#450: Attacking Brussels = Challenging a Catholic Dream

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