He has written Looking for Europe , a monologue in which he plays an intellectual who racks his brains for an hour and a half to write a speech on Europe.
The desire of the French philosopher is not merely artistic. The work is a call to action against the foreseeable nationalist rebirth in the next elections to the European Parliament.
Lévy will tour 24 European cities, including Spain's Valencia (March 20), Barcelona (March 25) and Madrid (March 26).
He says he goes on tour for two reasons, because the situation in the European Union is emergency and because it can be reversed. He has just arrived in Madrid from Barcelona, to which he has granted the capital designation of populism and where he has announced the return of Albert Boadella to a Catalan theater. In the role of a nationalist.
His work Looking for Europe is located in a hotel room in Sarajevo. The choice is not idle. Why is there almost no talk of nationalism? There is talk of populism, independence, other formulas, when the word nationalism helps to understand both the past and the present of Europe.
You are right and that is the reason why I go out to look for Europe. Looking for Europe is an emergency call that tries to warn about the danger of nationalism. Being proud of your identity is fine, but closing yourself to the other and raising walls is a nightmare, it is the mother of wars and the worst miseries and you tend to forget it. I try to remember it in my work. Nationalism is a ghost that goes back to Europe and that phantom must be identified as such.
Spain is a very pro-European country but the image of the European Union came out badly damaged by the procés. It is difficult to understand that a fugitive like Carles Puigdemont would find refuge in the heart of Europe.
It is true. Spain has built an exemplary democracy in a few years. The Transition is an example of how a country can emerge from the darkness of fascism and build a democracy. Moreover, Spain has built the paradigm of a State, which is not the French Jacobin State, nor a federal State like the United States, nor a confederal State. It is a very unique type of nation-state that you invented when you left Francoism and I am not sure that Europe has recognized to what extent it should be appreciated, protected and praised. I do not know if Europe has managed to understand that not only the Spanish people should be proud of the creation of this very special paradigm of State, but also that the rest of Europeans should be proud. The way in which Puigdemont has been welcomed in his escape and the way we have accepted this comedy, this provocation, in Belgium or in Germany is quite unfair for Spain. I know that many European citizens think like me.
Especially in France.
And also in Belgium. And in the European institutions. There are many people who know that what Puigdemont has done is spit in the face not only of Spain but of democracy in Europe in general.
Are your predictions about the upcoming European Parliament elections so grim?
No no. It all depends on the democrats, the liberals on the left and the right, waking up. If that happens, the European Union can prevail.
Are you on time?
Yes they are. I would not undertake this exhausting campaign, I would not travel city by city as I am doing all over Europe if I did not have the hope that there can be an awakening and that the populists and the nationalists can be defeated, that we can prove they are cheats, some impostors, some demagogues and that would take people to hell. I am convinced that populism is fighting against the people, that theirs is not the way to help people but to submerge their heads underwater.
Would you include within that band of populists, demagogues and cheats that speaks to a force like Vox?
Yes. Vox belongs to the same family. It is a new game that we do not yet know exactly all the points of his program and that has not yet been completely unmasked. This type of games tend to advance with a mask that is falling slowly. You will soon see how close Vox is from Marine Le Pen and leaders like Viktor Orbán. They have the same strategy and will have the same allies. You will see how Steve Bannon pays them a lot of attention, if he has not already done so. I can assure you that before my work is released, you will see how Steve Bannon appears interacting with Vox. It is news that I can already anticipate.
But in all these forces that you mention there are particularities. Le Pen is secular and does not share the confessional part of Vox, Salvini is a federalist.
I came here 40 years ago to Madrid to have a debate with Santiago Carrillo in a program called La Clave. There I said that communism and fascism shared the same agenda. Of course they were not the same, they even fought each other for decades. Of course Carrillo was an antifascist all his life. There was more than differences between them: there was an abyss. And yet they had a common agenda. The same thing happens today. Of course Vox, Marine Le Pen and Salvini maintain differences, much less than Carrillo with Franco, and yet the agenda is the same: ruin the values of European liberal democracy that we strive to defend. Forty years ago, Carrillo's friends became very angry with me, insulted me and told me that I could not compare him. I was right.
Extremism often benefits from the fact that the voter acts in a more frivolous manner in the European elections and uses them to punish their respective governments.
In this time of crisis, when we have so many external enemies, Chinese trade imperialism, Putin's ambition for power, Trump's betrayal, Erdogan's hatred, every election is important. It is not just a way to punish your president. These European elections are crucial and I am campaigning to explain it. The situation is too dramatic to consider these elections as any. They are crucial.
In your work there is a strong emotional charge. It's interesting Liberal forces seem to have given up the emotional charge of politics and believe that it is enough to state a truth in order to be recognized.
We have to be careful with the emotions because it is the path that leads to populism but at the same time we should not leave the populists the monopoly of emotion. We Europeans, democrats, liberals, we have to walk on two legs: knowledge and emotion. The policy is composed of both and we have to be able to connect them. As a modest writer, what I try is to unite both threads.
You have no qualms about talking about patriotism.
I define myself as a citizen of Europe of French origin and language. The language is my wealth, I am a writer, my origin is very important, but first of all I am a citizen of Europe.
With the crisis in Venezuela, the idea that Europe is incapable of defending itself and that in the end it has to be a platoon of American Marines that saves civilization returns. In other words, Europe is too slow a bureaucracy that does not respond to the challenges of the moment.
Europe is what the states of Europe have decided it to be. Your bureaucrats can give their best but they have a mandate from Spain, from France, from Germany ... Now what we have to do is expand the margins of that mandate. Because now that we see Trump abandoning us and Putin attacking us, we have to build a more powerful force, we must have a common defense, a common foreign policy. We must be able to do it, otherwise we will be devoured by our enemies.
How is it possible that Emmanuel Macron has yielded to the violence of the yellow vests?
He has not given in. He has done something very different. There are two phenomena in France. The yellow jackets with their violence, their hatred of the republic, their anti-Semitism and their racism. And then you have some economic claims about some real problems. What Macron did was to open the debate but not to the yellow vests but to all the French. You have proposals and ideas, let's put them on the table. Macron is thus inventing a new form of democratic deliberation about the ideas that people have begun to share and that experts did not see coming. It is a good democratic experience.
https://www.elmundo.es/cultura/2019/01/31/5c51d1db21efa088638b460f.html
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