It is no coincidence that the development pathway underpinning the European Union project roughly coincides with that of Christianity. Indeed, Christianity has played an essential role in its formation, both due to its constructive power and to the strength with which it has encouraged confronting those who oppose to it.
However, violence is neither the only nor the main reason why religion has served as a unifying element of cohesion across Europe. Professor Luciano Malusa (1986) argued that we fundamentally owe the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to its legacy. He believes that the result of the endeavours of solidarity between the European nations after the Second World War emerged from Saint Thomas Aquinas’ legacy, more precisely, from his meditations on human rights and natural law.
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to understand Europe as a mystical entity in which political unity is solely based on Christianity: other factors, like Hellenism, the Roman law, capitalism and political revolts, have equally shaped Europe – Catholic, imperialist and baroque at first; enlightened, nationalist and bourgeois later – and the European Union. Consequently, because we cannot attribute Europe’s success at globalising the world to religion, one might wonder what the key element is.
In philosophical terms, it can be explained through hylomorphism. Postulated by Aristotle, this approach sees being as composed by matter and form. Change occurs when matter is modified by the form. According to Comte and Husserl, contemporary philosophers, Europe is civilisation’s form, which is why they describe it as “the elite of the avant-garde of humanity” and “sublime”, respectively. However, this would imply that the negative elements embedded within the form, such as exclusion and annihilation, can never be eliminated, precisely because they belong not to the matter, but form. Due to its pessimistic approach, this idea lost significance after the Second World Ward and the Holocaust.
On the other hand, Hegel’s dialectic offers a more widely accepted explanation of how Europe’s history developed up to the current situation. Initially designed to be applied to arguments, Hegel’s dialectic proposes that contradictory processes between opposing sides lead to a linear evolution. Effectively, despite its origins, Europe is not simply history, or a miscellaneous collection of experiences and institutions amalgamated by luck or misfortune. It is the by-product of conflicts and contradictions. Thus, Europe is in itself a concept which alludes to all its different component parts: Christian and Atheist, liberal and intolerant, and structural and historical. In other words, Europe is an analogous and, if you will, imperfect concept, whose components persist but converge towards unity.
As Europeans, we should always bear in mind Europe’s two facets: its past, that is, its history of totalitarianism, ethnocentrism and racism, whose remnants are still present nowadays, and its future, aiming for intercultural dialogue, respect and appreciation for diversity.
References
Malusa, L. (1986): Neotomísmo e intransigentismo cattolico. Ed. Milan
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