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New synthesis for Europe. Interview with Franco Cardini by the Megachip Drafting.

New synthesis for Europe. Interview with Franco Cardini

Interview with Franco Cardini by the Megachip Drafting .

We continue with this interview the historian Franco Cardini a series of surveys on the ideas for the Transition , small introductions to thoughts that might accompany us for a long time, now that we do not want to linger with the twentieth century patterns: the usual left-right, the incomunicanti cultural islands , clashes of civilization, the accumulation of practical ideas to market ideologies, against the background of the self-destructive possibilities of our species. We will know rather creative minds, truly original books, different thoughts. Perhaps we will know solutions to the problems generated by a difficult change.

1) Professor Cardini, you have said many times not to recognize themselves in the political “right” which was still growing and had taken the first steps of civic engagement. What remains today of its ideals of that time, and how it plans to regenerate in the absence of clear boundaries between left and right, both subordinate to the myth of capitalist development to the bitter end?

An adequate answer to your question should start with a historical analysis of the origin of the word Right in the European political lexicon from the French Revolution to the present. In summary, the word Right is born – as opposed to the word Left – the beginning of the Great Revolution, to indicate those who remain loyal to the Throne and Altar as opposed to the ideal value and again, the Nation; and who therefore consistent with that choice, it defends the values of local communities, of intermediate bodies and of their ancient libertates against the individualistic and egalitarian leveling imposed by Jacobinism. This historical sense, which has changed over time – in a line from De Maistre to Donoso Cortés up to Miguel de Unamuno and Carl Schmitt – a meta-historical and metapolitical value, I rest a right man. But, mind you, only in this sense. A sense that invests in primary mode is absolutely convinced that they are individualism, the primacy of economics and materialistic liberalism that Jacobinism forwarded to the liberal-liberal bourgeoisie eight- and twentieth century the main enemies of justice, freedom and of mankind.

The fact is that, among the “revolutions” of 1830 and 1848, a part precisely that bourgeoisie individualistic and progressive, creator and promoter of capitalism contemporary liberal, has apparently accepted – as frightened by the will grow the “Fourth Estate”, from fit the social question – a part of the Right conservative positions: the nation and the homeland, born as authentically values of the Left, they have become so values of a “new Right”, characterized by the alliance between the now dying of waste ‘ ancien régime and the bourgeoisies well decided to defend their privileges (which were born in large part by the betrayal compared to the traditional values of Europe and exploitation of situations like that, which is typical, the privatization of church property). Moreover, in the second half of the nineteenth century and even after it was not uncommon for members of the traditionalist Right have rather sympathized with the Left more authentically revolutionary, convinced that their hunger and their thirst for justice were, in substance, the deeper Christian defense of privilege, of inequality and exploitation. Values and feelings of this kind have directed members of the “Right meta” in sympathy for example by Georges Sorel and revolutionary syndicalism.

Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell is one who in my opinion has better understood and interpreted this historical and political dynamics (referring to his Naissance de l’déologie fascist, Paris, Fayard, 1989). In the Florence of the Fifties and Sixties, the place and the time of my training (I was born in 1940), the school of a young traditionalist thinker who died prematurely, Attilio Mordini (1923-1966), he was formed a group of young people the arduous and largely obscure ambition of which was to connect the meta and metaphysical values of Europe by de Maistre and Donoso Cortés to the policies of the present struggles. Those guys went through Europeanism proposed by Jean Thiriart, which in the sixties sought to fight for a “European country” which svincolasse from opposite American liberal block and Soviet collectivism and would create a new reality, solidarity and socialist, which would link with the struggle for the liberation of what was then called the “Third World”. They mostly came from MSI, but inside they had sympathized with the “fascist movement ‘” (Berto Ricci etc.), For the very first Spanish Falange (De Rivera, Redondo, Hedilla), for the same “left” National Socialist (the Strasser brothers), for the Argentine justicialism and the Guevarism; and they were tired of anti-sided and socializing academy that reigned in that party, and that resulted in a constant rhetoric electoralist while the leaders of that party in parliament, regularly leading conservative and filoccidentalistiche choices.

The “Julia” Valle movement, when in ’68 the boys “right” to those who had joined the “left” in protest against the ‘ establishment capitalist-bourgeois were treated as “traitors” and made by the beat of Almirante bands and Caradonna, was the signal that now no further misunderstanding dialogue between them and the kind of “right” (that filled her cultural vacuum with capital letters, bills itself as ” the right”) was possible.

The critique of the concept of “the West” was one of the elements that allowed the group, numerically small, which I belonged, to sympathize a decade later, in the seventies and eighties, the “New Right” by Alain de Benoist and the positions that in that direction were carried out by other then very young, led by Marco Tarchi. You have to Alain de Benoist has “broken” with the utmost clarity by any misunderstanding “right”, proposing not to speak of “New Right” but of “New Synthesis.”

One can say that at least the beginning of the Eighties friends, young and old, which – of course with many joints and variable – is historically recognized and continue to recognize in this main stream politics and culture, have definitively ceased to call themselves ” right “as they may have kept some in a personal bond of friendship with people left for various reasons within the formation calling itself” right “that has come to pass in the National Alliance to finally merge in its near total in the party- Mr Berlusconi’s company, a sad end, that any of them did not deserve but which would have to escape.

Currently, my position is nell’impegnarmi within the limits of my ability to achieve a European Union that is a real team policy (non-bank financial-bureaucratic Euroland that exists today), which is opposed to both ” single thought “inspired by the international conformity that now prevails in the mass media, both anonymous empire (but not too much) of lobbies multinationals and its” armed wing “, made up Bush first experience of the US superpower, and now alive and also active in much of the UN. I believe that the great battle to fight in the twenty-first century is the one against the forces, with the goal of profit and the exploitation of the planet, working on his destruction.

My positions today are largely identifiable in those of thinkers like Serge Latouche, Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva.

As a Catholic, I believe that the great Catholic battle today consists in being close to 5/6 of the planet, those who suffer, to those who are poor and impoverished more and more because of the criminal assault of the international turbo against the planet, to those who struggle so that they are not stolen at least the air and water.

As a European, on July 16 last year I was a member, by anonymous, the mass of hundreds of thousands of anonymous European citizens who rushed to Vienna to pay their last respects to the remains of Otto von Habsburg, the last heir to the imperial throne Austria: in the name of old Europe that was destroyed in 1918 by the unjust Versailles peace talks, which broke out in the world the nationalist hysteria and madness capitalist selfishness ferocity gradually dissolved from any form of control.

Esser defined as “right” or “left” do not care: but the positions that today defend and with which sympathize are, however, for the most part, now supported by formations that are said to be “left”: this is a fact . For my part, I call Catholic, socialist and pro-European. If someone else I stick other labels, it is his business not mine.

2) As a Catholic idea which was made of the role played by the Church in the last thirty years of the existing justification process, that the current system of consumption? It makes sense to expect just from some basic Christianity the boost to a renewal of the ethical and political categories of post-modernity?

Again, I very much hoped, and long, the rebirth of a “Catholic traditionalist” who rediscover the sacredness and opposed to a Catholicism that in the Fifties and Sixties, especially after Vatican II, seemed to be moving with great strides in the direction of “secularization” and the flattening of religious values, the reduction in short religion in humanitarianism and sociology. Even the “pacifism” Christian seemed part of that surrender of the Church before the values of modernity, in short, of everything that had led Jacques Maritain to stigmatize “the church knelt in front of the world.”

But the turning largely caused by Giovanni Paolo II has produced – and not because of that great pontiff – a singularly unsuccessful: the emergence of a kind of pseudo-neo-traditionalism that identifies the Catholic Church with the “values” modern Western proclaims Modernity only daughter and legitimate Christianity (forgetting the “tear-off” of the modern revolution, between the sixteenth and eighteenth century started and legitimized the victory of individualism and the dominance of economics and technology by allowing the West to support, asservisse and exploited around the world) and crusades announces for the “defense of Christianity” (perhaps exploiting the tragedy of Christians today are killed in the world, often because those who suppress them they believed – wrongly – complicit in the crimes of the West ). This pseudo-neo-traditionalism-called “Catholic” is a true leprosy: Catholics who do so in truth they forget that at the end of time God will not judge us on the basis of orthodoxy theological or ecclesial practice or the liturgical correctness, but on alone basis of love and charity. This is the Christian truth, which is the prophecy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, 25: 31-46: and there is no sophistry to von Hayez, we are not talking to Novak taking.

Giovanni Paolo II, who had just been elected had visited Latin America inferring a blow to the “liberation theology”, in his second trip to the continent in 1979, promptly he inquired about the crimes of the dictatorships of gorilas – often, as in Guatemala, supported by the United States more or less “covered” by Protestant religious missions – and the tacit or explicit support that in some cases the higher ranks of the Catholic Church had accorded them. Moreover, among the brave opponents of the “conservative criminal blockade” there were also figures such as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, the absolute confidence of the Holy See and human opponent of the “liberation theology” but once office, he realized dullness and recklessness of those who, even among Catholic prelates, favored a repression which presented itself as “anti” while pointing only to the maintenance of injustice and exploitation, in line with the interests of lobbies criminals such as the United Fruit Company. But authentic martyrs, such as monsignor Romero, they care little about the actual drafters of the new martyrologies Catholics, for which only count the martyrs killed by Muslim fundamentalists.

Today, I do not expect anything from the “right” to gain Westernist Catholic conservatism. instead I rely on a few basic movements and in some groups that carry out intensive ecologistico type activities and solidarity, which engage in helping immigrants and the fight against prejudice and discrimination, which create a volunteer capable of becoming in time – and that is already becoming – a new great ideal, that of widespread struggle for the advent of a different world in which the evil magic circle production-profit-use-consumption is beaten in breach.

Even today, too many Catholics are couch potatoes uncritical and Sunday – maybe after Mass – accompany the little family in the rite of dire festive trips to shopping malls. Is this conformism, this kneel before the profit materialism and consumption, which must be defeated. Not all areas of the Catholic Church have yet realized that this is the great, sacred battle of our time. The Italian government, for example, is in default of the comparisons of the global fight against AIDS, against which still does not pay contributions of which it was committed. Despite the economic crisis, or perhaps because of that, the Catholic Church should condemn strongly these violations. But it may be that it prefers to accept the Italian Government other “favors”, fiscal or otherwise, rather than remind him of his humanitarian duties. It is from these cowardly that the church needs healing.

3) How Law, Professor Cardini, attempts to Obama and America of the United States to address the Arab uprisings to the US-friendly outcome? Do you think that really exists in the Muslim world, a growing attraction for Western liberal democracy?

When it came to beat the infamous Bush, we were all obamisti: there was no choice. It was to be against Bush, who was beaten by any means and sent home (as in Italy, today, you have to send home Berlusconi). But the “sanctification” of Obama was, in the US as we have, to a certain extent by ex-Bushite more or less “repentant” eager to recycle: certain conversions, including journalists and politicians, were among the grotesque and the pathetic. It took little, however, to understand that President Obama would be a bluff, perhaps beyond his personal intentions. In particular, Obama “sublet” foreign policy to the fatal Mrs. Clinton, who works in a substantial continuity line is soft with respect to the management of criminal Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, despite the apparent failure of their choices.

The culs-de-sac of Afghanistan and Iraq are proof. As for the Muslim world, we must never forget that it is a billion and a half people, a majority in the intercontinental belt from the Maghreb to the northwest of the Indian subcontinent and which leads to the Southeast Asia: in the great mass of men and women and the variety of peoples and countries, there is an infinite variety of issues and positions.

That in the “Arab spring” there were also instances tended to pick up some items from the “representative democracy” Western, it’s true. But to say it, if it is necessary thing, it is not enough. Within Islam there are also other components. And in it as a whole there is a strong will to find new ways that are consistent with respect to the many versions of Muslim culture developed within various ethnic groups, national, social and so on. On the other hand, it must not forget that Islam – a religion that, unlike Christianity, has no organized institutional centers comparable to the Churches – is suffering from a serious crisis arising from the impact of modernity and the Postmodernism: you can only evaluate the components “fundamentalist”, superficially judging “obscurantist” and “reactionary” as a whole, nor those “progressive” and “Westernized”, instead of judging them “progressive” and compatible with our world and our trend growth . The reality is more complex.

4) What, in your opinion, the most realistic and supportive way to tackle the immigration emergency in the European Union, taking into account the social upheavals that await us as a result of the austerity policies imposed, in these days, by the power of the big financial centers?

You need to evaluate very strictly, but also with serenity, the possibilities for absorption of non-European workforce that can support various EU countries as a whole and took one of the one; have basic reception facilities and solidarity in order to deal with the immigration waves without failing in humanitarian duties but at the same time preventing as much as possible the overcrowding phenomenon of refugees and involving seriously Mediterranean non-Europeans so as to induce them to a serious cooperation in the surveillance and containment of the phenomenon; facilitate repatriation ordered and provided with the necessary guarantees (you can not “give back” no one in government can respond to the needs of the present time with the only instruments of repression, of concentration camp imprisonment and violence); to develop tools that allow us to place by hand, the solutions based obsolete both sull’assimilazionismo “French” (which humiliates people and cultures), both on “multiculturalism” English or Dutch (who creates “islands “of” different “in societies that tolerate them and exploit them but they do not understand them).

You need to point to new synthesis enabling prospective European nationals who were born in Europe from non-EU parents, to live in their European homeland without lessening the traditions of their fathers, or being forced to forget them and betray them.

As for austerity policies, it is clear that one can not accept the principle that profits and income of speculators (those often euphemistically called “entrepreneurs” and “shareholders”) are to be safeguarded in the name of “recovery” and “development” , unilateral expense of fixed-income categories and lower classes. We have to fight against the concentration of wealth and parasitic annuities, including financial profits, which can not be saved through the “cuts” in what remains of the welfare state. The immigrants should not be considered unrelated to this struggle: the “black economy”, for example, results in a form of massive tax evasion which goes against us as they did. The point is that today, unfortunately, now, in Italy, there is no longer a “social conscience” as part of “civic consciousness.”

The great battle lies in its reconstruction and the involvement in it of the same immigrants. And you have to start all over again, from young people, by young people. Older generations are lost if they do not, the workers who are now boomers would never converted to the League’s xenophobia. Blaming the immigrants who “steal our work” is the same mistake the dog, struck by the owner, biting her stick. You have to start over: to teach to bite their masters. Better if the throat.

5) In the book she wrote with Sergio Valzania, “The roots of Europe lost. From Charles V to the world wars ” , connects many clues that can demonstrate a different fate of Europe, not the one then shaped by national states. Today they are vertically crisis is national states is the European model of the last sixty years, and without a Charles V on the horizon, we can imagine a further different historical fate, another cultural and political path for the continent?

For this reason, and not for a surge of reactionary aesthetic, July 16, 2011 I was in Vienna to render homage to the remains of the last heir of the Hapsburgs. Europe needs to find herself in a way that modernity has stopped imposing the victory of absolutism before, then the national states. A choice that has given us two fratricidal wars. The path to take is to discontinued gradually between sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: the path of solidarity, the restoration of “intermediate bodies” formed by local communities with their prerogatives and their rights, the general recognition of a common European home and since the Middle Ages has It built a culture based on diversity of languages and traditions and uniqueness of legal tradition and ethics coming from the encounter of the Roman world with Christianity and with the contribution of ethnic groups in the inheritance of those traditions you are approved.

The European Union was born in 1951 began, as they say, on the wrong foot: the money, the single currency, and the bureaucratic institutions supported by formal democratic scaffolding. But the people remained outside the scaffolding that have still suffered. They were not born or indeed a common European school for all future citizens, nor a common army (defense of our continent has been entrusted to NATO), and no real judicial system.

According to the principles of international politics, to form a correct policy team it needs four things: the Flag, ie institutions (we only have a hypertrophied and expensive European Parliament, with few real powers); the coin (we have it, the euro, but alone is not enough); The Toga, ie judicial institutions (themselves confused); the Sword, that the defense (but the “European” army does not exist: it is replaced by NATO, namely a sword in the hands of others). We have to start from scratch, with one goal: the creation of a real European patriotism, which leads to the founding of a Europe that is no longer that of the governments and states, but that of the people.

The first realistic goal today is to reiterate the pro-European willingness to stand together against micronazionalistiche temptations, which serve to divide us again to keep us in the service of NATO and lobbies multinationals, which obviously tend to divide us to better control us. In the fifties, people like Altiero Spinelli believed that European unity was around the corner and illusions that the superpowers would have allowed. Half a century later, we know that everything is far away and that world powers will never allow the emergence of a Europe actually free, independent and united. Today, for sperarvi, it takes a brave dream, to the verge of madness. You have to be realistic on the contrary: and ask for the impossible.