Berlin is a city full of memories, full of memorial plaques that remind us of our recent history or at least some of its most tragic chapters. But European memory is more than Germany. To the east, more than 2,000 km away, in Durrës, a small town in Albania, it takes the form of a Soviet-inspired statue standing on several concrete steps. He is an unknown soldier, a partisan, looking out over the Adriatic Sea with his rifle aimed at Italy. It is the communist monument to Albania's resistance to the fascist invasion in World War II. Statues and cold bronze plaques from two distant cities tell us something about our continent's history, although since they are there for everyone to see, we rarely stop to look at them.
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Memory is a complex matter. The writer and essayist Masha Gessen recently described in a controversial article in the New Yorker how the politics of remembrance works on the streets of Berlin and in which she compared Gaza to a Nazi ghetto. This boldness almost got him canceled the award that the German Foundation for Political Thought Heinrich Böll had given him: nothing less than the Hannah Arendt Prize. The image of the partisan statue appears in a text published in the magazine El Grand Continent by the thinker and writer Lea Ypi, author of one of the literary phenomena of the year, her novel Libre, which is strictly speaking a memoir.
Crimes against humanity continue as we abandon multilateralism
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Both are prominent names in this ending 2023, and both point to a phenomenon that perhaps sums up what is happening in the West, where narratives about who we are today are inspiring new heresies. Gessen's article is an example of how moving away from orthodoxy can come at a price. In this context, Samantha Rose Hill, one of the leading international experts on Hannah Arendt's work, described in the Guardian the tragic paradox that the prize that bears her name would not be awarded to Hannah Arendt today. The reason? His political position on Israel and his opinion on Zionism, a heresy that today as yesterday would shatter the status quo of European opinion on Israel's war policy. Hill explained, for example, that treating the Holocaust as a historical exception has the strange effect of placing it outside of history, a phenomenon that allows the German government to unconditionally support Israel without taking responsibility for what that support means .
Soldiers next to St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, December 6th. THOMAS PETER (Portal)
But let us apply the example of the German narrative of remembering the Holocaust to the entire West and think about our narrative, which says that democratic values and the will to harmony are what defines us in the face of the world, the reason which allows us to assume a kind of natural international leadership on the universality of human rights, just as Germany teaches lessons on the interpretation of the Shoah. Today, one might wonder whether our justifying stories act as a reflective shackle, making it difficult for us to understand the world in which we live. Have we become less permeable to reality by transforming our values into dogmas? We consolidate our memory by embodying it in stone or metal or by categorically affirming it as a reason of state, as Green Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck did, but that does not make us more permeable to the world. Is there no possible nuance to Israel's much-mentioned right to defend itself? What solutions does our unconditional support offer? Gessen dared to mention the elephant in the room: at some point the willful German attempt to keep memory alive began to seem “static and glassy, as if it were an attempt not just to remember history but also to remember it “To ensure that only this particular story will be remembered, and only in this way.” Something that Arendt himself would have signed up for.
How many resignations is the European Union willing to make to become a geopolitical bloc?
Germany is the paradigmatic example of a symptom that is to some extent reflected in the imbalance of Israel's war against Hamas and the European position in the face of this unbearable tragedy. The way in which we Western democracies dare to address the historical injustices of our acquiescence, such as colonialism or imperialism, by facing our crimes (“our worst selves,” again in Gessen’s words), seems to have withered. We decided that the impossibility of changing the past in the present brought with it the political responsibility to channel it as memory, and we did this through a narrative that built a sense of community: Europe as a common home, as a space of rights and freedoms. But through this consolidation, our memory has become a mental bondage that prevents us from understanding the present. It is no coincidence that at a time of political, budgetary and diplomatic crisis and in the face of the rise of the far right, Germany is clinging to its memory to preserve its own sense of nationality. It is also not true that in the West, by losing influence in the world, we cling to the narrative about our values, something that gives us identity but prevents us from recognizing how contradictory, incoherent and self-conscious our position is for the Outsiders are -portion.
From the self-proclaimed Global South, the part of the planet we still regard with suspicion as otherness, they tell us that while we pose as staunch defenders of international law in Ukraine, our almost Numantic defense of the alliance with Israel is ours Prove truthfulness face. It is the effect of the erratic, almost cantonal diplomacy that we in the West are deploying in the face of the war in Gaza and the West Bank. “Double standards,” they point out, and they are right, although they (also) do it with more cynicism than principles. Which countries in the global south really support Palestine? What democratic alternative do you propose for global governance?
Street vendors among ruins in Gaza, November 30th. IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA (Portal)
As we in Europe accelerate the riskiest expansion in our history and convince ourselves of the need to speak the language of power in order to be truly a geopolitical bloc, Israel is clearly showing us the consequences of abandoning a truly Kantian politics . For it is Kant and his peace that maintain the shaky narrative through which we travel and from which we view the world, even though we act politically differently as we see fit. Little Kant and too much realpolitik. The basic philosophical principles that seemingly hold our political order together have turned into mere fetishes, objects of masturbatory politics that have lost their permeability to understanding the present. Are we really promoting respect for human rights and compliance with international laws? Instead of using resources and diplomatic pressure to support a solution for Israel and Palestine, we have chosen conflict management, as if corporate language were more than empty shells. As if no life was at stake. Instead of relying on multilateralism and international law, the West has opted for reason of state, the law of the jungle and apartheid.
At the last European Council of the year, we witnessed first-hand the eloquent contradiction between who we say we are and what we do. The protagonist? The cunning Viktor Orbán, who could not prevent the start of talks on the EU accession of Ukraine and Moldova, but was able to block aid worth 50 billion euros for Kiev through his absence from the accession vote. The worst part is that the European Commission has resigned itself to releasing 10 of the 30 billion euros allocated to Budapest and blocked for its violations of the rule of law, in order to force him to choose between the EU or Putin. How many bribes and resignations is the EU prepared to become a geopolitical bloc? How often are geostrategic decisions made to ensure democratic purges? All this, moreover, is happening at a time of brutalization of the international order, when the most necessary is the resolute defense of a multilateral framework represented in a UN and adapted to new global actors and balances. The alternative is the law of the strongest, and it is enforced in many contexts. Look at Nicolás Maduro's proposal to organize a referendum on the annexation of Guyana, similar to the path outlined by Putin in 2014. Without striving for any symmetry, the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbass are a reminder of Israel's destructive intention regarding the annexation of the Strip. Skipping any international legality. “Greater Russia and Greater Israel” were a partnership, as Lluís Bassets put it.
Which countries in the global south really support Palestine? What democratic alternative do you propose?
The triangle of brutalization is completed by the great forgotten conflict within the Euro-Mediterranean border, namely the conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh province of Azerbaijan, whose Armenian majority population was emptied in a few weeks through textbook ethnic cleansing. War crimes and crimes against humanity continue as we allow multilateralism, the premise of a global order based on rational and ethical rules, to wither. Because the West and the Global South cannot find a way to understand each other, but while some speak of the questioning of the post-1945 peace architecture as a clear symptom of our decline, the de-Westernization of the planet, this would not make more sense in the discovery to see our relative position in the world? Such a perspective would force us to listen and open ourselves to criticism, to confront our double standards without giving up on leading or defending a global order based on democratic principles.
The transformation of political narratives into a fetish has another derivative: the desperate attempt to hold on to something, says Wendy Brown, is always reactionary because it paves the way to melancholy. Trapped in the past, we are unable to imagine the future and build it together. But as long as we continue to behave this way, the far right and the reaction will continue to grow inside and outside our armored borders. Our political judgment is determined by fear of what we believe we are losing: therefore our reaction is regressive. Germany and Europe act this way, perhaps without knowing it, driven by this underlying current. It is the epitome of a fearful West that refuses to explore beyond the boundaries set by its own political truths, even though, paradoxically, this is the only ethical way to continue to look the way we are.
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