The European Project in Stefan Zweig's Thought

Paolo Ponzano
Professor of European Governance at the European College of Parma, Italy.Senior Fellow of the Schuman Centre of EUI

Stefan Zweig
Appello agli Europei [Appeal to Europeans] (in Italian)

Skira, Milano, 2015

English edition including eleven Zweig's essays: Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink, Pushkin Press, London, 2017

In 2015, the volume “Appello agli Europei [Appeal to Europeans]” was published in Italy; it collects the unpublished texts of four conferences held in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian cosmopolitan writer and intellectual, a great proponent of European unity, who was deprived of his Austrian citizenship after the annexation of Austria to Hitler's Germany and forced to take refuge first in England and then in Brazil. There he decided to put an end to his days in 1942, when Europe seemed to be succumbing to the advance of Nazi troops. His autobiography was published in the book “The World of Yesterday” (with the significant subtitle “Memories of a European”), an illuminating account of the European civilization.

The first short text of the volume is entitled “The Tower of Babel”, in which Zweig describes the myth of the tower of the same name as a metaphor for the great monument of the spiritual unity of the European continent, which fell to pieces due to the discord of the European peoples, who  lost the notion of the common effort necessary to complete the work; a project, on the contrary, that it is essential to resume. The second text traces an evolution of European thought throughout the centuries, which Zweig sees as a continuous alternation between national and supranational tendencies (from the Roman Empire to the religious unity broken up by the Reformation, from Renaissance humanism to the affirmation of the national States, etc.); it contains an enlightening sentence by Goethe (“At the moment when the commitment is to create new countries everywhere, for the one who rises above his time  homeland is everywhere and in no place”) and concludes with an act of trust in the future United States of Europe. In his third conference, Zweig asserts the need for a moral detoxification of Europe, in order to put an end to the national propaganda that wants to instigate every nation to hate its neighboring nation, instead of highlighting what each nation has in common in the history of human civilization. To this end, Zweig proposes a sort of Erasmus program long before it was set up, in which each student would spend one year studying at the University of another European country - recognized in his country of origin -, with a view to contribute to a mutual knowledge and understanding among European peoples. .

Finally, in his last text dedicated to the unification of Europe, Zweig starts from the observation that “the European idea is not a primary feeling, as the patriotic sentiment is (...); it is not innate and instinctive, but arises from reflection; it is not the product of a spontaneous passion, but the slowly matured fruit of an elevated thought. It lacks the enthusiastic instinct that animates the patriotic sentiment”. ... If the European idea has to have real effects, we have to pull it out of the esoteric sphere of intellectual discussions and devote all our energy to making it visible and convincing for an enlarged circle”. According to Zweig, although a European spirit has not yet manifested itself, we have the mathematical certainty of its existence, the same certainty of the astronomer who sees in his telescope a star appear whose existence his mathematical calculations have revealed.

Zweig draws the conclusion that books, documents, congresses and debates reach a small part of all Europeans, and precisely those who are already convinced of the European idea. It is therefore necessary to move from mere praiseworthy gestures by an elite to concrete action in civil society, through an organization capable of militating for the European idea and giving it a visible character. To this end, Zweig proposes concrete actions for mobilizing public opinion for the European project: creating a European university; recognizing a year of study at a foreign university; creating a common press organ for all Europeans, to be published in all European languages; concentrating all international conferences for one year in a single European city; establishing a supranational body that has the power to disprove all the “fake news” or accusations published in a European country regarding another country, etc. ... Stefan Zweig's lesson is striking for its topical relevance: reason is nothing without passion, and passion is powerless without organized action. For this reason  Zweig's book concludes with the words borrowed from Goethe's Faust: instead of saying “in the beginning was the Word”, let us rather say “in the beginning was the Action”.

Zweig's book should be read in particular by the defenders of national patriotism, who have forgotten the harmful effects of nationalism and pretend to legitimize the superiority of their own nation over others (“America first”, or “Deutschland über alles”, or “D'abord les Français “, or “Prima gli italiani”). The physicist Carlo Rovelli states, in his article “Let's stop the nationalists: there is only one homeland, humanity” in response to an article by Galli della Loggia in defense of national identity, that the latter is “good if it helps to overcome local interests for the common good”, but it is “short-sighted and counterproductive when it promotes the interest of an artificial social group, namely “our nation”, instead of a wider common good”. Not because we do not have national identities - continues Rovelli - but because each of us is a crossroads of multiple and stratified identities. Putting the nation first means betraying all the others. In his book “28 centuries of Europe”, the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont mentions a hundred statesmen, philosophers and intellectuals who have devised or defended projects of European unity over the centuries. This has allowed Altiero Spinelli to assert the validity of the European project, because it has not been buried by history like other projects, but did always spring back to life after its defeats. As the most famous constitutionalist of the modern age, Montesquieu, said, “if someone would propose to me something that would prove useful to my homeland but detrimental to Europe, I would consider it a crime”. But perhaps Galli della Loggia did not read this passage in Montesquieu's works.

Translated by Lionello Casalegno