We Europeans seem to have forgotten about our future. And yet, at our borders, a battle is being fought about more than peace and prosperity today.
Former railway bridge “De Hef” in Rotterdam. Memorial of the Second World War.
The writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) once suggested that the European project urgently needed a memory transfusion. With this, he meant that Europeans should draw new inspiration from the past to confront the complexities of today and determine a direction for the future. Pope Francis agrees with this call to action:
“The founding fathers had a clear sense of being part of a common effort that not only crossed national borders but also borders of time, so as to bind generations among themselves, all sharing equally in the building of a common home.”
A betrayal of generations
The biggest problem that Pope Francis sees is the betrayal of young Europeans by those who benefited from the first fruits of European cooperation. He sees this as an unprecedented generational conflict. According to the Pope, the history and ideals of Europe cooperation were deliberately not being passed on:
“In passing on to new generations the ideals that made Europe great, one could say, without a touch of hyperbole, that betrayal was preferred to tradition.”
The Pope warned in 2017 that young people are being betrayed by being told everything should be about the here and now. As a result, they have been uprooted from their communal histories. And without shared foundations, young people cannot take responsibility now for our shared future. In other words, young people lack a past and risk losing their future.
A renewed memory of the future
Elie Wiesel and many others with him experienced the worst of the worst when a nation forgot about its past in favour of a-historical political mythology. These days, we can see once again the destructive power of such political mythologies. So let us not make the same mistake again, and instead, critically remember our past and pass it on so that we all can have a stake in our future.