A Sunny Spell in the Brumes of the World

Jérôme Bru
Actor and theatre director

World geopolitics have not changed since the end of the Second World War. The same State actors rule the fate of the planet as if time had been frozen for 75 years. The five “winners” of the last World War have calcified onto their United Nations seats, in their hazy dreams of power, and the world continues to be organised around their interests.Some situations are so established that they raise no surprise anymore. Instead, we comment on them with entire libraries of commentaries, and we end up accepting them as part of the course of History. Regularly, some theories about the end of History come up. However, just a child's question would suffice to experience astonishment again, and rub our eyes and wake up.

Let’s begin with France. From de Gaulle to Macron, the French State has been defending its seat at the UN, as if the European Union did not exist. No French Head of State has ever had the courage to harmonise his speech and actions in favour of the EU with his speech and actions on the world stage. As if there were one France at the UN, concerned about its rank and international prestige (or at least what is left of it), and another France part of the EU, uttering an increasingly pro-European discourse since Giscard and Mitterrand. Is this large gap still bearable? Does it make sense anymore?

The answer is no, but the problem is that it still brings consensus among the majority of French people. It’s some kind of collective psychosis. It’s nostalgia for power. It’s some sort of antiquated fantasy placed in a long-rotten treasure chest. For the same reason, this French State organises international summits (COP 21, Peace Summit…) in order to exist in the eyes of the World and at the same time demands European leadership: it struggles with its nightmares since the end of its colonial empire, since the end of its “great” history. France does not live its life, it dreams of it.

Entangled in the same nightmares, the British withdrew to their island and to their memories of a former world power. They entered the EU reluctantly and now leave it forcefully. Maybe more than any other, the UK has adopted the crumpled costume of the great victors of the past. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of”, as Shakespeare wrote.

On the French side, there is not a single journalist who does not evoke, every time Europe is concerned, the topic of the Franco-German relationship. As if we were still in the 1950s stuck in a frozen space-time, as if the weather in the 27 countries depended only on the weather alongside the Rhine River. It seems like the umbilical cord has not yet been cut since the birth of Europe. Moreover, it is symptomatic that we systematically mention the “founding fathers” whenever Europe is in an “identity” crisis, or rather a teenage crisis. Like a teen who does not want to grow up. If we lived in the present, if our clocks were set at the right time, all of that would make no sense. There would not be the old and the new, the first and the last. Instead, we would all be equal, respectful of each other and united in the same History. But here’s the thing, history is made of the past, more than the future! It is made of memories, more than present reality! We do not live history, we dream of it…

However, if we woke up, if we were really there, here and now, in this present world and not in the one before, there would be a strong gesture that the French state could make immediately: give its seat at the UN to the EU! This would really prove its European ambition (justifying all of the work it has done in this regard at one stroke) and would definitively turn the page of a bygone past, the one where it was still seeking to restore a lost power. Gone are the days of the dream, hello real life! Europe would catch up on decades not spent on the world stage! And could really bring its message of peace, that it was built for! The “founding fathers” could sleep peacefully in their graves!

We can imagine the consequence: the United States, China, the United Kingdom and Russia would be forced to welcome new arrivals at the table, for example the African Union, which could fully achieve its decolonisation and encourage the whole world to demand an authentic world assembly. Not just a “global governance”, a dreadful word which hides the inability to assume the government of world affairs; the failure to enforce the principles of the United Nations Charter; the inability to impose rules on global finance and take actions against global warming; the inability to guarantee world peace; the failure to create a better life for all the inhabitants of this planet.

Thus, in this assembly, the term “international community” could actually assume a meaning and be a reality, while now it is only an empty shell, the good conscience of rich countries. Paradoxically, this would not be dreaming of History, but living it! This would be the world of here and now, a world to be invented together with equal partners, instead of this post-war world which has never ceased to persist in the victors’ desire for domination.

Translation by Cecilia Mellana