This is Europe, written in the first person…
It only took me 50 years to write this book. For half a century we have been attending big events, meeting many people, worrying about Europe… And this is a love letter to Europe. Just like a letter from a European who is worried about the fate of the continent he loves.
A lover of Europe.
That is, someone who thinks that we are building the best Europe we can have and that this Europe is now under great tension.
Are these tensions a disappointment waiting for you? What is missing in the European spirit today?
The two main motifs of my life have been Europe and freedom. I was very young when I started traveling around Europe; In the early 70s, much of the continent, all of Southern Europe, was still living under dictatorships. I don’t need to remind a Spaniard. Later, in addition to the European Union practices where many states came together, we had an extraordinary history of freedom and democracy… We have experienced a real chain of crises since 2008, starting with the global financial crisis. It continued with the crisis in the Eurozone. Then the problems of Georgia and Crimea emerged. Russia’s annexation of the latter was not just a disappointment. This was a call to my European colleagues to stand up, take action and better defend Europe, the best Europe we have. Most of us still want Europe.
You are a historian but you have the spirit of a journalist. arrives in spain [cuando hacemos esta entrevista] When news broke that David Cameron, the prime minister who later called for what would become Brexit, had been appointed as his country’s foreign secretary. News that must have shaken him. How do you see this very English section?
First of all, it seems like a festival to me… Thank you for your understanding, I am a journalist too. I wear both jackets, I have a friendly relationship with history and journalism: a very tense boundary. It is true that this English news is very interesting, but nothing can compare with the political situation in Spain right now. Here I am, just like all over Europe 50 years ago, making notes of what’s going on in my little notebook, just like I’ve been doing my whole life. As for Mr Cameron… This is one of the strangest political situations I can remember in recent years. We have overcome Brexit and in fact the current Government is taking small steps to get closer to the EU again. Cameron has never been a Europhile, but it was unthinkable that he would be the one to take us out of the EU. He was more Eurosceptic. His appointment now as Foreign Secretary is a sign of desperation on the part of the British Government. This is proof that the Government is in its final throes and the return to Europe will begin next year when the prime minister changes.
He says in his book that he is angry with his country. This anger includes Cameron, of course. What other angers lie within this discontent?
England cannot leave Europe beyond Picadilly Circus. You can’t leave London, we are Europe and always will be. Ours is a European country where we have always been and always will be. What’s more: the Brexit vote was far from inevitable. Maybe 35% or 40% of the population voted for Brexit, including my father, who I included in the book. The campaign’s weak drive to remain in Europe contributed to its failure. So I see Cameron as responsible and I think the Labor leader at the time was Jeremy Corbin. If Labor had had another leader, history would certainly have been very different and the UK would have been in both Europe and the EU. There is still much to fight for. Meanwhile, it is clear that the British Government was instinctively involved in supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia. So the United Kingdom has not left Europe. The real period of Britain’s return to the EU will occur after the next elections. We took a break now.
It is interesting to think that a group of people interested in ending a relationship as strong as the UK’s with Europe would decide on something as serious and permanent as getting rid of an allegiance that seemed to be the result of a common war against Britain. Adolf Hitler.
One of the most important points I tried to convey in the book is that we Europeans know where history is going. The Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and yet we had Brexit, and all of that had a huge impact on individual attitudes, because actually individuals have a very significant weight in history. In this case, the populisms that pushed us to completely end our relationship with Europe eventually led to our separation.
In this book, you address all these events, sometimes with undoubtedly personal melancholy. He first went to Europe to search for traces of his father, who was a soldier in the war against Nazism. And you, as I said before, were demanding throughout Europe to write a completely personal book. What drove you to get involved in such a human way?
This is my main motivation, Europe is my struggle and my life. I spent 50 years of my life traveling constantly. This is a book about the real Europe, the real Europe of each country, its different cultures, its different languages, its cuisines, its different ways of being for men and women… It is not a book about Brussels. or EU. And now we have a generation of young Europeans who have grown up in the same shared space of peace and relative freedom, able to travel from one side of the continent to the other without any hindrance. They can leave on Friday morning and spend the weekend somewhere else in Europe and no one will stop them or ask where they came from or where they are going. The challenges I faced when I was young were different, now everything is different and everything is better. Describing it as it was and as it is now can only be done from the perspective of a writer who witnessed this enormous flow of people from an early age.
This is a widely shared story.
This is the story of my friends in East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, and the story that continues, so it is the story of the heart of Europe, from what the youngest felt to what the new young people experience now. They were born when Europe was already what we know it as.
He made a book with unknown or new, anonymous beings with whom he shares uncertainties as if they were from the same country.
I thought about the idea of this book a long time ago. You can see it on my website, where I even have my oldest notes from this long journey from the early 70s… Since I was saving a huge amount of materials, I had to pile them up all over the stairs in my house. In 2015, I decided to organize this memory, from that Yugoslavia to this Ukraine, going through the feeling that there was always a threat to the future of this big idea. Now, as I was passing through the Retiro, I saw a large banner celebrating the great European book called Yesterday’s World by Stefan Zweig… Europe was falling apart and was later rebuilt when he wrote his old memoirs. event.
And he committed suicide before the Europe of those dreams came true.
It is true that he has missed this for several years. He died in 1942. Europe was completely destroyed. Zweig was so desperate that he committed suicide after finishing the book. What I am now arguing is not Zweig’s fatalism, the impulse he had before reaching his worst conclusions that led to his death, but the optimism of someone like, say, the beloved Václav Havel, who believed in the hope that he would save Czechoslovakia. In times of despair, when it seemed impossible for his country to declare him president after seven years. I believe in this spirit.
It is as if he writes after Zweig’s pessimism, with Havel’s optimism and with the awareness that Europe cannot step back…
I agree. This book is currently available in 21 different editions throughout Europe. I was traveling to follow each of these European editions. And in every country I see a kaleidoscope of different tastes, what I call the tapestry of Europe. Just as there is Zweig, because each of us has our own European Zweig, from each country… It is the same book, but each contains different national versions of the story. All this explains Europe. A unity from Rome, in diversity, a very difficult balance made possible by the EU, a miracle implemented in the midst of skepticism that no longer exists.
This book is also a walk into loneliness, as Europe aspires to be a company, but in many moments there has been loneliness and lack of understanding. This is not an oil pool. Sometimes it looks like a puddle of boiling oil. In fact, Hungarian Viktor Orbán told you after reading the book that you did not understand anything. How do you see the power relations governing Europe?
If there was an easy way, it would be very boring, so it’s good to have competition of ideas, of course, as Orbán, who was a student of mine at Oxford, put it. In fact, he is the man who destroyed democracy in Hungary. We are mistaken if we think that European values are only the Enlightenment values contained in the second article of the Treaty on European Union, because it pains me to say this, Orban is right: also other elements such as xenophobia, religious tradition, nationalism are also European values, so to speak. Recently, an anti-European, nationalist, anti-German, reactionary, reactionary Polish government with the values that Orbán defends was removed from power by those who defend the European values that we defend. The Polish people did this in the best possible way with mass voting. The number of people voting was more than the elderly, and women were more than men. This is a fantastic European moment and gives me reason to be hopeful that the European values I believe in will prevail.
If Europe were a person, what would its characteristics be? Would she be his friend, his enemy, his playmate? A dream?
She would be an incredibly fascinating woman. A brilliant woman who has tremendous courage and is capable of performing extraordinary acts.