A necessary Europe between two giants

In Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” a passionate process in which human rights were transforming into concrete social rights was taking place until its structure was attacked.
The dawn that greeted resistance movements against a perversely administered globalization by financial powers, arms traffic and organized crime did not mean anything else.
Civil society emerged from its lethargy and launched itself to the streets when it saw the gods in which it believed for years knocked out of their pedestals: a Nation State, a guaranteed security, a market economy, a planned education, a patriarchal society in which everything was organized, shamans that exorcised and majestic powers that guaranteed an afterlife or that condemned the underworld.
Not without a reason social volunteering and drug addiction amongst youngsters are sociological phenomena that coincide in time. In front of a world that was losing its meaning, ideologies that were dead and the faded European ethnocentrism that had sustained an imaginary collective during centuries, some youngsters couldn’t take so much pressure without a reachable horizon and became obsessed with finding fatalistic paradises that broke them free from thinking and from making decisions.
It was the “trip” that helped them as a path, never as a cause, to escape from a society they did not understand and from a lack of self-esteem that was being damaged like a Prometheus that devoured his own entrails.
Although since the beginning of the times drugs have been used for medical purposes or with religious or ludicrous ends to enjoy a divine transitory inebriation, drug addiction as a sociological phenomenon that expands amongst youngsters of the four continents can be traced back to the Seventies. Of course the revolution in communications has contributed to convert the spook of those outcasts into a waterwheel that spins uncontrollably in real time.
Likewise, compassion and generosity with the needy, altruism and charity are not products of the 25th hour. History offers marvelous examples of solidarity and of communities that shared their goods and helped each other, going even beyond family bonds.
Now, in this Old Europe as in many other countries considered to be developed or industrialized, social volunteering blooms as a pushing manifestation of a civil society that drowns in orthopedic institutions that had become obsolete: empty and formalist religions, bureaucratic political parties and unconscious class syndicates that became sterile in the State’s rack with the crumbs that fell from the powerful people’s tables. The concept of nation with its flag symbols, hymns and songs, the idea of borders or of nationality as an excluding factor, the classic family model and morals linked to unmasked myths and taboos were diluting in a senseless magma for millions of youngsters who understood that even if life doesn’t make sense, living must have a sense. And they launched themselves to the roads to encounter other people who might need them. They wanted to feel useful and loved. They needed to participate in life’s celebration even if they had to invent their rules each day. They didn’t care to take hours from rest or from sleep, to organize their lives in order that they could steal some hours every week to be able to help others to help themselves. A phenomenon with an emerging ethic was being produced that placed desire to be happy next to social justice and liberty.
They did not ask anyone about their religion, their ethnicity or their nation and nobody asked them about their origins, their history or their condition: they celebrated the joy of encounter in friendship and discovered the meaning of knowing they were partners, “copains”, those who share the bread.
But the fall of the Berlin Wall came with the crumbling of the Soviet paradise that revealed itself as full of rust, injustice and pain.
Starting by the interests of the merchants, the European Union was being built step by step: but they realized that Robert Owen’s premise could be applied: productivity and economic benefits could coexist with good labor conditions and social welfare in a general atmosphere of freedom.
The experience of two horrendous world wars, the colophons of Hiroshima and Vietnam, added to the progressive gain of awareness about the abuses committed to the colonized countries and the responsibility for the disastrous management of their independence made people sigh over ways of life closer to nature and to harmony. Leisure as the colophon of an economic development that retired people at an age in which they could still enjoy enormously was being discovered.
In the meantime, the prepotency of the new hegemony that felt the temptation of dominating the world by imposing its criteria and its fears arrived.
This is what we actually have, in a world of convulsion in which no State considers itself to be safe, not even in the European Union, in which elements of disintegration have been introduced in a perverse way. The phantom of a Slavic Europe sustained by the North-American superpower is too evident not to perceive the pliers that would drown the Europe of the social rights and of the liberties.
It’s scary to think that the famous weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical, are not in the hands of the countries that conform the supposed “Axis of Evil” but that they rather slipped from their hands into the hands of the colossal superpower that emerges in the East. At least, the Chinese giant has received a blow in its power and its prestige that will make it possible to consolidate the new borders of the American empire dreamt by the plotters of State terrorism that the great North American country suffers.

José Carlos Gª Fajardo
Translated by Carlos Miguélez