As this year\u2019s Night of Ideas is focused on the concept of \u201c(re)building together,\u201d I shall begin with what I believe has been destroyed, based on my own personal experience. For our American friends reading this, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about the meaning of Europe, now that France has taken over the European Union Council presidency. As a 44 year-old French citizen, I am a member of the generation that witnessed the transformation of the European Economic Community (EEC) into the European Union (EU) as we know it today. My childhood and teenage years were punctuated by what I experienced as highly dramatic events, when new countries joined the great political and economic partnership, gradually increasing the number of members from nine to ten, twelve, fifteen and, eventually, twenty-seven.<\/p>\n
One memory that particularly stands out is when Spain and Portugal joined the union in 1986. I was nine at the time, and I dreamed of heading south to meet my new compatriots. I imagined valleys full of citrus fruits\u2014a clich\u00e9d image inspired by the mascot of the 1982 World Cup, which was played in Spain. The grinning orange-man, \u201cNaranjito,\u201d was engraved in my memory. He also featured on the Panini football stickers plastered all over my brothers\u2019 bedroom walls. Then there was the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, an extraordinary event followed by the sudden opening of the Soviet bloc (i.e. the previously impenetrable eastern part of the continent). My older brother set out for Germany to see for himself, and came back to Paris with a piece of concrete wall barely fifteen centimeters long, with a bit of graffiti still visible on its surface\u2014a miniature ruin, a sort of talisman for building our future in a finally reunited Europe. Then came the Maastricht referendum in 1992, which I think was the major event of my generation\u2019s political coming-of-age. A \u201cyes, barely\u201d with 51% of French voters in favor, but a massive \u201cyes\u201d from young people, who turned out in force to show their political support for the European project.<\/p>\n
I remember the switch to the Euro\u2014the single currency that replaced our French Francs\u2014and borders suddenly opening to the South, North and East of our country. With no more need for visas or customs declarations, school mates could jump on a train on the spur of the moment for a one-night round trip to Seville, Brussels or Munich, just to see what those places were like, the way we used to do with Marseille or Lille. As Victor Hugo once exclaimed, addressing the French National Assembly on March 1, 1871, \u201cLet us be the United States of Europe!\u201d My fascination with your vast country, a 50-state federation with no interstate visas, stems partly from that.<\/p>\n
Things have come full circle today and the word now on everyone\u2019s lips is \u201cexit\u201d\u2014as in Brexit, Frexit, Calexit. The threat of possible destruction of the European project suddenly became a reality one evening in 2002, in the second round of the French presidential election. I was living in London at the time; I remember my disbelief when the face that appeared on the TV screen was that of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right populist who wanted to take France out of the European Union. In a cruel twist of fate, it was that same country across the Channel\u2014which had felt to me like the very heart of Europe when I lived there in my mid-20s\u2014that would choose to leave the European Union, on January 31, 2020. Brexit \u201cgot done,\u201d and now we\u2019re back to square one in France with the right-wing populist\u2019s daughter, who also wants to isolate us from the rest of the continent.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s always dangerous when history appears to repeat itself. It is sometimes said that there are disturbing similarities between the current situation on the \u201cold continent\u201d and the 1930s, that Europe has fallen prey to the same evils that precipitated the war: jingoism, populism, distrust of others, xenophobia\u2026 The problem has spread worldwide and poses a threat to almost all of the liberal democracies, beginning with the United States which is just emerging from four years of enduring the same evils, which the billionaire ex-president claimed were virtues. Since Joe Biden\u2019s election, people here no longer talk about \u201c(re)-building\u201d <\/em>but about \u201cbuilding back.\u201d <\/em>\u201cBuild Back Better\u201d <\/em>was the Democratic candidate\u2019s campaign slogan and refers to the economic recovery plan he has implemented since he came to power. The expression refers to the past, though it\u2019s unclear whether it means \u201cbefore the pandemic\u201d or \u201cbefore Trump\u201d (when the current president was Obama\u2019s second-in-command). The operative word is probably \u201cbetter,\u201d which refers, as President Biden has explained on several occasions, to what he sees as the renewed possibility of a better life, greater social protection, and measures to protect the environment. \u201cBuilding Back Together\u201d is also a civic initiative that emerged in the wake of the 2020 election. As their website<\/a> puts it, \u201cBuilding Back Together advances the policy agenda of the Biden-Harris administration and effectively communicates the positive impacts of these critical policies to the American people. Our name is intentional: we can\u2019t do this work alone.\u201d<\/p>\n Together<\/em> is the title of the latest book by Turkish author and intellectual Ece Temelkuran. \u201cThis word, an ancient word in every language,\u201d she writes, \u201cmust have been invented to help us survive or tell stories of survival. The verbs it calls to mind (to gather, to join, to gravitate towards unity, to fit in, to come together in acceptance of differences) might seem outdated today.\u201d But in her own country, the very possibility of \u201cbeing together\u201d grows more complex every day. Turkey has been governed for years by a despotic president whose attitude towards the people seems inspired by the \u201cdivide and rule\u201d principle laid out in Machiavelli\u2019s The Prince<\/em>. Yet when Mustafa Kemal Atat\u00fcrk oversaw the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, it was a model of democracy in some respects, granting women voting rights long before the Western countries. Today, it is the country where the most journalists are imprisoned worldwide. Last year, Ece called me from Zagreb, where she now lives in exile. Over the last ten years, she has received numerous death threats on social media. She has also been accused by the government of having \u201corchestrated the Gezi Park protests in 2013\u201d. A newspaper close to Erdogan even printed her seat number on a flight to Ankara, \u201cin case someone would like to fix her for good.\u201d<\/p>\n Turkey is a country I know well: I got married there and my wife was born there. Most of my friends and family have now left Istanbul, Ankara, or Izmir to live abroad. Like Ece, they could be arrested if they return to their country, just for participating in the anti-government demonstrations in Gezi Park. \u201cThe true suffering of exile is not experienced in glory,\u201d Ece told me when we spoke on the phone last year, \u201cbut in solitude, or even in shame.\u201d She wanted to look to the future, to understand whether we could still \u201cact together\u201d today to build a brighter tomorrow. Not in vague theoretical terms, but by observing some very practical situations that illustrate new ways of living and acting together. So she traveled the world, drawing inspiration from the citizens\u2019 movements that have emerged here and there in recent years, such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Global Climate Strike, Black Lives Matter, etc. Observing that \u201cboth national and international institutions have lost the last residue of their prestige,\u201d she praises these \u201cnew forms of positive political activism,\u201d or \u201cantibodies\u201d as she calls them, that help us resist the rise of populism, fake news, and anti-democratic movements. \u201cWhat is true of all these political events,\u201d she writes, \u201cis that they happened when we came together. Consequently, \u2018together\u2019 is the only potentially dangerous word that I choose to include as a component of this new political and moral antibody.\u201d<\/p>\n So the word \u201ctogether is now \u201cpotentially dangerous\u201d? In some countries, the mere fact of meeting together is repressed by law. For my latest book, I interviewed some young climate activists who were imprisoned in their own country, whether in China, Russia, or Uganda, simply for demonstrating in favor of a less polluted world. For years now, Arshak Makichyan has been holding a solitary picket every Friday in Moscow\u2019s Pushkin Square, because it\u2019s the only form of demonstration allowed there. On October 25, 2019, he was arrested by the police and imprisoned for two weeks. His \u201ccrime\u201d was meeting with two of his friends, \u201ctogether for once,\u201d he told me, to demonstrate in the usual place on the occasion of the Global Climate Strike. Alone and isolated in her country of origin, where the environment is still a taboo subject, young Chinese climate activist Howey Ou was also jailed on several occasions. She eventually learned to use a VPN on her computer to escape government monitoring when connecting with the outside world, meeting online with friends from Fridays for Future <\/em>who, like her, <\/em>are fighting against global warming, all around the world. After years of persecution, she finally left for Europe, to join a local Occupy-style group in Switzerland.<\/p>\n Ece learned a lesson from the lockdown: \u201cIt is much easier to run a country when people cannot physically get together and stay together.\u201d No more demonstrations, no more strikes, no more calls to take to the streets. Admittedly France, where I spent the last two years with my family because of the pandemic, is not Turkey or China. Although the \u201cemergency law\u201d voted in March 2020 to deal with the Covid-19 epidemic included several new prohibitions, and although some of my American friends saw certain measures as worthy of the Soviet Union (\u201cYou couldn\u2019t go out if you didn\u2019t have a special permit on you?\u201d), I\u2019m glad that our individual liberties are still respected on both sides of the Atlantic, in comparison with so many other countries.<\/p>\n In California, where I chose to settle again with my family after the pandemic, I am more than ever inspired by the mutual aid and solidarity I have encountered, time and again. Never mind all the fault-finders who\u2019d rather to focus on the divisions in this vast country which, despite its crises and tensions, has always managed to reinvent itself! Recently, for a feature story, I went to see how as property was despoiled last century by the City of Manhattan-Beach, out of pure racism, was at last to be restored to their African-Americans descendants: thanks to joint action by an activist, family members, and councilors of all political persuasions, Bruce\u2019s Beach would soon be returned to its rightful owners. \u201cThis case will set a precedent, and inspire other states in the country to take similar measures,\u201d Janice Hahn, the local councilor behind the decree that enabled the procedure to go ahead (a decree approved by all the councilors, Republicans and Democrats alike, in the California State Senate and House of Representatives), explained. That restored my faith in the American Dream, a dream I thought had been well and truly forgotten after four years of Trump, but a dream I had experienced for myself and shared with so many other immigrants when I first moved here in 2007 and attended, awestruck, the election of the first African-American president of the United States, himself the son of an immigrant\u2014the dream that inspired me to write a book in 2007.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerica always means two things,\u201d German filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote in his 1984 essay, The American Dream<\/em>. \u201cA country, geographically, the USA, and an idea of that country which goes with it, the American Dream. <\/em>No other country in the world has sold itself so much, sent its images, its SELF-image with such power into every corner of the world.\u201d In Los Angeles, the world capital of the image industry, the dream (or Hollywood chimera) factory, one of my favorite occupations is reading the billboards <\/em>when I drive around. On Sunset Blvd., near Silver Lake, one shows a bucolic park scene with people enjoying outdoor activities, a woman looking into the distance through binoculars, a cyclist riding past behind her. The billboard states, \u201cWe can do this TOGETHER.\u201d (What is \u201cthis\u201d, I wonder?) \u201cBeoutdoorsafe.org\u201d<\/p>\n I understand the goal of that advertising campaign\u2014to make people more responsible towards nature, to get them to learn to go camping or hiking without polluting or starting a fire, while \u201cobserving the preventive measures.\u201d But I can\u2019t help feeling rather sad that \u201cliving together\u201d today boils down to staying safe, preserving the environment, and battling against the coronavirus. Aren\u2019t there any more positive and constructive reasons for exchanging and interacting with our fellow humans? In a sense, individual awareness is already a step in the right direction. \u201cThe young people of your generation thought about what they would do in the future,\u201d activist Greta Thunberg said in one of her speeches, \u201cwhile our generation is trying to ensure that a future is still possible.\u201d She always begins her speeches with something I think is essential, hammering home the scientific facts, contrasting fake news with scientific data. Time and again she repeats the same thing, because she\u2019s understood the virtues of repetition, whatever the result\u2014even if we forget to aim for a result. \u201cEver tried. Ever failed,\u201d Samuel Beckett wrote. \u201cNo matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.\u201d It\u2019s like the \u201cre-\u201d in \u201c(re)build together\u201d, the repetition in parenthesis. And Greta doesn\u2019t stop there; she draws attention to her less well known friends, especially Arshak and Howey, at the forefront of the battle against global warming in their countries. The people who talk to each other, support each other, help each other, and try to (re)build their future together.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n