Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The creation of the euro, despite the controversial exit of England, not the United Kingdom, because Scotland tried to make a referendum on the issue and the British Parliament rejected it, the attempt to create a European concept and policy did not fail, it just did not advance in the essentials.

Its deep humanist and cultural roots were suffocated by idealist and Enlightenment ideologies.

Sloterdijk’s book Se a Europa despertar (If Europe wakes up, in branzilian version) outlines the essentials of what the real Europe would be, its borders and its ethnic bases, what its practically abandoned religious identity would be, it’s not immigration that’s undermining this vision of identity and unity, but the question Sloterdijk asks in his book is what scene do Europeans draw in their decisive historical moments? What ideas animate them, what illusions mobilize them? And it’s not difficult to point out their misconceptions, both in terms of ethnic and cultural bases.

Father Manuel Antunes, too, in his book Repensar Portugal (Rethinking Portugal), written before the European Union, said that his country should turn towards Europe, that before it was a little corner of Europe that turned its back on it and turned towards its African colonies.

Colonization and wars, intestinal, because there were religious wars at the end of the Renaissance, and the Peace of Westphalia, a treaty that removed the religious question from the disputes, but Europe had other border and ethnic disputes, until it culminated in two world wars.

They ended up involving the whole world, because there are interests that go beyond borders, but we have to understand that a true European identity and unity has not yet been built, the borders have been opened, but now they seem uncertain and threatened by the involvement in the war in Eastern Europe.

Sloterdijk’s main thesis in this book is that the model of colonization that gave Europe the idea of an Empire of the Centre (as the author calls it) opened up a vacuum in the post-war period that created a generation of intellectuals who sought a new imperial model, so the author concludes that it has failed to understand that it is no longer a center and has difficulty with this.

The wars are therefore a way of bringing back the idea of empire, the opposite of what Sloterdijk proposed in his book, which would be to abandon this model. This is also the conclusion of Father Manuel Antunes, who adds a model of “social democracy” to Portugal.

Sloterdijk, P. (2002) Se a Europa despertar. Trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques. Brazil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.