Remo Ceserani
University of Bologna, Italy
Denis De Rougemont and his idea of Europe
Abstract: The discussion on the draft of a European constitution and on the proposal of including in it a mention of the Christian roots of European identity. The contribution to this discussion of the writings of a Swiss thinker: Denis De Rougemont (1906-1985) and especially of his Écrits sur l’Europe.
Keywords: Denis De Rougemont, European identity, federalism, multiculturalism
We have all followed, in the last few years, the heated discussions that have taken place about Europe, its ethnic and cultural roots, and its possible identity. We have read, and some of us voted for or against, the draft of a European constitution prepared by a commission headed by Valéry Giscaird d’Estaing (which, as you all know, has been recently rejected by a popular referendum in two important countries: France and the Netherlands). The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, in a good number of essays and articles [1995, 2001a, 2001b, 20001c, 2003, 2005], while taking side in favor of the proposed constitution, has rejected all traditional ideas of a nation, and also of a federation of nations, as ”a community of fate shaped by common descent, language and history”. Instead, he has suggested to conceive the modern nation, or federation of nations, as a “community of citizens”: ”a civic, rather than ethnic community”, whose collective identity ”exists neither independent of nor prior to the democratic process from which it springs”. Drawing from his enlightenment-inspired conception of the political functioning of modern societies, Habermas conceives a nation as a historical formation based on constitutional agreement, democratic procedures, the sharing of economic interests, cultural values, interpretations of the past, the development of means of communication of knowledge and ideas, and the growth of a ”public sphere”. Habermas, therefore, puts forward the idea of Europe as a specific community characterized by the shared values of solidarity, the orientation towards social, political, and economic inclusion, and the common goal of defending the welfare state. Others, and among them with particular emphasis, the authorities of the Catholic Church, and a number of politicians from various countries, have insisted on the necessity of preserving the Christian identity of Europe, of mentioning the Christian roots of our continent in its constitution, of including in Europe only the states in which the majority of the population professes Christianity, leaving out new candidate-states like Turkey. They base their position not only on the teaching of the late pope Karoly Woytila and also of the actual pope Joseph Ratzinger, but on a long cultural, and somewhat mythical conception of Europe, along a line of thought that links together, in spite of their ideological differences, a romantic and visionary philosopher like Friedrich Novalis [1799], a romance philologist like Ernst Robert Curtius [1947], a French right-wing utopist like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle [1941], a recent Italian violent and racist pamphleteer like Oriana Fallaci [2001, 2004], not to mention various political leaders of the far right like the French Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Austrian Joseph Haider, the Italian Umberto Bossi, all of whom have received new impetus and encouragement from the fundamentalist positions of contemporary American neo-cons.
As to the opposing line of thought, which is behind the position of Habermas, I could here mention the contributions of historians, philosophers, intellectuals like Marc Bloch [1935], Hanna Arendt [1951,1978], Federico Chabod [1961], Jean-Baptiste Duroselle [1965], Salvador de Madariaga [1968], Benedict Anderson [1983], Edgar Morin [1987], Ulrich Beck [1997], and many others. I will here limit myself to present the ideas of an interesting and passionate defender of an open idea of Europe, the Swiss Denis De Rougemont. You probably know a book that De Rougemont wrote in the late thirties L’Amour et l’Occident [1939]: it is a famous and controversial book, which contains a long denunciation of the perils of amour passion or romantic love. One might not agree with the strong condemnation, in De Rougemont’s book, of romantic love, but one cannot avoid recognizing that it is an important book, which offers a complex historical reconstruction of the conception of love elaborated at the time of the troubadours, of Tristan and Isolde and of Abelard and Eloise and of its recurrent influence in the modern societies of Europe. Not everyone knows, however, that after the war the same De Rougemont, based at the time in Geneva, animated by a strong utopian drive, inspired by a spirit of anti-conformism and of radical independence of thought, spent the last decades of his life in a long battle in favour of European federalism, with hundreds of essays, speeches, manifestoes, historical works, that have been collected in two large volumes of more than 800 hundred pages each [1994], the first volume of which contains [pp. 485-780], a substantial history of the idea of Europe, written in 1961: Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe.
Who was Denis De Rougemont?[1] He was born in 1906 at Couvet, in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel, the son of a Calvinist pastor. After having started the study of chemistry, he moved to that of letters, which he pursued at the University of Neuchâtel from 1925 to 1930. In 1930 he went to live in Paris, where, within the movements ”Esprit” and ”L’Ordre Nouveau” he was one of the founders of Personnalisme, together with Emmanuel Mounier, Arnaud Dandieu, Robert Aron, Henri Daniel-Rops et Alexandre Marc. Called the «non-conformists of the Thirties», these French intellectuals rejected both Hitler and Stalin, both nationalism and individualism, and supported the idea of a political, economic and social organisation at the service of what they called ”la personne”, conceived as a unity at the same time distinct from (l’individu) and connected with the community (le citoyen), at the same time free (in its role as an individual) and responsible (in its role as a citizen). De Rougemont and his friends took a stand against the centralised Nation-state as a form of organization of society and declared their preference for federalism. While in Paris De Rougemont published two books, one on Personalism: Politique de la Personne (1934) and the other on the relationship between theory and practice Penser avec les mains (1936), In the years 1935-1936 he worked in Germany as a teacher of French at the University of Frankfurt: his strongly critical reaction to the rise of Nazism can be read in his Journal d’Allemagne, published in 1938. In 1940, a year after the publication of his most well-known book L’Amour et l’Occident, the Swiss authorities, judging his active participation in an anti-Nazi organisation, called la Ligue du Gothard, a possible infringement of Swiss neutrality, sent him on a diplomatic and cultural mission to New York. There he met many European intellectuals and refugees and published in 1942 a book on the great evils that were poisoning the world: La part du diable. After Hiroshsima and Nagasaki he published the Lettres sur la bombe atomique (1946). After his return to Europe in 1947, he took up the full-time mission of convincing the European States and citizens to embrace the federal solution for their political organisation. He was among the founders of l’Union Européenne des Fédéralistes, of the Centre Européen de la Culture, that began its mission in Geneva in 1950, of the Congrès pour la liberté de la Culture, of the European Association of Musical Festivals, and also of the European Center for nuclear energy, the well-known CERN. Among his new interests, beside the battle for federalism and for the regional dimensions of the European continent (Lettre ouverte aux Européens 1970), there was the newly discovered discipline of ecology and the battle for the safeguard of our environment: L’Avenir est notre affaire, 1977. Denis De Rougemont died at Geneva in December 1985.
In order to understand the originality of De Rougemont’s conception of Europe one must stress two points. The first one is his being Swiss and his being convinced that the federal organisation of Switzerland should become a model for the construction of the new Europe. The Swiss model, with this long tradition of neutrality and pacifism, its division into relatively independent cantons, its capacity of unifying in a single State populations that speak four different languages, practice three different forms of Christianity: Catholicisim, Calvinism and Lutheranism (and also accommodating a not insignificant number of followers of other religions or of agnostics), its moderate inclusion of immigrants from all parts of the world, seems to defy the famous declaration of John Stuart Mill, pronounced in 1861, at the height of the celebration of the national States:
Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feelings, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country.[2]
There is in De Rougemont an evident pride for the contribution given by Switzerland to modernity. It is unusual to find mentioned, among the capitals of the European culture of the Twentieth century (Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Prague) also the Swiss cities of Geneva, Basel and Zurich, but certainly the list of names that De Rougemont puts forward is impressive: Ferdinand De Saussure for linguistics, Jean Piaget for psychology, Pierre Bovet for pedagogy, Karl Gustav Jung for psychoanalysis, Karl Jaspers for the foundation of existentialism, Karl Kérenyi for the interpretation of myth, Karl Barth for the renovation of protestant theology, Jean Arp and Paul Klee for the world of art, not to mention the centrality of Zurich at the time of Lenin, Joyce and the Cabaret Voltaire, etc. etc. In any case the model of the Swiss social system, so often looked upon with a certain condescension and reduced, in the European imaginary, to the precision of clocks and the beauty of the alpine landscapes of blue lakes, green pastures and snowy mountains must not be underestimated: it has probably something to say, along with other plurilinguistic and pluricultural states like Belgium, when we start to think of Europe as a multinational construction.
The second point is the peculiar mixture, in De Rougemont’s cultural approach, of secular modernity, religious radicalism, ethical nonconformity and openness of mind. The tradition from which he comes is that of Calvin, Luther, Goethe, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and of his personal friend Karl Barth. Contrary to those that speak so generically and superficially of the Christian roots of Europe, he writes that the original features of Europe are rooted in contradiction, conflict and laceration: the Christian cross for him is a tragic symbol of laceration, not simply of sacrifice and resurrection. Between those that think of Europe as a homogeneous civilization (based on the Greco-Roman-Christian legacy) and those that think of it as a space of differences and encounters of many civilizations he sides with the second ones, insisting on the diversity of nations, traditions, languages, religions, ideologies, political systems. For Europe, according to him, diversity can be an asset, not a hindrance. He speaks of those differences using a religious language: federalism for him is the result of love for complexity, as opposed to the brutal simplifications that are typical of all totalitarian approaches to reality: ”Je dis bien l’amour et non pas le respect ou la tolerance”. By siding with love instead of tolerance he takes his distance from the legacy of Enlightenment and the process of dechristianisation of Europe – the very legacy to which Habermas pays homage and to which I would myself pay homage, if my opinion in this context could have any importance.
European culture, De Rougemont writes, is a specific, recognizable culture, distinct from the cultures of the other continents (Asia, Africa, partly the Americas). European culture was formed by the confluence of numerous cultural streams: Near Orient, Greece, Rome, Christianity, Celts, Germans, Scandinavians, Arabs, and Slavs. In the course of centuries all those cultures were integrated in the mainstream culture of Europe and brought to it many diversifications. Athens, Rome and Jerusalem have furnished each a different type of culture, whose values were different one from the other and not easy to reduce to unity; when one succeeds in combining two of them, the third one tends to be excluded. On those first layers of culture, numerous other ones have been added, often contradicting the existing layers. From the Judeo-Christian tradition came the idea of a single, powerful God, a prophetic view of the world, the myth of the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ, the battle against slavery and for solidarity among fellow humans. From the Greeks came the great philosophical currents, the natural sciences, the logic of Aristotle, the medicine of Hippocrates, the materialistic trends of Epicurus and the Epicureans, the ethics of Stoicism, the practice of historiography, the arts (vases, sculptures, paintings), the tradition of lyrical poetry, the powerful sense of the tragic, the lighter sense of the comic, etc. From the Romans came the practice of the law, the institutional a bureaucratic organization of the State, the unifying tendencies of the imperial ideal. From the Celts came the ”sens de la Quête”, the experience of defeat and of his transfiguration, the experience of creative excess (la ”démesure”), the practice of ”chevalerie”: chivalry. From the Celts and the Germans came the sense of individual honour (or bravery) and of loyalty to the clan. These values were combined with and mitigated by the Christian values of humility and obedience to God, thus producing the individual adventures of Lancelot and the other knights, in a style at the same time Celtic, Cistercian, courtly and probably Catharist (that is Manichean). To these values were added the Occitanic ideal of courtliness, mixed with Gnosis and Arabic eroticism and lyricism. The Arabs also were the mediators of the Greek tradition of philosophy, mathematics, astrology, physics and logic. But there are many more factors to be added: the institutional force of the Church, or the Churches, and of the Monarchies and nationalist, later imperialist and colonialist, States; the undercurrents of heretic, rebellious, and non-conformist thinking and behaviour; the recurrent tendencies to reform institutions and values and to search for the true origins of the various beliefs; the rationalist and empirical tendencies of the Enlightenment and the consequent new ethics of relativism and libertinism; the process of dechristianisation and of demythologization of many religious values; the attempts at consolidating the instruments of democracy and the recurrent lapses into despotic powers; the frequent appearance of utopian thinking, from the medieval and Renaissance fathers to Karl Marx.
”L’Europe — writes De Rougemont — a été façonnée par le judéo-christianisme, par la notion grecque d’individu, par le droit romain, par le culte de la vérité objective” (1994, p. 17). This was, and still is, Europe. All the various cultural forms that lay deep within all of us Europeans, together with our love for conflict, our passion for individual challenges, our latent crises, our schizophrenia. In spite of this situation, De Rougemont believes that we can speak of unity of Europe (a paradoxical form of unity, based on long processes of homogenisation and diversification). The actual frontiers of Europe are open toward East, exactly as the frontiers of Greece were open toward North.
The elements of unity, that he has a hard time in finding in the cultural realm, he seems to be finding in the realm of literature. Here he probably follows the example of Curtius and tries to offer an idea of a European literature based on a great common canon (Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Joyce, Proust, etc.). I am not inclined to follow him on this line, and would personally prefer to insist, also in the case of literature, on the principle of diversification within a very large and complex mixture of traditions, languages, customs, ideologies. Still also in this case he has a good word in favour of difference and specificity:
La littérature européenne ne résulte pas de l’addition de littératures nationales qu’il s’agirait aujourd’hui de rapprocher et de comparer, voir d’unifier (horribile dictu!), mais c’est l’inverse qui est vrai : nos littératures ‘nationales’ résultent d’une différenciation (souvent tardive) du fond commun de la littérature européenne.
It is my conviction that Denis De Rougemont’s contribution to the discussion on Europe and its future is really valuable and full of fruitful suggestions. In spite of his religious allegiance, he is clearly in favour of a Europe of differences, or of unity through differences.
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