European Humanist Federation General Assembly, Nuremberg 2018
Opening Speech by EHF president Giulio Ercolessi
(Audio)
Dear friends,
first of all, allow me to thank our German member the Humanistische
Verband Deutschlands, and what I hope you will later welcome as a new full
member of our federation, the Humanistische Verband Bayern, and most of all our
friend Michael Bauer, for hosting us this year in coincidence with the
Humanisten-Tag, in this city of Nuremberg. A city that, after having been
chosen as its capital by the tyranny at the time of the totalitarian
dictatorship, has now rebuilt itself as a capital of the Human Rights, in this
Federal Republic of Germany that has been, in my humble opinion, the best
vaccinated of our countries in the more than seventy years of peace and
cooperation we Europeans have been living for the first time in centuries and
perhaps for the first time ever.
But now we are altogether living bleak times in Europe and throughout
what used to be called the Western world. Most of the taboos that were
established after the end of WW2 in defence of our restored or newly
established democracies have been broken and this has been largely accepted by
public opinion and electors. If much of liberal democracy consists in
“government by discussion”, our public discourse is growing more and more
uncivilised. What has been proudly defined “illiberal democracy”, by one of the
elected authoritarian leaders of Europe, is a model that is apparently gaining
momentum in many of our countries. The most basic human rights are being
trampled in many of our countries. What in the last 70 years used to be called,
rightly or wrongly, the leader of the Western world, the USA, has surrendered
to a tycoon who appears to be totally unaware of the basic principles of
constitutional government and of the rule of law, beginning with international
law.
It is perhaps not useless to remember, in a time when so many of our
fellow citizens and politicians have decided to forget the dire lessons of the
past century, that 79 years ago, in May 1939, the ocean liner St. Louis set
sail from Hamburg to the Americas, carrying almost one thousand Jewish asylum
seekers on board, who were fleeing from persecution in Nazi Germany. Cuba, the
US and Canada refused to accept them. So the St. Louis was forced to return to
Europe, but the ship’s captain Gustav Schröder, himself a non-Jewish German,
refused to return the ship to Germany until all the passengers had been given
entry into a safe country. After threatening to wreck the ship on the British
shores, captain Schröder docked it in Antwerp Belgium, and successfully
negotiated to safely disembark all the passengers, that finally found asylum in
the UK, in France, in Belgium and in the Netherlands, that all very reluctantly
accepted them in the end. Many of them were deported and died in the Shoah when
the Nazis invaded continental Europe, but many other survived.
The governments of the US, Canada, the UK, Belgium, France, the
Netherlands, that either refused or slowly and very reluctantly accepted the
asylum seekers of the St. Louis where not all necessarily composed by
antisemitic or racist politicians. On the contrary, many of them actively tried
to convince the other governments to
grant asylum to the passengers of the St. Louis. But they were not prepared to
defy the hostile attitude of many of their fellow citizens and electors and of
the media. They all objected that they already had accepted too many refugees
and they were not able to allocate more resources for that.
Our generation has good chances to be remembered that same way.
In this crucial area, and in many others, whatever the details and the
legal, economical and technical provisions, we should do whatever we can to
avoid the sinking of our civilization, of what most deserves of it to be
preserved and handed down to the Europeans of the future: liberal democracy,
secular institutions, the rule of law, human rights, government through
rational discussion, freedom of belief, freedom of the media. In short, the
heritage of the Enlightenment.
At a time when the progress of scientific research and its achievements
might theoretically open us the way to a global Golden Age, the political and
cultural developments seem to move in an opposite direction, pushed by the new
religious fundamentalism, by the autochthonous religious conservatives that
seek to regain power and influence thanks to them, by populist and nationalist
politicians and mass media that are, without even being aware, leading our
civilization to the same road, opposite to integration, and opposite to
supranational democracy, that led to the two attempted suicides of Europe in
the 20th century.
We should fight the populist and fundamentalist narrative, restore
education to citizenship, fight the “barbarism of specialisation” that is
disempowering even highly educated electors: all these forces and phenomena are
pushing toward a downfall of our civilization, for reasons that are utterly the
opposite of those outlined by the intellectuals that first used that formula
one hundred years ago.
Yet, there are also positive signs. Along with the steady growth of
societal secularisation, at least in Western Europe, traditional
authoritarianism appears no longer capable to reverse the trend towards
individual self-determination and individual freedom to choose. That kind of
traditional authoritarianism based on religious prejudice may unfortunately be
brandished as a rhetorical tool to stigmatise strangers or to revitalise
nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, even open racism, sexism and homophobia. But
that kind of traditional authoritarianism cannot be realistically re-imposed on
our citizens: the triumph in the Irish abortion referendum, three years after
that on equal marriage rights, is there to show that impossibility. On Lgbti
rights and end-of-life regulations our cultural battles are winning, and there
is no sign of a reversion in the path towards individual self-determination.
That is probably also the case or reproductive rights, and freedom to choose,
even though we must be aware that the new narrative adopted by our opponents,
that is now based on a distorted use of human rights and ecological or animal
rights jargon, requires an updated response from us. And, when and where it
retained its independence, the judiciary, and also most of our legal culture,
are not reversing the basically slow but steady progressive trend of the past
decades.
But even those achievements could be jeopardised by a downfall in the
quality of our democracies. There is a huge disproportion between our duties
and the resources we have at our disposal.
I would be insincere if I said that I am satisfied with what we were
able to do in the past year, but with your help, with our small but brilliant
and talented staff, we should redouble our efforts in the great challenges we
are bound to face in the next year. Mind you, this will be a crucial year,
because Europe, of which the European Union is no minor political actor,
carries more responsibility than ever in the defence of the tradition of the
ethical-political values and of the legal principles of the Enlightenment and
of its civilisation, that is our own.
