{"id":78668,"date":"2015-11-05T07:55:08","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T15:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=78668"},"modified":"2015-11-05T07:55:08","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T15:55:08","slug":"the-jewish-contribution-to-the-european-integration-project-read-more-the-jewish-contribution-to-the-european-integration-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=78668","title":{"rendered":"The Jewish Contribution to the European Integration Project Read more: The Jewish Contribution to the European Integration Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here<\/a> are transcripts of the speeches at this 2013 conference at Ben Gurion University in Israel.<\/p>\n

Dr. Sharon Pardo, Director Centre for the Study of European Politics and Society, gave welcoming remarks:<\/p>\n

\nLast year when we discussed Europe Day, we at
\nCSEPS, decided to celebrate this year’s Europe Day in a
\nunique and original way. We decided to embark on a
\nnew project that will examine and discuss the Jewish
\ncontribution to the European integration project.
\nI admit that when we thought of the theme of this
\nworkshop, which from now on will be an annual event,
\nwe had in mind Milan Kundera’s famous 1998 essay on
\n\u201cThe Tragedy of Central Europe\u201d in which Kundera
\nsuggests that no other part of the world was as
\nilluminated by Jewish energies as was the centre of
\nEurope. In Kundera’s own words:
\n“Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted
\nabove national quarrels, the Jews in the twentieth
\ncentury were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating
\nelement in central Europe: They were its intellectual
\ncement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its
\nspiritual unity.”
\nSuch iconic Jews were viewed by some as representing
\nEurope’s first supra-national and multicultural entity
\nand, from the nineteenth century onwards, were
\ndepicted as the essence of “Europeaness\u201d, consisting of
\ncosmopolitanism, anti-nationalism and the principles of
\nthe liberal order.
\nHannah Arendt, the controversial German-American
\npolitical theorist even went further in her 1968 book
\n\u201cMen in Dark Times\u201d and depicted the Jews as
\n“Europe’s Chosen people\u201d \u2013 in her words:
\n\u201cThe position and functions of the Jewish people in
\nEurope predestined them to become the “good
\nEuropean” par excellence. The Jewish middle classes of
\nParis and London, Berlin and Vienna, Warsaw and
\nMoscow were in fact neither cosmopolitan nor
\ninternational, though the intellectuals among them
\nthought of themselves in these terms. They were
\nEuropean, something that could be said of no other
\ngroup.\u201d
\nYet were such Jews really cosmopolitan, international
\nand European? Were they Europe’s Chosen people, the
\nheroes of the European integration project, and if so
\nwhat does it tell us about the founding fathers of the
\nEuropean integration project and their imagined
\ncommunity today? It appears that Jews have, or at
\nleast had, a lot to live up to in Europe. What happened
\nto the Jewish contribution to the European integration
\nproject? What happened to such Jewish Europeans? Did
\nthey all go in a puff of crematorium smoke?
\nThe Jew has always been deemed to have competing
\nloyalties and affiliations, being a member of a religion,
\nan ethnic group, and even at one point a ‘race’. To the
\nextent, therefore, that the European integration project
\nis creating a similar crisis at the heart of European
\ncitizenry, today all Europeans are, in some
\nmetaphorical sense, Jews.
\nInterestingly enough, this metaphorical sense is not
\nlost on EU leadership, who often speak of the need to
\nlearn from the history of European Jews and draw on
\nEuropean Jewry as a model for emulation within the
\nEU. As Romano Prodi, former President of the European
\nCommission and former Italian Prime Minister has put
\nit:
\n“I believe we can learn a lot from the history of the
\nJews of Europe. In many ways they are the first, the
\noldest Europeans\u2026 We, the new Europeans, are just
\nstarting to learn the complex art of living with multiple
\nallegiances \u2013 allegiance to our home town, to our own
\nregion, to our home country, and now to the European
\nUnion. The Jews have been forced to master this art
\nsince antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or
\nJewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and
\nPolish, Jewish and German. Proud of their ties with
\nJewish communities throughout the continent and
\nequally proud of their bonds with their own country.”
\nIn fact, the EU leadership views European Jewry as
\nsomehow the constitutive minority of the Union,
\ndespite or rather precisely because the most patently
\nhistorical link between the European project and
\nEuropean Jewry is the Second World War. After all, the
\nEU was born out of the atrocities of the past as an
\neffort to reconcile the religious, cultural and linguistic
\ndifferences of Europe.
\nMoreover, to the extent that religious tensions continue
\nto affect the European space, the EU leaders expect the
\nJewish communities to take a central role in improving
\nand promoting inter
\n-religious and inter
\n-community
\nrelations in the EU. In practical terms, this means an
\nexpectation that European Jewish communities work to
\nimprove their relations with the Muslim communities in
\nall EU Member States, and that Jews living in the EU
\nMember States broaden their struggle against anti
\n–
\nSemitism to include other categories of racial and
\nreligious discrimination, including of course
\nIslamophobia.<\/p>\n

Another expectation that the EU has from its Jewish
\ncommunities regards Israel. The EU views the Jewish
\ncommunities as a broker that brings it closer to Israel,
\nor in another words, as a bridge between the EU and
\nIsrael. EU leadership expects the Jewish communities
\nto assist the EU institutions in cementing the ties with
\nIsrael.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An author uses the moniker The End of Zion critiques<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nImagine holding an international conference in which European speakers claimed that Whites are \u201cIsrael\u2019s Chosen People\u201d and the \u201cessence of Hebrewness\u201d due to their leading role in the destruction of Jewish identity and the forced integration of millions of Blacks and Moslems into Israel, and you\u2019ll have an idea of just how absurd and offensive this all is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

German goy Michael Mertes says: “Nationalism (at any rate its ethnocentric version) had identified the Jews as an alien minority, excluded them from the Volksgemeinschaft \u2013 the national community \u2013 and finally treated them as enemies who had no right to life. In that sense, the fight against nationalism and the fight against anti-Semitism have always been two sides of the same coin.”<\/p>\n

“Should the Euro crisis considerably strengthen right-wing extremist parties that openly advocate anti-foreigner policies and an anti-Semitic worldview, Article 7 could become a serious option.”<\/p>\n

Article 7 is cited as follows:<\/p>\n

“[The] Council, acting by a majority of four fifths of its members after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament, may determine that there is a clear risk of a serious breach by a Member State of the values referred to in Article 2. \u2026 [The Council] may decide to suspend certain of the rights deriving from the application of the Treaties to the Member State in question, including the voting rights of the representative of the government of that Member State in the Council.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are transcripts of the speeches at this 2013 conference at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Dr. Sharon Pardo, Director Centre for the Study of European Politics and Society, gave welcoming remarks: Last year when we discussed Europe Day, we … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9993,29615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-nationalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78669,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78668\/revisions\/78669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}