What it means to practise the word 'Europe'

In these days when we often pronounce the name 'Europe' and vote for (or against) that idea, we must remember that it is not a party or even a parliament, but a destiny that the many peoples who have settled in its territories over the centuries have longed to share, building roads, languages, monuments, cultures, accelerating that thirst for unity with proclamations and with wars, with theatres and with music, with trains and with spas, with airports, with beaches and with parks.

The memory of the Roman empire, with its amphitheatres and its bridges, its aqueducts and its temples, lingers everywhere from the Betica of the Guadalquivir to the Anatolia of the Monumentum Ancyranum that recalls the exploits of Augustus in Ankara. These are not just archaeological ruins: men have travelled those roads and those myths, with the same intent: to find a better future; it is enough to think that those who go up from tormented Syria, through the Balkans, towards the eastern borders of the European Union still pass by, and along, the Via Egnatia, which runs through northern Greece from the lower Adriatic to the Aegean Sea.

But to gauge how much in fact prevails in Europe today what unites us over what divides us, how much it is a common homeland, if only in our imagination as tourists in search of beauty and surprises, it is useful to retrace it with the eye of one who has truly lived it feverishly, from Ronda to St. Petersburg, as suggested in a book edited by Francisco Jarauta, in the words and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (Prague 1875-Montreux 1926). Now that we are about to get intoxicated and dive into the upcoming Parisian Olympics, let us recall how Rilke described that city in a letter to Clara Westhoff in August 1902: 'I am distressed by the many hospitals scattered everywhere. I understand why they always come back to Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. All over the streets one sees sick people going to the hospital [...]. One suddenly feels that in this city there are armies of the sick, of the dying, populations of the dead'. So begins the essay by the late Franco Rella (Rovereto 1944 - 1923) and not dissimilar, in historical photographs of eloquent nudity, appears in the volume (to which Carolina B. collaborated. García-Estévez, Gerhard Wolf, Franco Rella, Thomas Schmidt, Antonio Pau, Francisco Jarauta, Ulrich Baer) the face of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century appears in the book (to which Carolina B. García-Estévez, Gerhard Wolf, Franco Rella, Thomas Schmidt, Antonio Pau, Francisco Jarauta, Ulrich Baer collaborated), which Rilke so acutely fixes in his poems, almost invoking the end of the exchange economy, for a nature solemnly closed in its own bowels: 'The kings of the world are old / and will have no heirs. // The plebs make money out of them. / The current lord of the world melts them / in the fire to produce machines, / abstemious servants of his will, / but they are not happy. // Iron is nostalgic. And it wants / to abandon coins and wheels, / masters of a petty life, / to return from factories and crates / into the veins of gutted mountains / ready to close behind it' (Die Konige der Welt sind alt). Working to be poorer: that knot tormented Europe in the First World War from which it emerged even poorer: 'You didn't know what mass is made of /. In there a stranger / found beggars. They sell / the emptiness of their hand' (The Beggars).

It would be enough to go back over the intervening century to measure how providential the European Union has been; there was indeed a period, in the first quarter of the 20th century, when it seemed that the West was in its last agony: the pages of Occidente y su muerte and, in those years, Oswald Spengler's book, The Decline of the West, 1918, remind us of this. And yet Ortega y Gasset, in his essay The Rebellion of the Masses, 1930, announced a process at which, even after a second terrible World War, we have arrived: 'The process of the creation of nations has always brought this rhythm to Europe. First moment. The peculiar western instinct, which makes the state feel like a fusion of various peoples in a unity of coexistence and morality, begins to act on the groups that are geographically, ethnically and linguistically closest. Not because this constitutes national fusion, but because diversity between neighbours is easy to dominate. Second moment. Period of consolidation, in which other peoples far from the new state are felt to be strangers and more or less enemies. This is the period in which the national process takes on a certain exclusivism and the tendency to close oneself within the state, what today is called nationalism. [...] Little by little, the consciousness emerges on the horizon that these enemy peoples belong to the same human circle as our state. Yet one continues to regard them as foreign and hostile. Third moment. The state reaches complete consolidation. Then the new enterprise arises: to unite with peoples who until yesterday were considered as enemies'.

The process is in progress and still faltering, because Europe today lacks the construction of interiority, that which Rilke so sharply intimated: 'Near is only the Within; all the other is far away. / And this Within is dense and daily / full of things and utterly inexpressible' (The Island, III). Of all Rilke's cities, Venice - visited for the first time in 1897 - is perhaps the one that provided him with the model we still need today to be European: to receive otherness, to construct interiority: "Strangers saw by what miserly yardstick / they measured him and his every deed; / and while they instigated him to greatness / they circled the golden dogado // more and more with controls and spies to limit him, / fearing the assault of that very power / that in him (as lions are held) / they cautiously nurtured. But in the shadow // of his slumbering senses, not seeing / their plots, he continued to make himself / relentlessly greater. What the lordship / believed in him to tame, he had / tamed in himself [...]' (Ein Doge, from Neue Gedichte, part II). The strongest lions are those who know how to tame our inner selves.