In June 2020, the publishing house Arcadia published a collection of texts by the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller (1929-2019) entitled The world, our world, translated by Joan Vergés and M. Vicenta Lucas. In relation to our immediate present, today, there is a chapter that seems especially relevant to me. It is called "The European metanarratives about freedom." Every culture rests on a set of foundational narratives that, over time, end up having an almost axiomatic value. They usually refer to the way in which we order our hierarchies of values. Because this would lead us to a ex cursus I will reduce it to an example. Most groups and specific people tend to value things like freedom and security positively, but not everyone interprets that freedom comes first and then security, or the other way around. This is just an example. Heller has in mind the two pillars of the Western tradition, the Judeo-Christian heritage and the Greco-Latin, and identifies some of these metanarratives in relation to freedom. The most remote, and also the most decisive when it comes to shaping a mentality, is the story of the Genesis Biblical: God makes us free because, otherwise, morality would be inconceivable. As for the Greco-Latin tradition, we are influenced by the events of Greek democracy or the Roman Republic, among others. All this has made us what we are. And now we must immediately add: for good and for...
In any case, the most vivid metanarrative, the one that most influences European politics, is still apparently related to the Second World War, and especially to its causes. The real objective of the first attempts at a united Europe was none other than to neutralise a new confrontation between France and Germany, strengthening economic relations between the two countries and their respective spheres of influence. The idea was to make the interests of both powers common, because this would remove the possibility of a new conflict, and so it was. A complete success. The second part consisted of integrating the rest of the countries of Western Europe into a common structure to create a differentiated space in the polarised world of the Cold War. This also worked. The third part consolidated the situation: it was the Europe of the euro, born in January 2002. Everything indicates that raising a war between France and Germany does not make much sense today, and that the euro has created a new economic area of more than considerable dimensions. Some of the programmed objectives have therefore been achieved in a more than satisfactory manner. Others, however, do not: the departure of the United Kingdom, or the increasingly marked dissonances generated by countries such as Hungary or Poland, could derail the Union project in the medium term. Issues as diverse as the relationship with the United States or Russia, the management of large migratory flows, demographics, defence policy or the absence of a real energy alternative, too.
Is that all? No: unfortunately there are other, deeper, subterranean changes that can generate significant turbulence in the long term. One of them has to do precisely with the metanarrative of the Second World War. For my generation (I am 60 years old) or that of my parents (they are approaching their nineties) there are several episodes that cannot be blithely relativized, much less ignored. Nazi Auschwitz or the Soviet Gulag are something more than a great historical error: they represent a moral limit, an aberration that cannot be accepted under any circumstances. It may be right-wing, left-wing, centrist or whatever, but the evil adventures to which we have just referred must not be able to be repeated, period. This is a metanarrative in its purest form, because it acts as an axiom that is both political and moral. It is evident that the Germans who have contributed to duplicating the results of the extreme right no longer share it. It also seems obvious that for the younger generations, the Second World War is now as distant and alien as medieval battles. It is no longer a reference point for anything. The idea of freedom is also beginning to seem like an abstraction disconnected from people's daily lives. The new metanarratives have to do with very childish ideas about security, understood as a kind of magical device: if we expel immigrants we will have work, a good apartment, etc. If we replace them with a new one, we will have a new one. immigrants by Jews We already have the 1930s. It's the same story, the same pattern, the same absurd expectations, the same lack of memory.
