An idea of Europe as Elite´s Ideal for Portugal.
Alexandre Honrado, Intituto Europeu de Ciências da Cultura-PMA
“Tenho o dever de me fechar em casa no meu espírito e trabalhar quanto possa e em tudo quanto possa, para o progresso da civilização e o alargamento da consciência da humanidade”
[1]Fernando Pessoa
The giant tower of introspection - and the cultural whirlwind that surrounded him - that Fernando Pessoa erected and signed in the first half of the 2oth century, is one of my points of departure to overfly the territory of my European residence, of which I am a very small tenant, questioning myself if I have, or not, the duty of closing myself in my mind in this hour of crisis, to roam the space with solutions, from the foundations to the roof-tiles - to find in it a sense of civilizational progress and the ways that can provide an awareness enlargement for a hurt and disoriented humanity.
I can even start by questioning if I do have a home in my mind, that is, recede - and complicate - undermining the title - An Idea of Europe as Elite´s Ideal -, that simply would be: an Idea of Europe.
In fact, if we have a house, we built it from scratch, we settled that the neighbour´s garden started in the Urals, but a more orthodox geographer would tell us that we are a peninsula, a large excrescence. Nevertheless, we certainly are and we don´t need a historian to feel and know that centuries of History smother what any map may say.
Let´s fold the map.
To Fernando Pessoa, Portugal is the face of Europe, the one that “stares” - but the new question is what do we stare at, now that we are a sore body and much less the indifferent face that stares?
I hold on to culture, which is the inherited mirror of a collective memory of residues and the flexible mesh that brings us together and supports us at each imbalance, at every nausea caused by the downfalls of History, in what it has of more cruel, intoxicating, incompetent and unfair. I search, in the new paths of cultural History, An idea of Europe as Elite´s Ideal for Portugal, knowing that, in the last decenniums, that very idea was a magnet of hope, after escaping from the New State, that affirmed itself through a clearly anti-European ideary, consubstantiated by Salazar´s statement “proudly alone”, to become an error of interpretations that must be corrected through initiatives as this International Congress that is taking place due to the celebration of Europe´s Day. I still must say that Elite is an always-alarming term and that elites are always defined by their power and their intrinsic influence, as well as by their own image reflected in the social mirror.
Meanwhile, opposite to some mild interpretations, we, the Portuguese, did not accept Europe as a simplified destiny, when we joined the European Economic Community. That means, we did not become European by innocence or inevitability, through signature or request, but because we always were European. We have been European since the foundation of our nationality, and with a dominant place in the world, since the Expansion and our bold entrepreneurship.
After much protagonism – a people with little over one and a half million persons dominated the world in the 16th century– we faced much decadence. In some stages, our Elite searched in Europe a solution for Portugal.
For instance, the country of Garrett and Herculano is the one that requests a new European Portugal. The same happened with Eça´s Portugal and the one of Antero and Oliveira Martins, of Torga and António Nobre, of Teixeira de Pascoais, of José Régio and Jorge de Sena and many others. The will to free Portugal from its archaism had its inspiration in the great Europe, the immense space that, by contrast, showed our imperfections and smallness.
A humiliating page of our History left us, for half a century, with our backs turned to Europe and the world, during the New State, in which we were an adjourned people – and caused in some of us the enormous will of being full citizens of the Old Continent and not its poor relatives. On the other hand, the same period deepened the scar of many others, grouped under the shadow of a country that was always in a crisis and that took possession of our mentality and viewpoint - reflecting a false image of ourselves that can even be oppressive.
We must manage a heavy and fascinating heritage: from the Roman civilization and the original values of the idea of Europe that sprouted, we, Portuguese, possess the variety and shades of a concept of Europe built over deep roots.
This is symbolized by many examples, as the legacy of the Latin poetry - not many European countries have so many poets - the perdurability of comportamental and pedagogical models; the use of civilizational criteria, the vision of the socially unprotected as individuals and human beings; religious tolerance; the perception of the other and of the exotic; the integration of the other… All this is an approach to the Roman world while paradigm of the European Union…
Accepting this line of thought drove us further away from the previous Greek matrix and values, in which Europe was a group of closed micro-universes and not a common civilizational extension. Curiously, that led us even further away from other European peoples. Let´s observe what George Steiner states in (his) The Idea of Europe: the singularity of European culture can be found in the synthesis of two cultures, the Athenian and the one from Jerusalem "Very often, European humanism, from Erasmus to Hegel, searches for different ways of compromise between the Attic and Hebraic ideals." Moreover, he concludes: “The 'idea of Europe' is (...) the 'tale of two cities'." The Portuguese did not ideologically associate with those two cities. Their vision of Europe leans more towards Rome than to Jerusalem and it will not be the Athenian one, preferring the one of Ceuta or Casablanca or of the whole Africa!
Christendom, for some understood as the pre-History of Europe, added new effects to the Roman and Greek Europe – and even so, our legacy was original. The denomination “modern History” was consecrated by the French historian, Cristóvão Keller that chronologically placed it after the “middle ages”, defining it as a period between Antiquity and the author´s own epoch. The “modern” spirit is responsible for the logic of Eurocentrism, which places Europe, from Renascence to Enlightenment, as precursor of modernity, for human and scientific progress and, afterwards, as the cradle of the contemporary world in which we live. The English historian, Trevor-Roper, in whom we can observe the modern and Eurocentric mind, makes this characterization of modern Europe: “if we consider the three hundred years of European history from 1500 to 1800, we can generally consider them as a period of progress.” With the end of the Hundred Years´ War (1340-1453), begins the centralization tendency that marks the beginning of Modern Age. It can be said that it starts with the Habsburg movement to dominate Europe, namely, Charles V (1500-1558)
Europe and the idea of progress appear moulded, responsible for the geographical and temporal space, where the so-called contemporary civilization begins. From Hellenism to Christendom, from Humanism to Enlightenment, from the supremacy of “internal authority” as opposite to “external authority”, from the culture of rights to the Treaties of Rome, Nice and Lisbon, which arose new questions about the “European mind”, our History is not included here, wavering among sounds of hope and deep dark diagnosis of self-pity. Moreover, the Treaty of Lisbon, of so recent memory, « represents a decisive step forward - to take Europe out of the deadlock in which it was since the rejection of the French and Dutch referendums to the Constitutional Treaty. If this decisive step had not been taken in Lisbon, Europe would enter in a very serious institutional crisis, whose predicted outcome could be the worse. Disaggregation could be included ».
In the 20th century, Europe is the territory of wars - and of relaunching. And Portugal is spared to the colossal effort of this barbarism that swept the continent from 1914 to 1918 and that happened again from 1939 to 1945, that butchered Bosnia that smothered the USSR…
If centuries before Verney, Ribeiro Sanches, Pereira de Figueiredo and Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, has brought from the heart of Europe reflexions of gold and desirable glitters of culture, the news from the battle front brought, now, in the 20th century disappointment and the wish for distance.
«For the here designated matrix of Portuguese Enlightenment, canonized with the official and state seal, contribute as role-models thinkers as Luís António Verney, António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, António Pereira de Figueiredo and Frei Manuel do Cenáculo. The first two at the same level as Pombal in the inside knowledge of a more developed Europe, that is, travelling, living and working at the heart of that Europe that throbbed with a new reason, art and science, where countries like France, Holland, Italy, England and Austria
[2]».
For the common Portuguese, Europe becomes less and less an utopic goal – and even more an inexplicable and distant space of surprising successes that go from destruction and massacre to glory, reconstruction and progress. Europe-myth – which we all are without knowing it.
Most of all, communal Europe is the Europe of the Rights of Man.
The Rights of Man, democracy and the Constitutional State are fundamental values of the European Union. Consecrated in its founding Treaty, they were strengthened by the adoption of a Charter of Fundamental Rights. The respect for the rights of Man is an indispensable condition for the countries that which to join the European Union and for the countries that with it established trade agreements or of another kind. And it better be; it was unthinkable not to be like that! In our collective memory - we must also say it - here is also the weight of the first colonialisms, of the subjugation of other peoples, the suppression of other civilizations, bringing down other temples. It was from this continent that the slave ships set sail. This also unites us to almost every European - bad quality cement made with salty (of tears) sand, nevertheless cement. Since we want to be a family, we must accept, like in every family that we are together in feasts and burials.
There will not be a better catharsis for that pain still in the memory of the European than being a bastion for the defence of the Rights of Man.
And that is the proudest message that we can display in our common house. Manuel Antunes is considered one of the most distinguished Portuguese thinkers of the 20th century, having unique intellectual and civic paths. He directed Brotéria magazine from 1965 to 1982 and in it, he signed, with his name and dozens of pseudonyms, remarkable texts with an interdisciplinary dynamics and a plural ideological openness. He reflected, as few did, about the tension of the opposites: mundialism versus ethnocentrism and about the idea of European Nation, the one that could rethink Europe in an optimistic way. The happiness with which he faces the common and liberating space is highlighted, of a Continent, which is able to become a space with open borders or where borders between peoples and cultures could be built, but not as places of conflict but of encounters and exchanges.
His text Europa: da comunidade económica à comunidade política presents the objective of the edification of a European Nation. A goal he has pursued to this day
[3]...
In a time of European Elections and in the uneasiness of national governments in times of crisis, the work towards the citizens´ political conscience must be stressed regarding the priority given to communal representation in the European space. Popular influence should be the effective lobby, overriding the inhabitants of the political habit, that is, the eternal “owners” of the political and party spectrum. In each of us, elements like freedom, equality and scientific progress should be daily partners. We are dealing here with a long process of mutation and cultural. However, each one of us must interpret and acquire the instruments to achieve them. No one may change us - that´s for us to decide.
Nowadays, believing we have a good critical sense, we just proffer value judgements in a shameful resignation in public opinion that should be open and preponderant. In a world of globalization, the political class seems to surrender to a provincial dimension - which is to say, makes a province of its own influence circle - and the almost inexistent ideology of our time may mean that we will witness the victory of the immeasurable grandeur of Man as effective master of his destiny. However, for the critics, globalization is the cause of the present worldwide financial collapse, of greater differences, of unjust trade and general insecurity. For its advocates, it is the solution for all problems. We do not know who is right.
Yet, we must make the following question: as we go forward in the 21st century, are we living mundialization times or are we redefining a great new frontier, the one of the Old Continent, trying to survive in the new map of unexpected mutations? Or will we end up following the authoritarian Bismarck when he stated that Who talks in terms of Europe is wrong?
Making an appeal to recollection and re-reading Robert Schuman´s speech, The Political and Social Causes of Anguish, dated September 7, 1953, given in the Geneva International Meetings, as well as the replies he gave to the questions made to him in a public debate held in the following day, we will find some answers. The Europe he wants is an open and ample Europe, but with a common denominator. Without that common denominator, we would have a mere juxtaposition of countries that have nothing in common. It is the cultural community, the economical community, the effort community and the community of the common exploitation of resources.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln: « To know what to do and how to do it, we must know first where we come from and where we are going ». In few occasions of our collective life did we really need to know what to do and how to do it.
So here, we are talking about memories, even wishing the great and sated space of the future… Because memory is intense and today it is needed to understand who we are…
Using Guilherme de Oliveira Martins´s words, one of the producers of new compromises and concepts, «Only memory can preserve us of a future in which humanity is forgotten ».
According to Paul Ricouer, everything lies on «memory work». I would say, a work that begins with the assumption of the historic legacy for the necessary perception of transformation.
We can´t forget that we can´t forget. We cannot lose the memory of ourselves! We cannot forget that we are what we do – in the complex and metabiological whole we create.
Culture - is cultivating and caring. We have been cultivating little; caring even less. Deep down, the traditional recipes are unsatisfactory. They no longer give a good enough answer to today’s challenges.
That is it, culture, my Penelope’s web. In addition, my fidelity, besieged, and sought after by so many pretenders, braces itself for the fight, which I keep inside. Today’s tasks – and the future opportunities – require leadership and vision, competences, respect for other cultures and a dedication to progress. Through training, education and changes of culture, mentors, investigation - and the promise must include the minorities and their rights and the emerging multiculturalism, which is itself reviving Europe – we will find a solution. It is culture which produces reform of nations – not laws. The ordinary folk sidestep the “frenzy of legislation”, unaware of the contents of the statute book but, conversely, culture can lead to an understanding of the heart of the law: it changes mentalities, transforms daily tasks, fashions institutions, promotes values, generates instruction, builds foundations, sets thing in motion. The cultural movement is the sustenance of our Europe. The Europe of free circulation of goods, products, people, intellects, The Europe of Democracy – constructed from within, with a civic intention of progression and not the looking backwards of conformists and indifference.
It is understandable then the difficulty that arises from the concepts: each nation is the culture, which binds it. One and the other are inseparable. Or, as Eduardo Lourenço says, “Each nation only exists to think of itself and live its destiny, i.e. symbolically, as if it had always existed and had a promise of eternal existence. It is this conviction that accords each nation, each culture, -indeed the two are indistinguishable, - what we call ‘identity’
[4]” And this interiorisation of identity is perhaps one of the most important challenges. In a world which is increasingly mixed, as more and more we carry with us our roots which we sink far from our geographic, social and religious space, it is important, indeed vital, it will be one of Europe's great objectives to continue to be a Europe of this variety. We changed from being a continent of massive exodus to a land of refuge. The winds changed direction and the exile is now a film viewed from the other side. We, - so used to going visiting, are now the hosts. Today's European will experience this new situation using the global view that we are obliged to have and use it to calm nationalistic emotion and the xenophobia, which is so bad for us, - we who have those celebrated ancient monuments.
Eduardo Lourenço pointed to the excess of mythological and past imagery, which Portugal carries with it. This excess of the past, if it is indeed an advantage in terms of identity, is in some respects also a mythical fiction which restricts the view of its history and stops it from resolutely looking at the present and predicting the future, so it remains trapped in an agonising wait for someone to come along from another time and rise up to solve our crisis - the problems of a Portugal always-in-crisis
[5].
“Eduardo Lourenço surprises us by talking of a disillusioned Europe. Europe was, to some extent, a victim of its own success. With the ending of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed and many expectations and new perplexities existed, which influenced its law. The frailty of Europe was evident, whether arising from the internal difficulty of overcoming old contradictions, or from a persistent external campaign of not allowing the old continent to become what it wanted to be”.
[6]We Europeans are a feature on the map. Only the continent of Australia has a surface area less than our own, which is about ten million square kilometres. In relation to the others, we are a lowly populated continent – and plainly getting older. We can cross our continent on foot – something that not many can boast. And we have a duty to know how to keep an area like that in good order, a place that seems fit for supremacy and for resolution of conflicts, being an area of closeness.
The historian Jaque Pirenne used to say that a citizen who travelled from Eburacum (York) to Cadiz would feel like he was in his own country. Today does this become possible in a journey from Lisbon to Warsaw? The Gospel of Augustus was substituted by the Gospel of Christ in 380 A.D. and by the Thessolonican Edict of Emperor Theodosius I – and this unified the territory. Today border authorities allow the free circulation of goods, people and services. But would that citizen really feel at home? It is not, I think, that which unites us. You cannot hide it: our diversity is brutal – after just a few kilometres, we no longer feel at home. We have been many centuries creating this patchwork from scraps, different in colour, texture, in the material. It is the coexistence of this difference that unites us and not its standardisation. In this respect, perhaps other continents would have this uniqueness, but the intricacies of our history caused us to have to find higher, more conceptual common denominators.
Following the words of Jean Monnet himself, it is worth highlighting that the project of 9th May 1950 was not a mere technical choice, but rather a process of inventing new political models… The first lines of the declaration written by Jean Monnet, discussed and read to the Press by Robert Schumann, French Trade Minister, immediately give an idea of the ambition of the proposal: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without a creativity equal to the dangers that threaten it”.
It now concerns a new peace, in this troubled start to the 21st century, which, so as not to be a century of bankruptcy, of disgrace, of speculation, of corruption, of genocide, of indiscriminate wars, like many others, requires the urgency of new ideas. It concerns a new peace – which renounces economic, social, political, mental, religious, institutional, and…cultural fundamentalisms and which puts Man back at the centre of the action, contradicting this time which we live in, where poverty is the poverty of traditional human values, poverty that drives man from himself – it is in that peace, yes there, where the 21st century could be a pioneer.
In 1985, at the International Meetings in Geneva on a «Europe for Today», Edgar Morin was saying that «the drama of Europe and what makes its future so problematic is the fact that historically Europe has no past».
So I will revisit in the past what could constitute a lever of the future; from Fernando Pessoa and other inspirations: Camões, Vieira, António Sérgio, Manuel Antunes, Fernando Gil, Ortega y Gasset, Oliveira Martins, Eduardo Lourenço – even Adorno, Habermas, Kraus, Marcuse..., and George Steiner and those that at the time of the Jewish exile, moved to all corners of Europe. And which Europe? The real continent or the imaginary one with multiple identities? The one of Socrates and philosophy? The Greek Europe or the Roman Europe? The Slavic? The Iberian? The positive Europe or the one of Critical Theory? The Economist's or the Thinker's? That of Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Marcuse, or of the nameless masses? The Europe of the motherland, Charles de Gaulle’s «Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals»? The one, which had Auschwitz, Bosnia and sorrow? The Islamic Europe, or Jewish, Christian, Agnostic, Atheist, multi-cultural, or the disoriented Europe, the Europe of lost ways, of unemployment, of corruption and intolerance? How to prove “An idea of Europe as an elite ideal for Portugal", just as in the past I thought I would find it in some of my beloved thinkers?
The god Europe, daughter of Agenor, King of Phoenicia, is old but single - and wants a new sense of being, indeed life expectancy is greater these days and she has worked too long, she needs the simple privilege of dignity. Indeed Europe is more than just an old “lady”, she is a cultured lady, and culture “more than wisdom and eloquence, signifies courtesy and respect”.
The quality of history identifies paradigms and examples – and historiography concerns the creation of a collective memory, which translates into a complex diversity, confined to transience, to feasibility and to its own ability to remember. From the archives, I take the words of Churchill, spoken at the heart of the new structure, which brought us to where we are. We must declare the aim and design of a united Europe, whose moral conceptions will win the respect and gratitude of mankind and whose physical strength will be such that none will dare molest her tranquil sway (…) I hope to see a Europe where men and women of every country will think of being European as belonging to their native land and wherever they go throughout this wide domain they can truly feel: “Here, I am at home". Without wanting to correct Churchill, I would first say that I expect to see a Europe where men and women will think of being European as being human beings and that they should ecologically internalise the planet as a – the only – common home.
Will this idea of a European home, produced by Churchill, be very far removed from Pessoa's home of the spirit? Do they not both seek the same progress for civilisation and the widening of humanity’s conscience?
Time to bring in António Sérgio:
“I don’t know if nostalgia will free us from this logic of history: I hope not. It is clear that between us we do not have a traditional work ethic, an education, or as they say, we live and breathe an atmosphere of parasitic inertia; it is this element which we get from abroad: the methods, the techniques, the education for economic performance”.
Perhaps today this Aristotelian concept – Economy – that comes from the ideas of khrema and acts – the ceaseless pursuit of output and the monopolisation of wealth for pleasure is becoming an overwhelming reality! Economic practise consists of putting the desire to maximise financial profitability (accumulation of cash) ahead of everything else, if necessary to the detriment of human beings and the environment. The nature of economic practise leads to many harmful strategies, like financial speculation, socio-environmental degradation etc, without concern for the consequences.
The European Idea must highlight, precisely that it is concerned with the consequences – and that it is identifying the causes. It must be stabilised from the secure platform of the Justice system, in order to leave the adversities and head for a new happiness, which awaits in the common home of nations, in the land of converging race. A future, as if we were all together on the same promenade on a sunny afternoon.
Or…
“Europe is made of cafes, - of coffee shops. These stretch from Pessoa’s coffee shop in Lisbon, to the cafes of Odessa, frequented by Isaac Babel’s gangsters. They range from the cafes of Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard stopped on his concentrated walks, to the counters of Palermo (…). Draw a map of the coffee shops and you will have one of the essential indicators of the ‘Idea of Europe’". This is what George Steiner wrote in The Idea of Europe, a book that takes the text - and title - of a lecture, which the writer gave at Amsterdam's Nexus Institute. The words bring back the memory of student afternoons on promenades of life. But with the crisis, the European Idea became a dark shadow, lingering over empty promenades, without food, drink, thought...
As Rob Riemen, president of the Nexux Institute said, everything centres "on the issue of knowing if Europe continues to be a good idea or not and what really is the importance and political relevance of the European ideal of civilisation". Fernando Gil would argue: «The most important and interesting controversies are generally those which are difficult to resolve and above all, those in which – even before differences about the best solution – the subjects are not the same for all concerned»
[7].
The former Portuguese president Mário Soares, in an interview to the newspaper El País, in March 2009, said that without a European integration conducted in a serious fashion (…) the European Union would tend towards disintegration. So Mário Soares stressed that re-establishing the confidence of the population «is essential» for recovery from the crisis and warned that this will not be possible «if those in high places responsible for the errors and for the frauds continue unpunished and if the politicians don’t change their ideas and behaviours».
Reason is forced upon me. There is only explanation in History: the moment in the past. Inasmuch as the present moment is so brief that it precludes criticism - and the future is an investment, which we can never completely guarantee. Only António Vieira – among many cited here – spoke of miracle and prophecy. He did it however, accepting a legitimate desire, capable of contradicting fatalism and decadence. I believe that it is in the past and the present that we will find the solutions to the new challenges. “From the historical Makeup of “The Idea of Europe” to the constructivist voluntarism of the
“European Idea”, the road has been full of obstacles…
The historians have an extremely important civic task, which is to fight for the memory of memories.
In a word, this is the observation. “I don’t know what tomorrow will bring” – but it is today that life calls upon us. I am going home, staying at home. It is the secret of being European.
[1] Translation: “I have the duty of closing myself at home in my mind and work as much as I can and in everything I can for the progress of civilization and awareness broadening of humanity”
[2] FRANCO, José Eduardo e RITA, Annabela, O mito do Marquês de Pombal: A mitificação do Primeiro-Ministro de D. José I pela Maçonaria, Lisbon, Prefácio Editora, 2004.
[3] ABREU, Luís Machado de, e FRANCO, José Eduardo, Padre Manuel Antunes, S.J. 1918-1985,Um mestre do pensamento português e europeu, Porto, Estratégias Criativas, , 2008
[4] LOURENÇO, Eduardo, Portugal como Destino, seguido de Mitologia da Saudade, Lisbon, Gradiva, 1999
[5] FRANCO, José Eduardo, O mito e o espelho:A ideia de Europa em Eduardo Lourenço, pdf version available in the Internet at
ww.eduardolourenco.com/6_oradores/oradores_PDF/Jose_Eduardo_Franco.pdf
[6] MARTINS, Guilherme d’Oliveira, Portugal: Identidade e Diferença, Lisbon, Gradiva, 2007.
[7] in Mimesis e Negação
