A Teachable Moment for Americans: Solidarity as a Shared Value in European Identity

Speaking at the Schloss Bellevue palace in Berlin, President Joachim Gauck used a televised speech in February 2013 to make the case for more European integration. At the time, calling for “more Europe” in terms of shifting still more governmental sovereignty from the state governments to that of the Union was not a very popular task. Further limiting the power of his message is the fact that the German presidency is largely ceremonial , unlike the office of governor in an American state. Nevertheless, Gauck was determined to put the contemporary condition of the “European project” in favorable perspective. The most striking—and even effective—aspect of his speech is his repeated references to “European citizens.” Had he used “Germans” instead, he would have subtly undercut his own message. The prime minister of the E.U. state of Britain at the time would never have used the term, "European citizens." Nor would he have agreed with the E.U. value of solidarity and especially the ensuing social policy. The American media tended to follow suit, rather than covering the otherness of the other—the European Union as having a societal political value that has been very recessive in the United States. In this regard, I contend, the American media companies let down the American people, who would have stood to benefit from the wider perspective that would have enriched American political debates from the tyranny of the hegemonic value ensconced in American culture: that of the self-sustaining individual ideally in the state of nature, economically speaking. Reporting on the principle of solidarity would have given Americans the acccurate picture of the E.U. as being more than just a trading "bloc." This point in turn could have resulted in Americans coming to the realization that the E.U. is equivalent to the U.S.—both being empire-scale federal systems wherein governmental sovereignty is split.

Acknowledging the fiscal and structural imbalances that gave rise to the debt crisis in several E.U. states  and the problems entailed in “patching up” the problems by emergency measures, Gauck nonetheless pointed to non-economic elements of the European project that were also in crisis. “It is also a crisis of confidence in Europe as a political project. This is not just a struggle for our currency; we are struggling with an internal quandary too.”[1] This problem was predicated on the point that the strengthening of a European identity comes out of a recognition of shared values, rather than in differentiation from other cultures outside of Europe.

Too often, Europeans have artificially restricted their values to their particular state. Typically, Europeans would preface a self-referential remark with, “In my country,” only to describe a custom or value that is by no means limited to, distinctive in, one particular E.U. state. Even in saying “more Europe means a European Germany,” Gauck risked falling into this trap, at least in terms of keeping Europe as secondary. More in line with his thesis would have been the expression, more Europe means more European. More European in turn means more of a consciousness of values that European citizens (and residents) share, whether or not people in Africa, Asia, or America happen to esteem those values too. So the question facing European citizens is this: What values do you share?

From an American perspective, the salience of the value of solidarity held by Europeans would be so obvious, were it made transparent by the American media, because solidarity has been such a recessive value in the United States. Ironically, World War II was perhaps the last time solidarity in terms of “we’re all in it together” was explicitly pushed and acknowledged in America. Even then, the value was more in terms of sacrificing for a common purpose rather than seeing to it that the most vulnerable among us do not fall through the cracks in terms of sustenance. In Europe, solidarity has more of a social welfare quality.

Moreover, whereas Americans have tended to apply human rights only to the harm caused by tyrants abroad, Europeans have tended naturally to extend to the value to covering the basic sustenance rights of one’s own fellow citizens as well. The shift needed for a stronger European identity has included becoming aware of the duty to apply the value domestically to other Europeans rather than merely to people in one’s own state, or “country.” By implication, “European Germans” would feel solidarity with starving “European Greeks.” This element twas largely missing from the austerity response of E.U. finance ministers to the debt crisis from 2010 to 2012. So even in the E.U., the principle can succumb to greed and interstate clashes of economic interests. I submit, therefore, that “more Europe” involves not only a stronger value-fueled-identity, but also more fiscal redistribution at the federal, or E.U., level. Put another way, Europeans surely have more shared values than that of austerity. It is a pity that the American media failed to capture this point in reporting on Greek austerity, which more closely resonates with the values dominant in the U.S.

1. Ian Johnson, “German President Joachim Gauck Uses Major Speech to Call For “More Europe,” DW, February 22, 2013.

Nature's Racial Melting-Pot: The American Empire

The 2010 U.S. census reignited the question of racial identity among multi-racial residents.  “I can’t fit in a single box on the census form” was the typical refrain among the fastest growing segment of the US population.  According to The New York Times in February, 2011, "when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand." The number of mixed-race Americans was at the time rising rapidly, largely on account of increases in immigration and intermarriage. In 2010, for example, one in seven new marriages was interracial. Politically, some racial interest groups believed that the use of a catch-all category marginalized minority races in particular. As a result, the Census Bureau created 63 categories of possible racial combinations (a typical bureaucratic solution to a political problem).

Regardless of how the U.S. Government slices the deck, the reality on the ground was that the United States were finally turning the corner on racial-bonding in the beginning of the twenty-first century; the U.S. had gone from some states outlawing miscegenation (i.e., the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations) as late as the 1960s to the multiracial segment of the population being the fastest growing.  America in the late twenty-first century would undoubtedly look rather different than how it looked even at the turn of the twenty-first century. We should not be surprised at nature having overflowed the laws that  were designed to keep the races separate, and thus “pure.” What a strange adjective to apply to something like race!

The lesson here is that life is a fluid thing. The naturalist ethic in line with the flow of life tends to have the last word, even though particular laws can seem daunting in their hayday. Any generation can expect that the world it knows will be morphed by life's forces into yet another world even if it takes a few centuries. As strong as they may seem, governmental restrictions in the face of natural forces are doomed to fail, like sandcastles fending against a rising tide. In other words, nature has the last word. In terms of race, nature's instinct can be called a naturalistic ethic because it is in the direction of attraction rather than hatred.

That the multiracial “category” is the fastest growing in the American census can be regarded as the natural solution to racial problems that have plagued North America since the time of the colonies.  Whereas Cortez and his followers in New Spain quickly mixed the Indian, Black and Caucasian races, the British colonies further north quite intentionally kept the three groups separate and distinct. In spite of having some members out of parts of New Spain, the United States followed the British tradition until well into the second half of the twentieth century.

The courageous people who risked pain and even death in the Freedom Ride cracked the societal shell that had enabled the artificial laws to hold nature temporarily at bay. By the 1970s, attitudes in most of the United States were shifting, such that by the turn of the next century race relations in general bore scant resemblance to those back in 1960. Beyond changed race relations, a growing multiracial segment was tasked with making sense of themselves in the new society.

Cheryl Contee, for example, wrote in a CNN opinion piece in 2010, “When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot. I can’t ignore the pale skin of my white forebears, the slanted eyes of my Indian relatives nor the full lips and curly hair of my African blood.”  However, because there are many white Africans (e.g., in South Africa), her distinction of “white” and “African” is a false dichotomy.  She is treating two different categories as though they were one.  Better stated, Cheryl has Caucasian, Black, and Indian ancestors, hence she is multi-racial.  She puts it as follows: “When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot.”  Her melting pot constitution is something for her to be proud of because it instantiates the natural, rather than the governmental, solution to what has been an intractable problem in the U.S. for centuries. Looking forward, her situation is one of transition; her great grandchildren may look back at old pictures of Blacks and Whites as strange book-ends.

Sources:

Cheryl Contee, “I Can’t Fit in a Single Box on a Census Form,” CNN Opinion, March 30, 2010.

Susan Saulny, “Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers,” The New York Times, February 9, 2011.