Beneath the paving stones, Europe (but not Juncker)

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German revolutionary that led the May 68 revolution in Paris and who became the leader of the Euopean greens some years later, was one of the supporters of the new pro-European French President, Emmanuel Macron. The European left will have to decide whether it chooses the direction of Cohn-Bendit, and Varoufakis, and many others, or the direction of the national-trostkists, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (a europhobic) and Jeremy Corbin (a eurosceptic). That is, we have to decide whether to choose Europe as the natural space of a new social contract, or we remain fatally embraced to the myth of the nation-state. Of course, many will be tempted to run away from Europe if we are once and again exposed to the unbearable lightness of the European Commision's president, Jean-Claude Juncker. Last week in Florence he made some stupid remarks about how the English language will lose importance in Europe. He made these remarks in an event I believe (beacuse I've been there before) co-organized by the European University Institute, a European institution that does all its academic work in English in the middle of Italy (I did my PhD there), thanks to which it manages to attract some of the best scholars trained in the best American universities. He made those stupid remarks just days before that France elected a president who probably speaks better English than the US president, Donald Trump, as a twit pointed out. If this is the attitude that will preside the Brexit negotiations, Juncker will not have the support of the millions of anglophiles that populate Europe (myself included), or of the millions of europhiles still present in the United Kingdom. The English language is an asset for all of us, it is our lingua franca and will continue to be if Europe is to say anything in a globalized world.