SOCIETY

The Root of Political Europe and Europe of the Peoples
Joseph Weiler’s book was also at the center of a debate at the Auditorium of Milan, Thursday, November 20th. Along with the author and Roberto Fontolan the moderator, the speakers were Claudio Morpurgo, Vice President of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities, and Roberto Formigoni, Governor of the Region of Lombardy

Claudio Morpurgo
We all have the impression of having before us an operation that is no concern of ours, squeezed between the various logics of political conflicts, partisan tussling, and technical niceties. European unity appears in the end as a bureaucratic operation, a mere accord of interests and powers. It could be built by either referring to technocratic models already tried out or by building something genuinely innovative. How did we come to this impasse that has made a moment so central to our age a fact so foreign to our day-to-day life? It’s because we find it difficult to belong; we live in an Italian and a European society that refuses the concept of belonging, that marginalizes it, confines it to a ghetto as a harmful expression of the Ancient Régime. The most evident fact of our times is the difficulty in building a multi-cultural society that is authentically pluralistic and founded on the recognition of differences. This is why there can be no delay in defining a cultural, politically educating, and constitutional fabric that will determine the rules of encounter between the various allegiances, sanctioning basic services of public order aimed at safeguarding the right to exist. So it’s a question of building a new Europe, which recognizes, as fundamental, fixed values, fixed needs–and the main need, to quote Weiler, is the religious one, perhaps because the relationship with God unifies more than everything, determining the recognition of common values. The first field of confrontation could be religiosity, which is expressed in commitment to God’s commandments, to justice, to mercy, to affirming the sanctity of life, God’s involvement in history, in the conviction that the good without the sacred is destined to succumb.

Roberto Formigoni
Professor Weiler is dramatically right when he says that the absence of a reference to Christianity in the Preamble to this Constitution is only the tip of the iceberg constituted by the absence in Europe of an articulate expression of Christian thought. This is all the more interesting because the warning comes from a man who could certainly not be said to be a partisan expert. The question doesn’t concern only our being Christian, so much so that we are not all Christians here at this table; it is European man’s incapacity to understand what Europe is, and what it has been in the course of history. In its turn the absence of a reference to Christianity is only the tip of an iceberg that I call the radical inadequacy of this Constitution to the moment Europe is living today. A judgment is lacking, or perhaps almost all the foundations. Despite the length of the document, there is no affirmation of the role of the family, no mention of horizontal subsidiarity, freedom of association has been left out, intermediate bodies have no juridical dignity, the Churches are put on the same level as philosophical societies, there is no adequate recognition of social and cultural pluralism. Quite remarkable, too, is that it is claimed that the denial of this Christian root is in the name of the so-called secularist principle, which was born within Christian history with Christ himself and His call to, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” In fact, this principle is not found in any other culture. The awareness of one’s own identity, of what one is, is the basic condition for respecting the identity of others. Not only would the approval of this European Constitution not be a positive fact for us European citizens and for European institutions, but it would be the drowning of that hope of European unity in a bureaucratic or administrative process; it would be the negation of politics in the noblest and highest sense of the word. I advise the Italian government not to content itself with this extremely mediocre compromise, not to be blackmailed into this by those who maintain even these days that it is better to approve an imperfect constitution by the end of December rather than miss the chance. The Italian government can ask for some substantial changes; if it cannot reach an agreement then it had better hand over the job to others.