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Past and Future of a Multicultural Europe: A struggle between Democracy and Cultural Identities
| As we can read in T. Judt, Postwar. History of Europe since 1945, London 2005, 8-9, Europe was once a melting pot of overlapping languages, religions and nations. Many of the cities at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Wroclaw, L’vov, Odessa or Vilna, were truly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious communities. Between 1914 and 1945, that Europe was swept away. In the second half of the 20th century, after two total wars, boundary adjustments, ethnic expulsions and displacements, the genocide of the European Jewry, the processes of nation-building imposed homogenous linguistic and cultural communities: only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were two exceptions. But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the European Union, because of the new immigrant waves from Europe’s expanded margins have given multi-cultural Europe back. London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan have turned into cosmopolitan world cities.
This paper aims at focusing on the important contribution of political and cultural history and their political and sociological implications on the issues of the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious identities in Europe. The lands of border between Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman Empires, characterised by multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious identities, what Lewis Namier called the European “middle East”, was a kind of particularly extreme laboratory of historical processes, common to all Europe, in different degrees. The crisis of the European “middle East” was a result of the expansion of democracy, which provoked at the same time the enlargement of political rights and the raise of pathological and violent nationalisms. The new multicultural Europe is facing strong tensions because of the same conflict between individual rights and claims of cultural communities, pushing towards new definitions on the basis of religious identity. From this perspective, the wars in former-Yugoslavia, especially the war in and against Sarajevo, was a paradigm of the link of the old and of the new conflicts between democracy and cultural, ethic and religious, identities.
This is the starting point for a reflection about interconnections of ethnic, cultural and religious identities, at local, national and European level, and their complex relations with democratic citizenship in a context of growing multi-ethnical, multi-cultural and multi-religious societies. The main issue of my paper is: what can we learn from intellectuals who deeply understood the conflicts between democracy and cultural identities in Central-Eastern Europe of the 20th century in order to understand better the new inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century?
I want to focus on some intellectuals like Lewis Namier, Arnold Toynbee, R. W. Seton-Watson, Umberto Zanotti-Bianco, Andrea Caffi, Leo Valiani, Franco Venturi, Elie Halévy, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig von Mises. Most of them experienced the condition of exile as a painful, but analytically meaningful prospect: this is the fundamental root of their cosmopolitism and the origin of their akin awareness of the issues of national, cultural and religious identities. These intellectuals, focusing on the conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War of the 20th century, faced with historical, political and sociological problems of citizenship in multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-religious Europe of the 21st century.
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