It was one of those works – the unity between the Europeans built after the war – that men undertake when they approach the brink of the abyss, and de...

It was one of those works – the unity between the Europeans built after the war – that men undertake when they approach the brink of the abyss, and decide at this moment to take a look at themselves: when they see the disasters they were capable of, and explore the reasons of a fallibility too callous to be fruitful. And yet, they are not blasé enough, not overwhelmed by the indolence that according to Paul Valéry was the sickness of the European spirit after the 1914-1918 war: the “tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate”, the unfitness to recover and learn once again.   The Nobel Peace Prize was given last October to that re-start of history, and to the turning point that was the reconciliation between France and Germany, two countries that in just 70 years had fought three wars. From the pooling of resources vital for both of them – coal and steel, sources of wealth and death – was born the Union we have today. Never before was the link between peace, democracy and rule of law so clear in the awarding of the Nobel Prize. It was as if the invention of Europe were the living proof that signing a ceasefire is not making peace. That to hold together on a continental scale the three goals – peace, democracy, rule of law – we need to go beyond the treaties between States, beyond the non-belligerence between sovereigns that do not recognize any power, nor law, above them.   When Jean Monnet proposed and created the Coal and Steel Community, he explained the reasoning that inspired him: “When we look at the past and become aware of the enormous disaster that Europeans have brought about to themselves in the last two centuries, we are literally annihilated. The reason is very simple: each one has tried to fulfill his destiny, or what he thought his destiny was, applying his own rules”. It was thanks to this awareness that the unity of the Europeans became a model, and for a large part of the world it still is: from the ethnic massacres, from the clashes between cultures and religions, the only way out for the nation-States consist in getting rid of the illusion of being self-sufficient – of the fiction of absolute sovereignty – and in creating common political institutions whose purpose is to fulfil the fate of several associated countries, not of just one. In Asia, in the Middle East, the supranational community method remains the golden path to overcome nationalisms: much more than the solitary American power.   It was a kind of conversion, the one experienced by the Europeans. Instead of the national gaze, the cosmopolitan gaze; instead of treaties between States, a partially-federal union since the beginning, to which the old absolute sovereignties were delegated. Europe is an old dream, but in the 20th century it becomes a practical project, a necessity, giving birth to an institution with state features. An institution that lives side by side with nation-States that admit not only their fallibility, but even their dangerousness for themselves, if they yield to nationalist frenzies. Only after its own Thirty-Year War (the one that goes from 1914 to 1945) did the continent find out that it is not enough to lay down the arms: the most urgent endeavour is to understand why such bloody conflicts arise. “They arise because of the easiness with which the States bring the functioning of their institutions into question”, said Monnet. Better to watch out since the start: wars devour democracies, but it is the degradation of democracies and their institutions that throws peoples with no helmsman into wars.   This was at stake, after 1945: stop the wars, and at the same time give new strength to the institutions, make them less discontinuous. Unity arises by saying no to nationalism, but also to what drives them crazy: poverty, corruption of democracy, and the fading of the rule of law, even before that of human rights. Awarding the Prize in these days is peculiar indeed. Its intent is probably a stern warning but in some way it sounds like a mockery, though we can hardly imagine an ironic jury. It stamps a seal on a progress, but indicates how we risk to fail it. It shows what Europe wanted to be, but it is not yet or any longer. The clashes on the euro, Greece transformed into a scapegoat, the abnormal weight of a single State (Germany): it is not the union we aspired to for decades, but a construction which is de-constructing itself and going backwards rather than complete itself. It is as if the jury were telling us, between the lines: “You Europeans have invented something great, but you are not up to the prize we are awarding today. You are a promised land, but you still live in the desert as the Jews who fled from Egypt”. If Europe will be pleased with the award, it means that it sees only the celebratory surface of the event, not the chaos that seethes beneath.   Such prizes are not simply “received”. They must be meditated, questioned, as ancient Greece used to question the oracle of Delphi. The response does not change over the millennia: know thyself (gnōthi seautón), it repeats. Know the betrayal of your initial promises and the ridicule of your apotheosis. Try to understand why the Union does not arouse hopes any more, but distrust, fear, and sometimes disgust. Left halfway, Europe is not yet the supranational institution that preserves democracy and the welfare State. It is identified with one of its means – the euro – as if the currency and the economic therapies so far devised were its final aim, its horizon of civilization. The obsession with the financial rescue plans and the refusal of any alternative obscured and reduced our concern for democracy and solidarity, and for the project of a Europe that, united, can become a power in the world.   The ideal thing would have been for the Union not to go and receive the prize, but to convey the following message to the Nobel Committee: Europe’s citizens (not the States and not even the common institutions, much less meritorious) will pick it up when the task will be really carried on and accomplished. When we will finally have a Constitution that – as in the American Federation – begins with the words “We, the citizens …”. When we will go back to work, and will shed the tedium of re-starting our history. Technical subterfuges do not last: only institutions last. The turning point is political, mental, and, just like in 1945, it is St. Augustine's maxim that we need to adopt: Factum eram ipse mihi magna quaestio – I had become to myself a big problem, and a big enigma.   Translated by Elena Flor