A program for Florence 2022. A reflection on “Argomenti 2000” regarding the CEI conference at the end of February.
What can take shape in Florence, where Bishops and Mayors of the Mediterranean will meet in the footsteps of La Pira, is a change of gaze capable of restoring Europeans to a fidelity to the truth of things. The Mediterranean is a space in which not only the moral reason of Europe is consumed more every day, but also the historical root of its political subjectivity.
Riccardo Saccenti
The search for the common historical-religious root of the peoples who inhabit the shores of the Mediterranean: this is the official reason for the convening of the first of the Mediterranean talks, wanted by the mayor of Florence Giorgio La Pira starting from 1958. Yet, under these apparent cultural diplomacy that initiative constituted an articulated response to the great historical issues posed by a geopolitical and religious framework which in the two decades following the end of the Second World War faced profound, if not radical, changes.
When La Pira opened the first of the talks, on October 3, 1958, indicating the aim of that meeting to “cooperate in building peace in the Mediterranean and in the world”, the picture was that of an area in which traces were still visible. and the wounds left by the Suez crisis of 1956. The drama of a decolonization process intertwined with the emergence of the political subjectivity of the Arab world. A picture made more complex and conflictual by the unresolved conflict between the State of Israel and the Arab world and to which was added the long Algerian war of independence. A conflict, the latter, experienced by the French Fourth Republic as a real civil war and which had consumed the political-constitutional system, the culture and the transalpine society itself which just four months earlier, on 1 June, had entrusted itself to General De Gaulle to get out of the crisis. Within this scenario, the mandate that the mayor of Florence intended to entrust to the Mediterranean talks was not that of a generic call for peace, for the suspension of the use of weapons. On the contrary, there was the clarity of a context that required a shared political direction and that in order to elaborate it had the urgency of finding a transversal reading key to the shores of the Mediterranean, around which I could build itineraries and processes of pacification made of cooperation, of constant dialogue, sharing of resources and hopes, of identifying possible common horizons.
In anticipation of the Florentine conference that will bring together the mayors and bishops of the cities of the Mediterranean at the end of next February, the reference to the Lapira experience cannot simply be played on the terrain of the model to be imitated, nor in the key of a past of which the present attempts to to be a clumsy follower. Rather, serve the challenge of an opportunity not to be forced into the logic of the event, free from a before and after and above all from the context in which it takes shape. Because what is being prepared in these months can be a passage of great value, it can undertake important, active and lasting processes on many: from politics to economics, from culture to the practice of socio-environmental sustainability. However, all this requires a clear vision of a political nature, an understanding of the processes that mark the Mediterranean at this end of 2021, of the possible options of the actors who animate this theater – not only the institutional and political actors but also the cultural, social and religious ones – , of the tensions and convergences that are consumed in it. Refining an understanding of what this historical passage is for the Mediterranean area therefore requires an interpretative key, capable of putting things in order, of bringing interests, expectations and aspirations back to their natural order of magnitude and of refining the way of composing needs and conflicts. in a common horizon.
Moreover, the current situation is profoundly marked by the still open wounds of the war in Libya, Syria and the Middle East, by the fragility of important political subjects such as Algeria and Egypt, by the contradictions that mark Turkey and the presence, by the absence of a European policy for the Mediterranean. And religious and cultural tensions are intertwined with all this: the conflicts we witnessed as “spectators” canceled the balance of dina coexistence, which over the centuries had survived the succession of various empires – think of the fate of Christian or Yazidi communities between Syria and Iraq -; religious radicalism on the one hand and the rhetoric of fear of migratory “invasions” on the other have fueled a logic of a “clash of civilizations” that sees in the Mare nostrum only the southern border of the European Union. With respect to all this, Francis’ speech in Lesbos of last December 5 represents a real call to the responsibility of dealing with today’s Mediterranean with extreme clarity and realism. In the words of the Pope and in the appeal to the priority of the dignity of persons, in fact, there is not only a call of an ethical and moral character: there is a clear awareness that it is political and religious at the same time. The invitation to look for the root causes of this more phenomenon, to dare adequate answers represents an invitation to shift the gaze from the surface of the deep events to their intimate sense and. Thus, the movement of millions of people from the Middle East regions and from Africa to Europe is revealed as the effect of a much more dramatic scenario. The picture is that of the “permanent third world war” which has been fought for a decade across the equator, starting from the Atlantic coast of Africa to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A scenario made up of a chain of more or less not to European public opinion and which pour out on the shores of the Mediterranean their most tragic consequences that have the face and eyes of women, men and children fleeing both violence and poverty.
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https://www.argomenti2000.it/content/un-programma-firenze-2022