The whole history of Europe runs in a sense: the construction of states where rights are political and therefore correspond to all citizens, against those nations in which rights depend on belonging to an idea, an ethnicity, a language or a religion. And it has not been easy to get here. The road has overcome a long succession of disasters and cataclysms, from the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the conflicts that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Today’s Europe has many problems, some with as many echoes in the past as the effects of the economic crisis or the resurgence of the ultra-right, but the inclusion of all citizens in the same model has managed to quench conflicts that seemed impossible to solve.
The World of Yesterday, the memories of Viennese Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, has become the literary equivalent of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, an endless song to the wisdom of this continent, but also a warning about the fragility of its achievements. Zweig committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 when he thought that there was no longer hope for Europe and that Hitler’s triumph was inevitable. This is what he wrote about nationalism: “All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great national ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general.”
Zweig’s phrase must be applied cautiously to the current situation: we are not faced with an assault against reason and society similar to that represented by great totalitarianism, there is nothing in Europe like Hitler or Stalin. But when the writer puts nationalism as the worst of evils, as a poison, he talks about the exclusion it represents for all who are left out. His idealization of the Austrohungarian Empire comes from the reality that it was an entity in which different peoples, languages and totally different religions were able to live under the same law and the same rights.
The collapse of that Empire caused the lifting of boundaries that always left someone out, because if you draw the boundaries based on imaginary national rights, there is always someone left -the Hungarians in Romania or the Romanians in Hungary, the Italians and the Slovenians of Trieste, and so on to infinity. There are no uniform nations. The great Austrian writer was fully aware of this and so he saw with such pessimism the evolution that Europe experienced in the 1930s.
Like Zweig’s, the personal experience of the German sociologist Norbert Elias can be useful to sum up the twentieth century: veteran of World War I, he fled Germany for being Jewish – his mother failed to escape and was murdered in Auschwitz -, he lived in England, where he was deported to the Isle of Man for being German, and then worked in universities in Germany and Holland. He wrote a very influential book, The Civilizing Process, on the foundation of the state in the West, and the protection that, in the end, the Leviathan State gave to individuals. This work inspired Steven Pinker to write The Angels of Our Nature, an essay that gives a deeply optimistic view of the present since, he argues, we live in the least violent moment in history. Elias explains that in the fifteenth century Europe had 5,000 independent political units, most of them baronies; 500 at the beginning of the 17th century; 200 in the Napoleonic period, at the beginning of the 19th century; and less than 30 in 1953.
These figures represent a perfect summary of what has happened on the continent since Stefan Zweig wrote his memoirs: fewer States as a solution to national conflicts. The EU was born with the aim of sharing resources –coal and steel– but it quickly became much more ambitious: to create an inclusive structure in which countries, nations and their differences are represented, but giving priority to the citizens. The history of Europe is so intricate that there is no other way of resolving millennial conflicts. In his book L’invention de l’Europe, the French demographer Emmanuel Todd explains that “the present European civilization is the product of a slow and laborious synthesis” because “its religious or economic passions are inscribed in space.” Giving a new meaning to that space, inclusive with all citizens no matter their passions (because, let’s not forget, nationalism is a passion, not a reality), is the greatest achievement of the EU. And backing off would be a gigantic mistake.
Some foolish politician has spoken of something like «the Slovenian model» for the separatist challenge of Catalonia. Even if we ignore some facts that should not be overlooked –a 10-day war, 70 deaths, the beginning of the Yugoslav catastrophe, the worst that Europe has suffered since the end of World War II– it is important to remember an event derived from that independence, an event that reflects what happens when states based on the nation are created: the so-called «erased.» When Slovenia became independent, 10% of its population (200,000 out of 2 million) had Yugoslav origins; they had settled in the richest Republic of the federation, but they were not born there, although they were integrated. First, they were forced to regularize themselves (in the country in which they had been living for decades!) And 18,000 were «erased», removed from public records as if they had never existed. It was a logical conclusion: in the State of the Slovenes, those who are not Slovenes have no place. In a plurinational state, that problem does not exist. When was it solved? After Slovenia entered the EU and Brussels forced it to fix such an ugly matter.
On the weekend of the illegal referendum in Catalonia, a Bosnian writer named Velibor Colic, author of Manual of Exile, a book full of humor on the difficulty of starting from scratch in another country, visited Spain. Bosnian of Croatian origin, he deserted during the war, he was in a concentration camp from which he escaped and went into exile in France. He learned the language and eventually he became a successful writer. He now lives in Strasbourg, where he works with immigrants (50 nationalities live in the city) and he contemplates with a mixture of concern and disbelief what was happening in Catalonia. Colic said that the nationalist referendums are charged by the devil. And he kept joking that his next exile would be the most comfortable and cheap, because a tram connects Strasbourg with Khel, in Germany. It opened on April 24 and it crosses, for 1.40 euro, a border that caused three wars between 1870 and 1945. That exiled Bosnian could not understand why someone would get off the tram that crosses borders and leaves behind forever a sad history.
