EUROPE 2020

Clemens Sedmak Interim Director, Nanovic Institute for European Studies

Europe 2020. There are things we know and things we could have known, things we guessed and things we could have never guessed. 25 years ago, Portuguese author and Nobel laureate José Saramago published his novel Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness); he described a mysterious mass epidemic leading to loss of eyesight, a scenario of contagious blindness. Three years later Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as an author “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” Indeed, the realities that we encountered in spring 2020 in Europe were “elusory” to some extent—we could not fully grasp them.

Europe 2020. Some things could finally be planned and happened: On January 31, Europe watched an unprecedented event—the official “Brexit.” Lord Alton of Liverpool, who is set to serve as our next Nanovic Forum speaker in 2021, published an essay a few days before the official Brexit where he reflected on the gaps in British society and the need to build inclusivity: “The ‘social market’—moral capitalism—remains our best hope, but it needs inspired and ethical leadership and to be rooted in personal values that do not feed on greed, selfishness, and the survival of the fiercest. It needs to seek justice and fairness for the poorest. When we lose sight of that basic truth, the gaps in society widen into chasms.” The challenge of preventing gaps from widening into chasms has been made more visible by the global health crisis, which although we could not foresee is forever changing our vista.

Professor Kjell Espmark delivered the Presentation Speech for the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Stockholm Concert Hall—he described Saramago’s works and suggested: “Your distinguishing mark is irony coupled with discerning empathy, distance without distance.” Indeed, these terms— “distance without distance” and “discerning empathy,” even “irony”—have gained new meaning in Europe in 2020. Saramago, in his speech at the Nobel Banquet, remembered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and made it a point to talk about the duty of citizens: “Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.”

Europe 2020—time for accepting responsibility based on solidarity. There are so many possibilities: Paolo Mazzara ’23, for example, a Notre Dame undergraduate student from Italy has been helping Italian healthcare workers in Lombardy with translations, offering his language skills to help secure crucial personal protective equipment through interactions with global agencies like the WHO. As we conclude this exercise of looking back, may we more clearly see those around us (1 John 4:20). Like Simone Weil, the French philosopher, reasoned, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’”