Reinventing Europe

If Europe wants to be anything, it is first and foremost a community of memory. Post-war unification came from the realisation that civilisation proved to be ‘mortal’. French writer Paul Valéry concluded that in 1918 after the trenches of the Somme. Emmanuel Macron recently repeated those loaded words in a speech at the Sorbonne: “Even today, our Europe is in mortal danger.”

Whether this sentence will resonate with a contemporary audience I am not sure, but that sense of vulnerability was very much present after Germany’s capitulation in 1945. It was also true for the generations growing up shortly after the war. After years of barbarism, it was time for a new beginning. That story has often been told, but its eloquence diminishes if the whole story is not told – even in the light of current conflicts.

‘Never again’ will be an endless quest: a new explanation and interpretation is needed each time. The memory community ‘Europe’ is never finished; it’s always in the making. This became clear once more during the past months in which the war between Israel and Hamas has caused fierce debate. And in doing so, the past is never far away: old truths rub shoulders with new traumas.

That debate in our part of the world should be seen first and foremost as part of a living democracy. We see something else. What is striking is the often-convulsive reaction to criticism directed at the Israeli government. I also see that this criticism often enough spills over into the denial of Israel’s right to exist, but that does not diminish the disgust at the excessive violence with which Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is responding to Hamas’ acts of terror.

In the university protests around Gaza, we can see an echo of the generational conflict 50 years earlier around the Vietnam War. I saw the demonstrations on Dam Square in the late 1960s – ‘Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ echoed at the memorial – and not much later I myself was walking around with banners against the US army’s so-called Christmas bombing in 1972.

All to the incomprehension of the generation that saw in the Americans primarily the liberators to whom they owed their freedom. It was hard to digest that that same America could also end up on the wrong side of history. The helpless reaction of the authorities could not escape anyone’s notice: the slogan ‘Johnson killer’ was banned and then rehashed by demonstrators to ‘Johnson grinder’.

Decay of civilisation

The same generational conflict is repeating itself in front of our eyes. I grew up with the idea that Israel embodies first and foremost the perspective of the victims. It takes effort every time to see the other side of the story, even after many visits and conversations over the past 40 years. Yet there is no escaping it: the anger of younger generations in particular at the war in Gaza is not only understandable, but also justified.

That they are susceptible to the same reproach as the generation of fifty years ago is equally clear. What did we really know about North and South Vietnam? After the end of the war, did we understand why all those boat people wanted to flee their ‘liberated’ country? We can ask the same thing now: do the protesters calling for a ‘free Palestine’ understand the corruption, oppression and religious coercion in the Palestinian territories, which are surely also homegrown? Do they know that a banner with ‘Queers for Palestine’ in Gaza City would not be very welcome? Do they understand the murderous thrust of the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’?

Yet we can see in the polemic over the war in Gaza an invitation to tell the whole story about ‘Europe’, not half the story. Certainly, the quest for European unification rests first and foremost on ‘never again’, in other words, a reflection on the nationalism that caused two world wars. The decline of civilisation was first placed in continental history.

That the fear of war did not only concern the immediate past we can see in the memoirs of Jean Monnet, one of founding fathers of the European community. Looking back to around 1950, he writes anxiously, “What could we do to connect France and Germany before it was too late?” Monnet was propelled “by the fear that we would face war again in the foreseeable future.”

Commemorating a lack of freedom does not tolerate conformism – self-examination is required and that is always painful

In retrospect, of course, it is striking how much the “never again” focus was inward-looking, a form of Eurocentrism. In that view, the violent conflicts on the continent between 1914 and 1945 could be seen as a ‘civil war’: the violence that was commemorated mainly touched the populations of Europe. The greatest danger lay in its own history of nationalism and dictatorship.

Colonial past

Less visible was another ‘never again’, a reflection on the colonialism that brought so much disruption beyond Europe’s borders. British historian Tony Judt pointed out in A Grand Illusion? (1996) that Europe’s integration was also a response to the loss of power through decolonisation. This was certainly not an unequivocal break: the independence of Congo (1960) and Algeria (1962), for example, came only several years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome.

In Judt’s words, European unification was a way of “making a continental virtue out of imperial need.” That ‘virtue’ was mainly about preserving power; the moral meaning was given less emphasis. For a long time, this other ‘never again’ played no role in the community of memory that Europe wants to be. Yet this side of the story is also essential. In this way, the gaze is not only turned inwards, but also outwards to a world in which the former colonies have ever more weight.

‘Never again’ also echoes the violent past beyond Europe’s borders

Anyone who wants to reflect on the ways in which barbarism was able to nestle in civilisation should not only talk about the victims on their own continent but also include colonial history. Think of Mussolini’s genocidal wars in Libya, for example, where poison gas was used to subdue the population. Concentration camps were also already being used there.

There are plenty of reasons to conceive of the remembrance community more broadly than has been customary in recent decades. ‘Never again’ also echoes the violent past beyond Europe’s borders. Post-war migration – mostly with a post-colonial motive – makes that past more tangible than ever: ‘We are here, because you were there’, as Pakistani students wrote on a banner.

More stories are needed. It is striking how much the initiators of the Dutch monument on past slavery mirrored the World War commemoration. It explicitly had to be a national monument. As with the Dutch 4 May commemoration, a meaningful community was addressed. Through this appropriation of the collective past, the community of remembrance expands. Commemorating a loss of freedom does not tolerate conformism – self-examination is required and that is always painful.

British-Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, in his reflection The Shoah after Gaza notes: “For most people outside the Western world, who carry with them the experience of European civilisation as brutal colonisation, the Shoah was not an atrocity without precedent.” It is not a coincidence that South Africa has filed a lawsuit against Israel in The Hague.

This sense of alienation is reinforced by the use of the Holocaust to justify acts by the Israeli government. Such a mixing of power and morality detracts from memory. It began in the 1970s when Menachem Begin’s government invoked the atrocities of the past to shield its own atrocities from criticism.

Perpetrators and victims

Around this year’s commemorations in the Netherlands, it became visible how much contemporary images of war divide people: for many Israel is a community of destiny of the generations that survived the genocide, while for others – certainly outside the Western world – Israel has become a community of perpetrators and colonisers. Thus perpetrator and victim are hopelessly mixed up in imagery and everyone talks past each other – moral deafness has taken hold of too many people.

Sustainable peace requires empathy that is increasingly difficult to muster

Why can’t we recognise that there is truth in both points of view? Why could we not say: Israel is the life insurance policy of the Jewish communities? And, at the same time, we should be able to see that the violent colonisation of the West Bank – around seven hundred thousand settlers have established themselves there – disrupts any peace equation.

Lasting peace requires empathy that is increasingly difficult to muster. On the eve of the Second Intifada in 1999, I was visiting Ramallah. There I spoke to the president of the Palestinian Writers’ Union who was sure: “It will never come to anything if Palestinians refuse to understand the Holocaust from which Israel emerged. But Jews must understand what they did to us: we will never forget the expulsion from our land.”

This need not be an insurmountable contradiction. On the contrary: the victim can also be a perpetrator; the perpetrator can also be a victim. History shows that time and again. If Europe wants to be a community of remembrance, “never again” must refer to both world wars and the colonial past. This is not moral relativism – in both cases good and evil are recognisable.

Such a conversation is more likely now, although there were plenty of voices calling for the recognition of the day when Indonesia declared independence, 17 August 1945, in the 50th anniversary year, in 1995. Yet the then government did not want the queen to be present in Jakarta on that day. She went a few days later. Then, too, we saw an inability to deal with the past.

I noticed this myself when in the same year I was asked to write an essay for a book by the Dutch National Committee 4 and 5 May. The core of my contribution was that we must learn to see the period from 1933 to 1949 – from the rise of Hitler to the transfer of sovereignty in Indonesia – as a whole. The contradictions that characterise the periods of neutrality (1933-1940), occupation (1940-1945) and colonial war (1945- 1949) cannot be understood in isolation.

Remembrace community

It was clear to me that judging in retrospect requires an understanding of the circumstances at the time. Above all, I wanted to show that Dutch citizens had not only been victims, but also spectators and perpetrators. In doing so, the book ‘Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders’ by historian Paul Hilberg played through my mind. Especially the reflection on the war that took place after the Second World War was badly received within the National Committee 4 and 5 May: the text was not included in the book.

Seen this way, ‘Europe’ is not only the outcome of two world wars but also the outcome of a long period of decolonisation. These references to the past should be allowed to coexist alongside each other. This broadens the community of remembrance and focuses the gaze on the wider world. Contemporary wars teach that power shifts and morality are not necessarily on our side. Indeed: ‘Even today, our Europe is not immortal.’

Biography:

Paul Scheffer (1954) is a publicist and emeritus professor of European studies. He was previously a correspondent in, among other cities, Paris and Warsaw.

He has written for NRC Handelsblad since 1990. From 2003 to 2011, he was a Distinguished Professor of Metropolitan Issues at the University of Amsterdam. From 2011 to 2021, he was a Professor of European Studies at Tilburg University and the University of Amsterdam. In 2007, he published the widely read Immigrant Nations (2007), a comparative study of migration in America and Europe. This book was translated into numerous languages and inspired the film and three-part TV series ‘Land of Arrival’, which Paul Scheffer made with director René Roelofs.

A recent book on Europe is Freedom of the Border (2021). For VPRO television, he made, among other programmes, the series Waiting for the barbarians: borders of Europe. And he was the editor of programmes such as Buitenhof. Over the next two years, Paul Scheffer will be the ‘writer-in-residence’ for Comenius, when he will be working on a book on Europe as a community of values. He was recently appointed a member of the State Commission for Demographic Developments 2050.

In our leadership program OnValues & Ethics, Comenius collaborates closely with Paul Scheffer, Emeritus Professor of European Studies (Tilburg University) and Comenius’Writer in Residence.

In this capacity, Paul is currently writing a book about Europe as a community of values; his thoughts on this topic are appearing as essays in NRC.