http://www.francocardini.net/minimacardiniana.html
New synthesis for Europe. Interview with Franco Cardini
by the Megachip Drafting.
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.