The forest in the garden

Jose Marti, 1884 (1)

Panama City (Prensa Latina) On a social network, an anonymous source spreads a seemingly simple message: globalization is, as the letter says, “another name for colonialism,” as it adds – and adds – conservation, modernization, development and progress. Something tells us, in all the strictness of its limitations, about the process of disintegration of geological culture in the world order that the victorious liberalism has created in other times.

Guillermo Castro H., contributor to Prensa Latina

Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, told us more, as expected, at the opening of the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges (Belgium). There, he referred to Europe’s place in the world order in the following terms:

Europe garden. We built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humanity has been able to build, all three together. And here, perhaps, Bruges is a good representation of beautiful things, intellectual life, and luxury. rest of the world […] It’s not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is jungle, and jungle can invade the garden. Gardeners should take care of them, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. Having a nice little garden surrounded by high walls to prevent the jungle from entering would not be a solution. Because the forest has a lot of potential to grow and the wall wouldn’t be high enough to protect the garden (2).

He immediately added, for the sake of these protective works, “Gardeners must go into the forest. Europeans need to engage more with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us in various means and forms.”

This is the most important, he added, because we are “also witnessing a ‘moment of creation’ of a new world” and “we have to show our unity, our strength and our determination.” He added that the main support for this design is that Europeans have “strong institutions” that make a “big difference” between “developed and undeveloped”. And the panorama he immediately described could not be more consistent with the quality of the argument:

Here we have a neutral and independent judiciary. Here, we have income distribution systems. Here we have elections that give freedom to the citizens. Here we have red lights controlling traffic, people littering. We have these kinds of things that make life easy and safe. Institutions, that’s what matters. It is very difficult to build institutions.

Finally, after shedding some thoughts on the importance of identity in the contemporary world, and the merit of having a clear identity for Europeans, he proceeded to remind his audience of the sense of mission they should assume: “Keep the garden, and be good gardeners,” he said, but remember that your duty “will not be to take care of.” By the garden itself, but the woods outside.”

All this, of course, takes place in the context of the war that the European Union and NATO are waging against Russia on the territory of Ukraine. And it was not surprising that in her response to the High Commissioner, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zagarova, emphasized that the European “garden” had been formed “at the expense of the barbaric attitude towards the plundering” of the rest of the regions. world, and that “Europe’s most prosperous order has its roots in the ruthlessly oppressed colonies.” For Zakharova,

“The logic of apartheid and the philosophy of supremacy are what underpinned fascism and Nazism.” He added that the world war of the twentieth century, which consisted of two parts – he added – “began with Germany’s desire to ‘restore justice’ and redistribute the European colonies, which it did not achieve. They were supposed to live the same prosperous and exploitative life as the home of Borrell, Spain, As well as France, the United Kingdom and Portugal »(3).

Zajárova claims to be a language with a really long history in America, Asia and Africa. With this, he picks up an important element from the circumstance of his response to Borrell: the process of disintegration of geological culture created at the time to legitimize the formation and development of a world order that is also disintegrating. This geographical culture developed on narratives of conflict: Civilization Against Barbarism (1750-1850); Progress Against Underdevelopment (1850-1950), Development Against Underdevelopment (1950-1990), to enter the twenty-first century with the slogan of sustainable development of the already existing world order, in contrast to its apparent unsustainability, already expressed in the threat of extinction of the human race.

For his part, Borrell also picks up this process from deeper cultural roots. The identity he is referring to, in fact, consists of urbanization in a world steeped in barbarism, carrying on his shoulders the “white man’s burden” referred to by some Victorian ideologists: the fulfillment of the “civilization message” that the North Atlantic world assumes in its relations with the rest of mankind.

The civilizing character of that mission is a reminder of the fact that it was Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism that paved the way for Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection – where those best adapted to their changing environment thrive. Liberal-oligarchy state culture in the late nineteenth century. From those times he dates precisely what Martí warned in his article “Our America”:

The imported book was overpowered by the natural man in America. Natural men have conquered fake lawyers. The original mestizo conquered the exotic creole. There is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between pseudoscience and nature. Natural man is good, and he accepts and rewards transcendent intelligence, so long as he does not use his submissiveness to harm him, or to offend him by ignoring him, which is not forgiven by natural man, and he is ready to regain respect in it. Force – that hurts his sensitivity or harms his interest.

Paraphrasing Marty, one tends to say that our forests are better than those that go into a garden among the synthetic bar. Here we know that our republics “cleared through tyrants their inability to know the real elements of the country, and to derive from them the form of rule and rule with them”, and that the tradition in our peoples is not what is required, because here, among us, the ruler “in a new people means the Creator”.

(1) “Distribution of diplomas at a college in the United States.” America, New York, June 1884. The Complete Works. Social Science Editorial, Havana, 1975. VIII, 442.

(2) European Diplomatic Academy: “Opening Remarks by High Representative Josep Borrell at the Opening of the Pilot Programme.” 10.13.2022. Magicians EEAs Press Team

(3) “Burell compares Europe to ‘garden’ and the rest of the world to ‘forest’.” October 13, 2022.

rmh / gch

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