The historic importance of Brussels in recent European history deepens the tragedy of this week’s attacks.
During my junior year abroad as a political science
major, one of my courses at the University of Paris’ Institute of Political Studies
was a seminar in energy policies of the Common Market. In those days (1969!) “Common
Market” referred to the six-nation cooperative that later expanded into the
European Economic Community (EEC), and finally into today’s European Union (EU).
The highlight of the term was a field trip to Common Market
Headquarters in Brussels. For 4 days, our seminar group participated in working
conferences with Common Market diplomats discussing the future direction of the
Common Market. (In those days,
simultaneous translation was available in French, Italian, Dutch, and German--but
not English, since Great Britain had not yet joined the Market.)
On the final day of the conference we finished with a
lavish lunch that reinforced our impression that our hosts were intent on
recruiting as many of our seminar members as possible for the work of
international diplomacy. My classmates
knew that I was the exception, since I would be returning to the United States
at the end of the year. Nonetheless,
they wanted to know what I thought of the entire gathering. My response was that I hoped, if I returned in
25 years, I would find a new “United States of Europe” waiting for me. This pleased everyone, since it was exactly
what they were hoping for as well.
In the nearly 50 years since then, what was the Common
Market has expanded to more than 25 countries, continues to expand, has added
political institutions like the European Parliament, opened the borders among all its member
countries, and even established the Euro as a common currency among most of
them. And through all this time,
Brussels has remained the capital of the New Europe.
But behind this
history is a vision that was driven by Catholic leaders whose dream, while it has
come very close to fulfillment, is now being jeopardized by the terror
movements that surfaced once again this week—precisely in Brussels.
The Common Market started with something called the
Schuman plan in the years after World War II.
Its chief architect was Jean Monnet, a Frenchman who represented an
entire class of socially elite Europeans who belonged to Christian Democratic
parties and espoused a world view rooted in Catholic “Personalism.”
The theology of personalism looked beyond the national
identities dividing people to focus on the people themselves. It called for the
reconciliation of former enemies, the reduction of animosities and divisions
among European countries, and the creation of a transnational community that
could end the long history of European warfare and provide the basis for both
peace and prosperity.
Their notion was that European nations, tired of long
generations of war, would be willing to sacrifice some of their national
sovereignty and independence for a more interdependent
federation that would end up looking something like the United States of
America.
Their agenda was gradual and progressive. They intended to begin with free trade agreements
leading to an economic union, which in turn would gradually encourage nations
to form a political federation. When I
visited the headquarters in 1969, things like a common currency, a European parliament,
and open borders were far away--but they were part of the vision from the start.
It may be difficult for Americans to appreciate what
Europe has accomplished. Most Americans
I meet have no idea that the European Union is a clear imitation of the
experience in American history of moving from three distinct colonies, to 13 loosely
federated states, to a unified republic of states under the U.S. Constitution. And while the media consistently describes
contemporary China as the world’s #2 economy after the U.S., the fact is that
by most standards the EU is a bigger economy than China.
But now, as refugees pressure the eastern borders of
Europe, as the open borders within Europe allow radicals to move freely, and as
security forces prove incapable of preventing further attacks, the common
wisdom is that Europe’s experiment may be in jeopardy. Perhaps the open borders will be lost. Perhaps the single currency will soon be gone. Perhaps the vision of a unified Europe will
not survive terror.
Brussels remains at the center of that vision. It is not only the headquarters of the
European Union’s daily operations, is also the where NATO has located its Supreme
Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) since 1967. In short, this small country finds itself the
host of the major institutions that make the Catholic dream of a united Europe
a reality.
But ironically, it is precisely in this small country
that we see the critical flaw in that original dream.
Observers on the scene have been informing us that the
neighborhood recently raided by intelligence and security forces, the same
neighborhood where the newest assailants lived, is a kind of isolated, “no go” Muslim
ghetto within Brussels, capable of harboring fugitives and providing a home
base for planning terrorist attacks.
Such neighborhoods exist in many major cities in many
countries, and are almost always the result of the failure to integrate
newcomers into the general mainstream of the population. And it is no surprise that this has been
especially difficult to do in Belgium, a country which has not even succeeded
in unifying its own people.
Belgium has long been torn between the Flemish and the
Walloons--that is, the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking. It has it is as though Belgian has been
caught cultural and between France and the Netherlands, and never resolved its
identity. With such a fissure in the
main population, it is no surprise that the Muslim community has fallen through
the cracks.
But there is a deeper tragedy in this fact. The Christian democratic parties that founded
the vision of a common Europe on Catholic personalism came from the elite
classes of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. These elites assumed not only that it was the
responsibility of the educated elite to forge the continent’s future--they also
assumed that the continent’s future depended on its Christian identity. In other words, the vision behind the
European Union was a vision of Christian culture dominating the continent.
No surprise, then, that the influx of Muslims into
Europe has been consistently out of sync with the progression of the European
Union. Just as many conservative
Americans cling to the myth of the Christian nation in the United States, many
of the governing class behind the European Union have clung to the myth of a
Christian Europe.
The explicit endorsement of Christianity has
disappeared from EU documents, to be sure, in the interest of the secularized
cultures that have emerged since World War II.
But the founding vision has never been quite prepared for the pluralism
that Europe has witnessed in the wake of the end of colonialism. As populations have flooded into Europe from
North Africa and the Middle East, Europe has been consistently caught off guard. And this week’s attacks have revealed that
the very city which has become the heart of the European Union has been perhaps
the least prepared to broaden the vision that would keep that union alive. It
has become home to the vision of United Europe, but has failed to become home
to its newest peoples.
The lesson, for both Europe, and for America, is not
to hold back the movement of new peoples.
That strategy would be little more than a finger in the dike of global
migration. Rather, the lesson, the moral
of the story, is that we must learn better than ever how to welcome and
integrate new peoples, adapting our vision of the future so that these people,
rather than radicalizing into dangerous attackers, develop a sense of ownership
and investment in the vision itself.
Ironically, the EU’s founding Catholic vision of a peaceful
Europe will only work if it opens beyond Catholicism, and even beyond Christianity.
Nothing could be clearer about this week’s attacks than
this: the attackers felt no stake in the status quo, and had nothing to lose by
attacking it. And nothing is more common
sense than this: the survival of our hopes for the future--for the kind of life
we would lead, and for the kind of world we want--all that depends on creating
for such people a stake in our way of life.
Only when they have everything to gain by joining us, and everything to
lose by attacking us, will the threat recede and civility return to our life.
But for both Europe and America, this means abandoning
the destructive myth of a culture dominated by Christians, and accepting that
the global future--and in all probability the providential will of God--calls
for a single human family learning to inhabit, in civility and peace, what Pope
Francis has called “Our Common Home.”
© Bernard F. Swain PhD
2016
