Rome and Athens, epicenters of the economic and financial storm currently shaking Europe and the world.
You read it right: Rome and Athens.
In other words, the two cradles of Europe.
Two of the three sources (Jerusalem, thank heavens, not yet included) of its ethics and its religions.
The double matrix of its languages.
The great blocs of faith and memory that seal its destiny.
The site of the invention of the models of democracy and citizenship we have lived by, until this very day.
The source of our knowledge and of our legal concepts.
The idiom of our double commerce, of things and of minds.
The native land of our philosophers, our rhetors, our jurisconsults, our pontiffs, and our artists.
Our compass, in both senses of the word.
Our secret but all the more imperious ancestry.
Obviously, I'm leaving things out.
I'm leaving out a great deal.
For this is a sign that, clearly, points to two things.
First, it is Europe itself that is in crisis. Not finance. Not the economy. Europe. Its culture. Its genius. Its unconscious conscience. Its immemorial and its memory. All that makes up its bases and its origins. Its heart, that beats more and more faintly. Its soul. Its common and hidden grammar. The distinction, that it invented, between law and right. Or between man and citizen. The articulation, that is its own, of multiple forms of the Multiple and of the unique name of the One.
In short, its being. Its substance. To such an extent that, in order to understand what is happening, to know what it entails when we speak of the crisis of the debt or of the euro, to understand, just to understand, what the popular movements of protest currently shaking Rome and Athens, the two great capitals of European intelligence, are saying, we should be rereading Gibbon, Humboldt, or even Polybius -- these theoreticians of the fate and the fall of the Athenian paradigm or the Roman road -- rather than Friedman or Keynes.
There was the time when the Greek Idea spread, via the Empire, and then through its budding catholicity. There was the schism, early in the second millennium, between the masters of the Idea and those of the medium, between the inheritors of Athens and those of Rome, each retrieving their own. In the midst of crossing over to the modern European political project, there was the reconciliation of 1965, with the lifting of excommunications, the peace of the Churches and their priests, the disarmament of minds.
Well, perhaps we are entering into a new new phase, outwardly resembling a rapprochement, in superficial appearance a reunion, but this time for the worst. Sudden and cataclysmic, as though Rome and Athens joined together in the same disaster, as though both dead legacies were conspiring in the same amnesia, posturing of relations, caricature. So it is.
Second, the solution to this crisis will be neither financial nor economic, either, but once again, according to choice, either spiritual, moral, or political. Governments of technocrats, of course. Eminent civil servants, experts, competent individuals, Mario Montis and Lucas Papademoses, very well. Plans of austerity and rigor, stress tests for the banks, reformed States that have broken off with Berlusconian antics, obviously, and no one can escape it.
But if the above is exact, if it is no accident that Rome and Athens are the two names of this suspended apocalypse and of its horsemen gone mad, if, behind this explosion of sovereign debt, the apprehensively expected bankruptcy of States, the widespread crisis of confidence, the speculation, the crazy money, the increasing irresponsibility of the actors involved, all hiding, henceforth, behind an anonymous and inevitably irreproachable "System ", there is, indeed, this radical unbeing, none of these efforts will touch the heart of the matter. If it is really the seat of Europe, its axe of foundation, its symbolic and imaginary double name, its profane religion that are struck to the quick, none of these measures will suffice, not one of these ligatures will reshape the world of Europe, and there is no reform that will succeed in staving off the anticipated catastrophe.
Europe was established, a first time, by substituting the word of the citizen-magistrate for the sayings of the oracles and auspices. It reconstructed itself a second time by favoring reason over anathema, preferring that a consciousness become transnationally national to the schism of faith and corps. Well, here, in the same way, we must confront these new soothsayers (the agitators of the financial markets), and the new grand excommunicators (agents of the triple A ratings), with a word, a wisdom, a manner of speaking and listening of the archons and the polemarches, faithful to the best of European heritage.
Go back to Rome.
Restore Athens.
That is the only plan.
For the rest, in other words the administrators, will follow, as usual.
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Perhaps it should split into two pieces as Europe also should consider cultural boundaries. Remote history is no more than an artistic distraction. A Mediterranean area would be a buffer also dampening one version of Huntingdon's War of Civilizations. Before the oil runs out the Middle East has to buy another future.
Europe cannot assimilate Greece, especially, or the other Mediterranean countries which list does not include France. And if they haven't done it themselves by now they never will.
Remember that the US has tried to incorporate a different culture area also in the states including the later Texas to the Atlantic. The price was to have no Jefferson's Wall between politicians and private money as there is between politics/the state and religion. The oligarchies of the southeastern states needed that corruption to preserve their societies. To this day their core politics is to raise contending, distracted mobs while the real players clean the table.
All democracies in the classic world were built as democratic governments of masters of slaves primarily, this tended in those days to have the population of people from whom those slaves were taken favor monarchy, better a king you hardly ever see, than a master you serve every day.
I would not be bringing those issues up were I you, the French, Germans and Eastern European people who made up the bulk of the slaves held by Athens and Rome have not forgotten that, even if you have.
He does, however, wisely note that the crisis is cultural and thus, far greater than the mindless economic fashions of Friedman. But BHL packages his message in an ornamental style known as Asiatic in antiquity which makes it virtually useless to the reading masses, even those who fancy themselves intellectuals. If Levy stylistically would have gone back to the Golden Ages of the literary patrimony of Athens and Romes it would be obvious that a simple "back to the basics" argument would have sufficed.
Still don't think there is anything cultural in this crisis, unless if by cultural, we mean to say traditional greek or italian economies.
The fiscal screws could have been successfully tightened by all European leaders of the last three decades. Failure to anticipate these issues is remarkebly similar in all European (even American) economies, albeit within different scales.
What is being overlooked is that the EU, US, Japan, and others should be taking perhaps a 20% cut in their standard of living for a while because of the rise of the BRICS. Denying this and maintaining artificial standards based on debt is a colossal error and guarantees massive failure and overshoot on the downside.
Today a micro-SD card can contain up to 32 Gbytes. One or two are enough for all the IP worthwhile from most companies. A few must leave every day from San Francisco Airport. The next generation of US tech workers is being replaced by visa workers and big Western corporations are moving out anyway. What's left may still create a new world for us.
Invoking long-lost cultures of a hundred and more generations ago means nothing but a distraction.
A useless gathering of handy oxymoron's and meaningless, only-half-ironic allegories, loosely based on factual and historical observations.
How about offering workable solutions?
This crisis, while threatening the fabric Europe, is solely economic and political in essence. The European ideal is tied together by many a treaty, common interests, and less palpable aspirations, but it is also tied together by wealth and economic success.
The US-born recession of these last few years has exposed many western economic models based on unsustainable debt relying on growth. Europe was especially shown as vulnerable, where some member countries were abusing this model particularly badly.
This, in turn, revealed political struggle in resolving these issues, as conflicting interests were arising at every level of the economic issues and subsequent rescue plans and initiatives.
Was Greece's economy the lowest common denominator? Maybe so, but making it Athens' and Rome's issues only is just plain silly.
Any nation claiming sovereignty cannot then be indebted to creditors whose interest in the welfare of the people is only indirect at best - namely a return on their investment.
Credit systems are useful in global economics, but in abusing them, you yield your sovereignty to the whims of global markets.
I hope I'm not simplifying beyond acceptable boundaries, but my point is this: blaming Greece and Italy is insufficient.
United Europe emerged after the WorldWar 2, with the idea that intertwined economies of memberstates would create such national intrests that new Wars would always be the worst solution, with a "War Free" Europe as a consequence.
Apparently, being free of the cost of War has not been sufficient, since we are now being told we have to give up most postWar realisations, such as pensiuns, healthcare and education, due to some "crisis", caused by the banks and the financial markets, demanding shareholders be bailed out, because otherwise people's savings will be lost (using taxpayers' savings to achieve this).
Although the cradle of Europe was probably in Athens and Rome, also France, the UK and Germany have made important contributions to what Europe is today. Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Locke, Spinoza, helped Europe break free of the chains of the Era of Catholicism, aka the dark ages.
If BHL invokes spirituality, politics and moral to suggest a solution, he could perhaps also have referred to these as origins of the problems. Instead, he focuses on blaming a few people who hardly have a clue of what has happened (the greek and italians), having their souls sold out to the devil by corrupt and greedy leaders, in the best Faustian tradition, whereas he could have made a real statement in referring to the part in the Bible where Jesus used a whip to chase the fraudsters out of the markets.
Bernard Henri Levy is the NeoCon of philosophers.
Kevin Chamow
Actually, we can fix both by taking the unearned money away from the extremely wealthy investors and the financial industry executives and distribute it among the unemployed and underpaid working class people.
criminality of the financial system that has bought its legislators and mass media and has closed the circle with rhetoric that does not and will not define the issues and solve the problems. Why would the wealthy want to give more tax funding to a corrupt war economy that is based on covert actions and secret budgets-- military spending is a loop of bribery and deception and 9 11 proved it had nothing to do with defense?
If we avoid knowing what the root of things were we will again make the same mistakes. Next time it will be something else if we don't learn to see more clearly.
Despite their architectural and artistic achievements, both Rome and Athens deserved to be destroyed.
America is coming very close to that bankrupt state. Professing high ideals, but betraying them at every turn. Using money and military to get its way in the world, as opposed to moral force.
Rome and Athens are alive and well. Here and now. In the USA.
Ummm .... but America has been this way since the early 1800's. There is nothing new about this. Your point that America should use moral force instead is well taken, and one I agree with. But American bullying, foreign-policy-wise, seems to me to be nothing new.
I think comparing American hegemony to the Roman and Greek empires is a difficult comparison to draw useful predictions from. The world is truly different today, and it is difficult to extrapolate where things will go. It's not difficult to predict that most outcomes aren't good for America, though. :-)
The United States of America in my lifetime was King Lear acted by an entire cast on LSD with the cameras rolling at 24 frames a second. Nothing could have been any stranger.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4onhv63jom8