The migration processes which, coming especially from the Mediterranean, have been flooding Europe for some time now, represent for our continent, and for the life of its inhabitants, a decisive challenge. Europe is actually faced with a dilemma: it can risk a real dissolution and ultimately being lost as a civilization, or it can try to renew its common identity presenting itself to the world as a possible model of peaceful and inclusive democracy.
Faced with this alternative, and in order for it to make a choice for life, and not, instead, a possibly suicidal one, limited policies and short-breath projects are no longer enough. Even after the demise of the great nineteenth-century’s and twentieth-century’s ideologies, which promised a meaning and a goal to human action, guaranteed in some way, what is needed today is at least a worldview, a comprehensive project of society and civilization that could represent a possible, shared horizon to all Europeans. Old Europeans and also new Europeans, the ones coming in with the migration processes that characterize the new century.
It is worth reflecting, to understand the complexity and severity of the challenge we are facing and also the need of a shared vision of the world, on what is placed “upstream” and at the same time on what is placed “downstream” of the migration flows in progress.
"Upstream", as is well known, there are wars, civil conflicts, oppressive and police-controlled political regimes, social, environmental and economic crises that disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East and Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, which essentially force those people to leave.
"Downstream" of the migratory flows there are, as it is also known, the difficult and often dramatic problems of the acceptance and inclusion of migrants, refugees and displaced persons who, after a long and often tragic journey (the Mediterranean is increasingly a sea of the dead), enter the European countries in search of safety. And there are, at the same time, the dramatic problems of transnational terrorism, that affect to an ever more serious extent the inhabitants of the European countries, fueling insecurity and fear. Migrations as such, as we know, are not at all the origin of terrorism and indeed, as one can easily verify, many migrants have been themselves victims in their countries of origin, and flee because of that. The fact remains, however, that the increasingly "molecular" terrorism harming Europeans (old and new Europeans again, as evidenced by the presence of many immigrants among the victims of the attacks) involves mostly North African or Middle-Eastern perpetrators, or anyway individuals of such origins, and has a kind of "control room", real or imaginary, in Daesh (or Isis or the Caliphate) established in particular between Iraq and Syria; it covers itself under a "symbolic umbrella" that is tied to Islam. Since the circumstances apparently coincide, this entails that in the minds of many Europeans, fueled and legitimized by xenophobic and neo-nationalist political movements, the two phenomena, migration processes and transnational terrorism, are perceived as related to each other and as if somehow one is the cause of the other.
"Downstream" of the migration processes, there is in addition the objective crisis of the European Union and its member countries, economic and social as well as political and institutional; this has established, to the detriment of the Community method, the intergovernmental one, that favors the strongest EU countries like Germany, and widens the gap between the South and the North of Europe, leading also in some cases to ignore or violate fundamental rights recognized by Community law. This method has also produced, in response to the financial and economic crisis, the disastrous austerity policies that have been afflicting Europe after 2008 and have decisively contributed to the fall of the citizens’ consensus toward the European project. There is, moreover, the lack, equally apparent, of a European leadership and of a political project able to propose and build the democratic and federal unification of the continent, beyond the no longer sustainable limits of the current institutional framework.
In this context, faced with momentous challenges that directly jeopardize the very life of the people, there is the need, as has already been said, of a vision and an overall project that can offer a shared horizon to all the inhabitants of Europe, old and new. It should be noted that in the foreground there is the issue of security. This theme cannot be removed, and should not be left in the hands of fraudulent "entrepreneurs of fear." Security, understood in all its dimensions as "human security" in the sense proposed by the United Nations, is first and foremost indivisible. In short, it is utterly unrealistic to think that only we can be safe, and alone. We can only be really safe together with the others. To make a few examples: How can the safety of the inhabitants of Europe be possible in the absence of the security of the inhabitants of the Middle East or Africa, across the Mediterranean? And how can the safety of uptown European communities be possible if there is no security (economic, social, environmental, in one word "human") in the suburbs of those same cities? The insecurity factors, today more than in the past, “move around”, and eventually arrive even where we would not like them to be. The "mole" of technological globalization, particularly in communications and transports, keeps digging and erodes time and space, and tends to wipe them out. Time and space were essentially, in the pre-global age, natural barriers that to some extent allowed security to be divided. You could to some extent be safe alone, without the others. But today, indeed, these natural barriers are gone. Safety is either common and undivided or cannot really guarantee anybody.
If this is the overall picture of the momentous challenges Europe is currently facing, it must be said that a worldview and a plan to address them today, at least in embryonic form, do exist, we are not at year zero. Concretely, this vision and this project are represented by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Not just a "piece of paper”, but a formidable tool for planning and for political action, if indeed people wanted to recognize and use it. The Charter, as is well known, was originated by the Nice European Council in 2000, was approved a second time by the Council, the Parliament and the Commission in 2007, and became, after a stage when it was anyway applied by the European Court of Justice and the national courts, binding with the Lisbon Treaty (December 2009), for citizens and for States, with the same legal value as the Treaties. The Charter, in essence, even if it does not bear that name, is today a kind of Constitution of Europe, that European citizens not only have the right to claim and ask to be enforced in all jurisdictions, but could and should indeed become a great tool in the fight for democracy and rights and, before that, a great tool for a common European civil education. Unfortunately, today it is not at all like this, and the European democratic political movements, including to some extent also the pro-European and federalist ones, carry a great responsibility for this state of affairs. As one can easily see and check in practice, a Union reduced only to market and currency does not attract and does not seduce either the old or the new Europeans, and the European unification project is likely, even for this reason, to fade and eventually die.
What is there, then, in the 54 articles composing the Bill of Rights?
There is first of all a Preamble, which sets up its general meaning. "The peoples of Europe in creating an ever closer union among them are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values …".
It is important to note, to begin with, the centrality of the concept of person, called out in the Preamble. Almost always the rights referred to in the Charter are attributed to "persons" and "individuals", not only to "citizens". The meaning and value that this term has for migrants, and in any case for those who are deprived of citizenship is clear. So is the great importance that the concept of person, or individual, has in the face of improper generalizations, often potentially criminogenic, as evidenced by historical experiences, produced by neo-nationalist political, xenophobic or fundamentalist movements and cultures (including of course the case of the Islamist fundamentalism). Therefore, any attribution of collective responsibilities to entire human groups (Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, migrants, refugees, Germans, French, Italians or whatever they may be) is unlawful, since each person has his own responsibility, his own rights, his own history, his identity.
To make some significant examples, the Charter recognizes to all persons dignity, the right to life (so no one can be sentenced to death), the right to physical and psychic integrity, the right to liberty and security, to the respect of private and family life, the protection of personal data, the right to marry and have a family, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, the right to freedom of assembly and association, of art and research, the right to education and so on. There are also important specific rules concerning the migration processes and migrants: the right to asylum in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and the prohibition of collective expulsion. It recognizes the equality of all persons before the law. It prohibits any form of discrimination based on sex, race, skin color or ethnic and social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political opinions or opinions of any other nature, one’s belonging to a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation. It recognizes the right to diversity: "The Union shall respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity". It also advocates the principle of equality between men and women "in all areas", the rights of the child, the rights of the elderly and the disabled. It recognizes many rights of workers, always as persons. To all persons it recognizes the right to social security and health protection, and to a dignified existence in any European country they live in.
The Charter of Rights, finally, may be the shared basis of a common project for life and society for all the people of Europe, old and new. It can and must become the source of a new common imagery, able to give life to a new and more appealing narrative on Europe and its future. Who are we Europeans, old and new? We are what the Charter of Rights makes us be, persons beyond and also before being citizens, bound together by our shared values and rights, then, inevitably, also by obligations of mutual recognition and solidarity.
But who can today truly say so, and propose such a narration, when the Europe in which we live is increasingly insecure and restless, pervasively threatened by a “molecular" terrorism, worried by the outcome of an economic and social crisis that seems never-ending and that fuels authoritarian and xenophobic temptations, challenged by large migration flows, surrounded on its borders by areas of instability and conflict for which solutions are not in sight, as things stand? But the very unprecedented drama of such a context makes the Charter a possible answer to the challenges, for it is as innovative and engaging as the circumstances require today. At the same time, it is a strong and clear response to all forms of fundamentalism and terrorism. What vision of life and what kind of society do the fundamentalists and terrorists of all shapes and colors, first of all the Islamists and jihadists, dream of, propose, and are also trying to build at the cost of their own lives? A vision founded on a nihilistic hatred of life, their own as well as other people's, on the rejection of diversity and personal freedoms, on discrimination (ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual), on the subjugation and exploitation of at least half of humanity (the women), on a catastrophic vision of the world and of society, based on fear and resentment. Which enemy, therefore, is for fundamentalists and terrorists worse than a document like the Charter of Rights, founded on the endorsement of life, the rights of persons, the equality between men and women "in all fields", on the prohibition of discrimination, on respect for diversity, on the right to freedom of thought, freedom of religion, on freedom of art and research?
To all migrants, to all Muslims, themselves victims, in Europe and especially in their countries of origin, of fundamentalism and terrorism, the Charter can and should be proposed as a solemn pact on which to establish, under conditions of reciprocity, a common coexistence. The Charter and the various national constitutions, if consistent with it: this is the project for the future which can make the idea of European unity seductive again. A model of plural and inclusive democracy, a worldview freed from fear and resentment, a project for the common and indivisible security of Europeans and, at the same time, of migrants too.
Translated by Lionello Casalegno