Toward a Diverse and United Europe Daniel Barenboim
Almost 75 years after the end of World War II, we face grave threats to our joint European identity, and dangerous nationalist and populist movements are on the rise all over Europe and the world. Overcoming these threats and reinforcing once more the idea of a shared, open and peaceful Europe is perhaps our greatest challenge ever and we must meet this challenge with all the tools we can muster. A key tool is the return to a fact-based culture. The current zeitgeist allows too much room for false narratives. Whoever screams the loudest gets through, whether what he says is true or not. We must work against this, in politics as well as in culture. The rise of nationalism is in large part a result of many people’s sometimes justified discontent with globalization. Globalization has a homogenizing effect on culture that threatens to annihilate one of our greatest strengths, our wonderful cultural diversity. But nationalism is not the answer to this threat. Nationalism is, in fact, the opposite of true patriotism, as patriotism allows for the inclusion of others, whereas nationalism explicitly excludes and subordinates them. If you are secure of your own values and culture, you can comfortably engage with others and appreciate their culture, too. This is what universalism is all about, and this is what we need to work towards together. The focus in Europe has too long been on only an economic union—the idea of a shared European cultural space has been largely given up on. This is not what François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl had in mind when they set their European agenda holding hands at the graves of French and German soldiers, an agenda which expected the French and the Germans to engage with and get to know each other through their cultures, through Beethoven and Thomas Mann, through Ravel and Baudelaire. As a musician, I have spent my life getting to know other cultures and their inhabitants through art and music. This is, of 12
