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From the idea of Europe to a Europe of ideas: A colonial reflection
Anya Topolski posted a blog on Open Democracy titled From the idea of Europe to a Europe of ideas on May 24 . In her blog, a contribution to the extensive discussions on-going about a Europe to-be in a time of crisis, she made the following statements:
How can we make Europe more about politics than profit and in so doing return solidarity and prosperity to a continent divided by austerity?
How different is the Nazi slogan “work makes free” to the austerity message the Troika sent to the people of Greece and Spain during the economic crisis? How different are the mass unmarked graves scattered around Europe from those of Srebrenica or those of the 20,000 who died risking their lives to penetrate Fortress Europe? This is where we have come from and exactly where we should never again return
Her theme is that the challenge is not on of creating a ‘new’ European identity, but of acknowledging the dysfunctional nature of ‘old’ or even present day Europe. Her provocation call is for, “us to reject the idea of Europe and embrace a Europe of ideas”.
As a settler Canadian with European roots, I live within a deeply contradictory intellectual imagination. There is no question that the white male European body of knowledge that gain ascendance in the 16th Century has undergirded the cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples in what we call Canada today. Our call in Higher Education in Canada is to de-colonise our curriculum and acknowledge the effects of epistemicide resulting from colonially imposed knowledge systems.
At the same time the project of social Europe in the past 40 years has provided support to many of us in Canada who have struggled along similar lines. Social Europe has been critical to us in Canada faced as we are with the geographic proximity of the leader of cowboy capitalism in our world…the United States of America.
As we move towards our meeting in Catania in early October, conscious of the deepening crisis of the austerity strategy being pursued, hearing calls for naval blockages off shore of Libya and other places in North Africa, aware that Europe’s role in both intellectual affairs and global politics is declining, we are challenged to reflect on the potential of the millions of HE students, the thousands of HE Institutions, the myriad university-community research partnerships. What might a ‘Europe of ideas’ mean for European intellectuals, for activists and social movements and for those of us in other parts of the world?
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Europe of Ideas
Budd’s blog makes interesting reading. To those of us unliberated from the European continent yet, hopefully, able to detach ourselves form its cultural embrace, there are lessons to be learned from it. I’m not sure about a link between neoliberalism and Nazi ideology, but this economic and political system, imported from the USA, has certainly divided the continent and provoked a questioning of the European adventure.
European togetherness though has never been popular with the people. The few referendums held so far on European legislation have usually rejected the proposals for closer union. It’s easier to say no, especially when certain political leaders play the nationalist card, and the populist press has an eye on increased circulation. In several European countries, nationalist movements are leading a return to the days of the 1930s when nation states were nation states and not subject to interference from any supra national body. And we all know what that led to.
So the question is what is actually driving ithinking in Europe. For the vast majority of people it isn’t ideas, or forward thinking or working out Europe’s place in world affairs. It’s more the (alleged) scandals of the bureaucrats, the (alleged) wastage of money, the (alleged) clogging bureaucracy and the remoteness of Brussels from their everyday lives. Their information comes from the populist media, much of which, in Britain especially, is dominated by what Budd rightly calls the cowboy capitalists. And in this age of giving power to the people this is troubling for such outward-looking notions of a Europe of Ideas, no matter how seductive it is to intellectuals.
So whither the Europe of ideas? It is an enticing concept given that there are so many original thinkers in academia and a burning desire to help change the global status quo. Regrettably I believe that neo-liberal austerity orthodoxy will also constrain the influence of universities and they will continue to be under pressure to conform to political and commercial requirements for their funding.
The upside may be that ideas are not inhibited by politics, economies or commerce. They are the result of thought processes, often but not always supported by research, and a desire to change the status quo. Many of the world’s most original thinkers – Newton, Pascal, Descartes, Einstein, Karl Marx, Wilberforce, Freud – the list is endless, were European, just as in their own milieu and time, were non-Europeans such as Confucius, Mandela, Ibn Khaldun, Said, Thoreau, Chomsky and others. The trick is to make the ideas audible over today’s media babble and that is not what we are very good at.
Which leads me to think, as I think that Budd does, that this may be a role for PASCAL. Unfortunately I will not be in Catania – a retiree’s pension doesn’t permit such luxuries - but this is a subject that should be debated.
Europe of ideas
This exchange between Budd Hall (with Anya Topolski) and Norman Longworth is fascinating and important – not only but especially to Europe(ans), not only but especially to Pascal as it plans to meet in Catania.
We need to clarify our terms of trade – the terms or words in which we think and trade ideas in this neo-mercantile era. People write about the European project and the European idea. The era is characterised hopefully as a ‘new’ European identity, the project of social Europe, now perhaps a ‘Europe of ideas’. Norman however suggests that “European togetherness though has never been popular with the people… political leaders play the nationalist card, and the populist press has an eye on increased circulation”. He fears “a return to the days of the 1930s when nation states were nation states and not subject to interference from any supra national body populist media, much of which, in Britain especially, is dominated by what Budd rightly calls the cowboy capitalists”. We are losing our historical memory – dumped as an obstacle to progress and ‘going forwardness’. – History now suffers low status in the school curriculum and its content is contested ideologically (eg. teach Britishness and British values).
As to universities, Longworth finds it an enticing concept given that many original thinkers have a burning desire to help change the global status quo; but neo-liberal austerity orthodoxy is a formidable inhibition acting as a veto in much latent discourse. Whatever we think of ‘a Europe of ideas’ we have to get this Out The Box of a political orthodoxy that privileges the economic and fiscal over all else.
In her blog critical of divisive austerity Topolski want to “make Europe more about politics than profit and in so doing return solidarity and prosperity” to divided Europe . Certainly Greece would like nothing more: but solidarity and prosperity may not go together. Pascal set out, itself ‘OTB’ in privileging the social over the economic, arguing that without social solidarity and justice economic prosperity would be short-lived. Setting out ‘ahead of the curve’, it concerns me that we currently adopt the reigning orthodoxy of promoting economic, then social and cultural development just as the light is dawning that economics is not the answer – and just as the EU is about more than trade and profit.
Longworth sees a challenge, and a possible role for Pascal, by reference to ‘the trick of’ making “the ideas audible over today’s media babble and that is not what we are very good at”. This OTB Website facility has among its themes asking: what changes the narrative, such that policy-makers and the media-bombarded public ‘alter the discourse and cause change’. What better place to start than ‘the European idea’ and the retreat to nationalism and localism, away from the messy discourse and messier power-play of politics? Norman was central to that energetic 1996 Year of Lifelong Learning and associating internationally in its global promotion. Pascal should be asking how LLL now connects with the European crisis and the apparent silencing of the intellectuals in the old now fearful ‘democratic continent’.
My sense is that there in more applied LLL innovation coming out of practice in East Asia than Europe and perhaps North America, not only from democratic regimes. Yet for all the limitations of focus groups and referenda as well as the excesses of a capitalist free press, democracy remains in Churchill’s words the least worst form of government, the importance easily forgotten until lost. Free speech and press within an ideological box and with zero historical understanding is however stunting ‘freedom’ – depriving us also of the deeper indigenous knowledge and wisdom not mediated via media old and new, mass and social which Norman and Idiscover in rural French society, as more obviously in parts of reawakening Africa.
Europe is poised between fragmentation and if not rebirth then at least a hazardous remaking. Thanks to the troika Greece provides the living workshop experiment that social scientists would die for but Ethics Committees would absolutely veto. At least let us participate and learn by both reflecting and doing. A good European future may accept being the museum of the world where the wealthy in this Asian century buy the odd chateau or island. Not only the Greeks may find solidarity out of austerity as compensation for ever-rising prosperity. Maybe as Norman blogged here recently, the French have it right after all: community before prosperity. Can this be the new European idea?
This is not to everyone’s taste. And it does not absolve French or other public intellectuals from thinking out loud, hard as it is in the teeth of hyena-pack journalism. Not just that. During the Blair years Stuart Hall confessed that he had been silenced by the new politics: all his words had been stolen, abused and corrupted into uselessness. Let’s ensure that Pascal is not frightened into conformity, elevating the economic ahead of the social in its mission is missing the point and using the safe words of conformity in weasel ways.
Conspiracy theories and the crisis of Western democracy
Do conspiracy theories of Right and Left deepen the crisis of Western democracy? This is suggested by Natalie Nougayrede’s opinion piece in The UK Guardian (19 December 2015 p.37).
She considers something that we are surely aware of but from an angle new to me and relevant to our concern about crisis in Western democracy. ‘Both [Left and Right] peddle a simple us-and-them narrative. The results are calamitous… what has become most striking is the degree to which conspiracy theories abound in the political arena’. Nougayrede cites examples from Marine Le Pen and Putin as well as Soviet bloc regimes, but also the Greek Syriza movement and Spain’s Podemos. The Left inclines to blame the system and external forces: ‘the traditional rules of the political game are questioned and the legitimacy of representative democracy put in doubt….. reasoned facts are sidelined by emotion’.
It is simple binary: the people versus the system, with charismatic leaders claiming to be, and appealing to, the will of the people. Referenda, online voting and other devices weaken representative democracy. Thus Le Pen’s rule by referendum would bypass ‘the occult links’ that tie us to ‘globalists who deceive’. Putin ‘rails against a US-led world order’. In Britain the ‘political class’ is a system locked against the people; more light-heatedly, Jose Mourinho identified a conspiracy against Chelsea that led to his downfall. The power of conspiracy theory is the way that it un-self-critically locks proponents into ‘enemies of infinite power’, ‘setting the stage for the erosion of democracy’.
Why is this relevant to the lifelong learning of individuals, organisations and communities? ‘…..in a political world of conspiracy theories, there is little room for the kind of lengthy structured dialogue, deliberation and building of compromises that representative liberal democracy – at its core – is made up of’. This is a job for education.
Building a stronger civil society foundation for long-sighted and accountable governance and sustainability requires a new generation of political educators. It requires new curricula and methods for a civic and political education that dismantles conspiracy fantasies unremittingly and without fear.
We adhere to the rhetoric and narrative of lifelong learning. We seek its enactment via learning cities and communities. But between broadly humane socially informed learning by individuals supported in local communities and economic growth-oriented skill development and work readiness, hard-edged political education slips away. A new wave of local community empowerment education needs to connect with the larger political arena. It is time to reappraise how to get better governance grounded in hard data and critical analysis. To beat the ‘conspirators’, engaged citizens must read, lead and not be led by the media. Representatives must govern in the daylight, guided and constrained by an informed citizenly holding them to daily account.