European Elections 2024, With No European Visions – OpEd

Since Karl Marx invited proletarians from all over the world to unite, the world has lived in an ideological war that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and whose failure risks to bury Europe in limbo in some respects worse than a lost war.

The war inaugurated by Marx is the first ideological war on the planet. Borges recalled that every genius creates the predecessors, and there will be no lack of example of  previous ideological wars, but the one inaugurated by Marx was the first real planetary ideological war because it is the war in which to borrow a statement of Thucydides speaking of Sparta and Athens, everyone had to decide which side they were on. Marxist ideology did not admit neutrality and abstentions, and did not hesitate to brand as treason anyone who proposed, I do not say a peace, but not  even a compromise.  Nor did it admit peace to capitalism,  which evoked compromises only in order to weaken the counterpart from within it.

The damage of this planetary ideological  war is easy to evoke: coups d’état, ethnic cleansing, mass violence, but not the  terrorism of the State that became a system after the fall of the Berlin wall, but if the damage is evident, the merits are mistakenly silenced.  For almost a century the best European intellects produced fascinating ideas where, they elaborated original and powerful theories, they produced intellectual values of the highest level. 

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the cessation of ideological hostilities, everything ended, and the greatest victim of this cessation of hostilities is Europe. Europe was faced with a completely new situation because of the lack of an easy North Star to decide the right and the unjust, the bad and the bad, even the beautiful and the ugly, because in the most acute times of the ideological conflict even aesthetics had been acquired as a belligerent party in question. 

Once the ideological conflict ceased, Europe found itself without its own cards to play. 

And we come to the point of the pericolosity of the current situation for Europe ’24. (’24 is the year of the next European elections).

Having hastily set aside the intellectual Marxist theories and not being able to wear fully those of the winning side because it had fought the war as an auxiliary force, Europe now suddenly finds itself short of intellectual production tools of its own. And this is the real problem to be addressed for the 2024 elections. Europe is faced with the problem of China, Russia, Ukraine, that of a new monetary order without its own intellectual production capacity  . The pros and cons Europe shares are the result of partisanship, not autonomous reflection. And the debate of elections in 2024 is of a poor level because it is not enlivened by  intellectual inspirations. It looks like a shop war.

To solve this problem today, Europe needs to produce what could be called radial thinking. Imagine a stone thrown into a lake. The waves that develop are in all directions, without preconceptions. Europe needs  to produce such standards in order to play its own role and not be limited to partisanship. The stakes are enormous. Peace and nuclear war and climate challenges put the survival of the species at risk. Artrifical intelligence risks making the human race attached to an algorithm. All this means that Right and Left are not adequate modules of reflection for Europe 24. It is necessary to  strive to produce a “radial” thought, like the wave that widens in all directions to cover the widest possible territory.

Let’s take an  operational example. the question of the  landings from Africa seems to be reduced to a question of good and bad, in which the League and the like are good, and the people of the left as well. It is evident that put in  these terms the problem is unsolvable for the region. It is here that Italy should produce a radial thought for Europe ’24. With satellites, with Internet networks, with digital platforms, with mobile phones, Italy should propose a program of African distance education, including health care, that enhances the material and cultural heritage of African countries — not only for Africa. Africa is the right frontier for Europe ’24.

Here is a valuable Europe ’24  program: to create infrastructure of knowledge managed by the countries themselves, in order to avoid neo-colonialist temptations. But what is suggested for Africa also applies to Europe ’24. It takes a burst of intellectual pride. Europe ’24 must have the ambition to place itself at the intellectual centre of the world, to receive stimuli from all over the planet and to give it. Mondoeuropa ’24, is an intellectual idea that belongs to those who created the Renaissance.