“Europe aspires for the rest of the world to adopt a humanism by definition intended for all” | EUROtoday

“We are not like the others. » Emmanuel Macron's sweeping speech at the Sorbonne on April 25 conveyed many concepts, one of which may raise questions: the singularity of our continent. While warning of the mortality of Europe, in the sense of the risk of its marginalization for the benefit of rival powers, the Head of State highlighted the exceptionality of Europe, which unites its unity and nourishes its vitality. .

By hammering home the existence of a “We, Europeans”, it relaunches an mental reflection on the identification of the continent, which precedes and runs by way of the complete European building. She lived specifically Jacques Delors who, figuring out that“we don’t fall in love with the internal market”had mobilized scientific, inventive and non secular forces to “give a soul to Europe”. The one from which emanates a sense of belonging with out which there isn’t any nice collective design, nor incarnated energy.

The debate returns by way of the geopolitical door. The Sino-American rivalry, usually in comparison with a brand new Cold War, tends to oppose the West and the Rest, the West and the remainder of the world. The thought with Gaullist overtones of Europe as an influence seeks to interrupt this potential bipolarity by exhibiting that not solely the pursuits, however the very values ​​of Europeans will not be aligned with these of the Americans, with whom we’ll quickly commemorate with nice fanfare the Landing.

Universality

Emmanuel Macron already affirmed this on the 2019 ambassadors convention and within the journal The Great Continent in 2020, on the finish of the Trump presidency: “We are not the United States of America. (…) Our values ​​are not quite the same. » Even more obviously in the face of China. While the war in Ukraine has united the Western camp, there is no question of drowning Europe in it. As he declared at the Sorbonne: “Europe is not simply a piece of the West but a world continent that considers its universality. » Including in cultural terms, a slippery slope on which most of its European counterparts do not dare to venture. Berlin and Warsaw would never put it that way.

However, these are not just armchair discussions, but rather a battle of narratives in which the French president wants to engage Europe. The philosopher Luuk van Middelaar insists that, like Russia or China, European geopolitics should equip itself with“a story with European civilization as its hero”with “the European Union as its current political expression”. In “Sorbonne 2”, this “hero” totally different from the others is known as European humanism, i.e. “a certain idea of ​​man which places the free, rational and enlightened individual above everything” : “To be European is to assume that there’s nothing extra vital, the truth is, than to be a free particular person, endowed with purpose and who is aware of. »

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