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Oct. 31 - Nov. 7, 2004 |
13 - Looking For Our European Roots
Series traces the evolvement of the world's most culturally diverse continent
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2004-08-22
After May 1, the European Union has become a political reality: now it is made up of 25 Member States, 450 million citizens, and 20 official languages. Its territory runs from the Iberian Peninsula to the Urals, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. For the first time in its millenary history, Europe is unified... but not by conquest. The Europeans decided to join together at last, casting aside past enmities and century-old rancours.
Several times, in our reports, we wrote that so many different peoples are kept together mostly by their common culture. We never delved on the roots of this culture. That's what we intend to do now.
This is no easy task, as more qualified people spent years studying this same subject, writing monumental tomes. Entering any Italian library and asking a librarian to browse the online catalogue for cultura europea, no fewer than 300 books will be retrieved. And these are only those published in Italy. They're quite a few, and prove the importance of the subject.
We've read some (let's leave it at that) of those books, spoken with some of their authors, pestered more than one university professor, and beaten the roads of Europe looking for confirmations of the things we had read or been told. In summary, we've made up our mind, and would like to share our observations with our readers.
Let's begin with a simple remark: the modest size of Europe did not prevent it from becoming for centuries the central hub of political, cultural and scientific activities of the whole planet. That happened because Europe grew in the confrontation of great differences: just think of the peoples and nations that compose it, of the languages they speak. From a political standpoint that caused endless wars among Europeans; from a cultural standpoint, on the other hand, those differences stimulated their creativity. This is where the real richness of Europe was born: no other great country has it, be it the United States or Russia.
Umberto Cerroni wrote in a recent essay, "With the development of European unification and the overcoming of the century-long intricacy of its internal difficulties, we're discovering the intellectual richness that those same difficulties produced." Paul Valéry was even more explicit. "Everything came from Europe, everything started there. Or at least almost everything." These considerations can charm and occasionally make Europeans proud, but Europe's richness is a result. We are mostly interested in the starting point: the cultural roots of the Old World. They are Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Arab. They left unmistakable traces in national histories and cultures, a sort of underground river running through them. If one manages to ignore the wars, both holy and profane, that have been fought, and the mutual intolerance and disrespect, that river can resurface. And it does so even in small things, not just big ones.
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