimini meeting preview

THE EUROPE THAT EXISTS
What remains today of the identity of the European Union, in this time of economic imprisonment, threats to non-negotiable values, and the crisis of its institutions?  Why is belief in the Union still worthwhile? GIORGIO VITTADINI introduces the Rimini exhibit dedicated to these questions.

by Martino Cervo

It takes courage to talk about Europe. For millions of people, the European Community institutions, the united currency, and their decision-makers appear to be, if not the problem, then certainly far from the solution to the increasingly grave crisis of the West, which started in 1929 and seems to prolong its effects in the euro-area more than elsewhere. And yet the Rimini Meeting starts out from here, in an exhibit that will be inaugurated by Italian Prime Minister Letta and will be entitled, “Symphony from the ‘New World’–A United Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals.” This issue of Traces offers a few of the main themes from a conversation with Giorgio Vittadini, President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity, who is one of the principal curators of the exhibit.

Where do you get your courage? Isn’t there the risk of speaking of an abstract Europe, in the face of much more concrete problems?
At the Meeting, and not just starting today, we speak of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, conscious that this is the natural geographic dimension of that which founded our civilization. Similarly, the horizon of the Christian experience is not the individual nation states, but the European continent, and the world. The fundamental element of our civilization is expressed by the title of this year’s Meeting: ‘The Human Person: A State of Emergency.’ This attention to the emergence of the human person is what made decades of unification without wars possible, and won the European Union one of the few rightly chosen Nobel Prizes for Peace in recent years (that of 2012). This does not mean we should cease to ask ourselves what idea of Europe to pursue, especially in a moment like this, in which nationalism is being reborn in the form of economic hegemony.

What will visitors see?
The first part is an overview of the thought of the founders of the idea of Europe (DeGasperi, Adenauer, Schuman, and Monnet) that led to an idea of the European Union as a place of freedom, of development, and of peace; and of the “re-founders,” those protagonists of politics and culture who–especially in the 1980s–brought new strength and intelligence to the European ideals: Kohl, Andreotti, Delors, John Paul II, Havel, Walesa... Then, after the 1990s, lower-profile figures came onto the scene, with policies of more limited vision, who imposed a French–German axis that policies by Italian and other countries are unable to block. In those years, the euro was born, without a political and cultural concept worthy of it. Our intention is to show that notwithstanding delays, difficulties, and errors, Europe exists, is necessary, and is worth working for. In fact, the second part of the exhibit will offer testimonies of students, professors, entrepreneurs, social workers, researchers, exponents of the scientific community, people of different creeds and ethnicities who show this Europe that exists. The third part focuses on some economic, social, and institutional proposals that could promote the support and spread of these facts.

What do Catholics have to say in this regard, given that often communitarian institutions are perceived as “hostile agents” against the so-called non-negotiable principles?
Precisely because this dynamic exists, you have to understand the European identity deep down, its idea of the human person as “unique and unrepeatable,” which is derived from Christianity. The lowest point of the discussion on Europe in these decades, to my mind, was the negation of its Christian roots in the constitution agreement, with the derision by Chirac’s France of those who held more realistic and respectful positions. As the exhibit will show, the Church has always battled against nationalism even when it was unpopular to do so, in order to affirm a deeper dimension that safeguards the value of every human community. The safeguarding of this dimension is what enables a battle against a closing that is opposed to the European vocation: a closing that reduces the European government to a place that can be used to legislate choices that the individual parliaments and governments would refuse to adopt, that is, seeing the European government as a position from which to impose protectorates, be they economic or cultural.

In this regard, what does it mean to have a Latin American Pope? Do you agree with those who hold that the choice of the conclave expresses the recognition that the Christian West has nothing more to say?
What foolishness. Pope Francis represents a call to conceive of Europe, precisely because of its identity, not as a closed place but one that is open to embrace the world. The Pope charges everyone with a great responsibility. First of all, he revives the awareness that in the face of the anthropological crisis we are experiencing, the human person can be reaffirmed only where most challenged, precisely in Europe.

How does this anthropological approach play out with the economic cage in which we live, from the fiscal agreement that defined the 3%  deficit–GDP ratio, which seems to make the choices of national parliaments and governments irrelevant? Is it right to see this crisis as a test of strength on some themes?
A premise: the grave thing about the current situation is not in primis the economic difficulty. Europe has always been in crisis. We have had immense waves of immigration, two wars, red and black totalitarianism, and the challenges of reconstruction. In the recent words of Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who will be present at the Meeting: after having been a big country in a small world, Italy risks becoming a small country in a big world. The true problem now is doubt about the ability to emerge, to think of ourselves as irreversibly in crisis. I do not deny that a certain Europe is frightening, because it means the dominion of nihilistic positions; this is paradoxical, because the financial crisis is precisely the sign of the limit of a Hobbesian view of man, determined by his egotistical interests. Therefore, there is no doubt that it is necessary to fight, fiercely, for a Europe of peoples, of development, and of solidarity. A Europe reduced to war between Protestants and Catholics is a Europe that is finished. This is not an abstraction: one of the gravest errors of the past 20 years has been the abandonment of a Mediterranean dimension of community policy. It is a matter of reconsidering the nexus between the individual, with his ideals, the associations to which he belongs, and the institutions, engaged in horizontal and vertical subsidiarity.

Even authoritative economists have put forth the possibility of  exiting from the euro for countries like Italy. Is this doable?
Monetary union was born weak because it was devoid of real economic union, so it seems more reasonable to me to complete the process, not interrupt it. Reality demonstrates that this advancement is possible: it is in scientific research, in many sectors of the market, in the infrastructure, and in the opportunities opened in these times to which the exhibit wants to testify.