In one of his public interventions, Josep Borrell suggested that Europe was a garden in the middle of the global jungle.
Coming from the head of foreign policy of the European Union, his metaphor triggered a series of offended responses from various latitudes.
In reality, as sometimes happens, the rhetorical slips of a political figure disfigure a message of profound content.
Because it is true that in a chaotic world where democracy is in crisis and human rights are violated daily, the EU is founded on principles and values that constitute a project of a humanity that is respectful of humans and our natural environment.
The problem is that the practice of these values depends on what cultures and institutions make up the EU.
And in a world of global flows characterized by multicultural interdependence, it is not always possible to reconcile our interpretation of human values with those that come from other cultures or histories.
It is not that ours is superior (that is the problem of colonial-based ethnocentrism), but it is simply ours, that of the people who formed the EU around a project rooted in our values.
From this derives in part (another part is pure xenophobia) the growing rejection of broad sectors of immigration that is both necessary and inevitable.
But when talking about immigration, very different cultures and habits are mixed.
It is forgotten that some societies in Eastern Europe have gone through a long period of corrupt communist institutions, the decomposition of which has resulted in mafias that have expanded throughout Europe.
Some countries resisted better, particularly Poland, with a historical identity of democratic legitimacy.
In other countries the traces of the past have marked the present.
The case of immigration from Eastern Europe in Sweden is paradigmatic.
The Swedes have accepted the numerous Kurdish refugees without major problems.
But they are reacting vehemently to the daily shootouts between criminal gangs whose core are the thugs from the societies of Eastern European countries who now have free rein.
Obviously we must be extremely careful with stigmatizing entire societies, falling into xenophobia.
But we would have to be equally careful in an expansion project to the east, with some countries undermined by corruption and authoritarian traditions.
This is the case of Ukraine and other candidates to enter the Union.
Neither their economies nor their institutions predict easy integration.
The reason for the expansion is geopolitical: to stop Putin's expansionism.
But that's what NATO is for.
Join NATO and go through a long homologation process in the European Union, with multiple prior adjustments.
If, in order not to enrage the Russian president with integration into NATO, we make a mixed bag of the EU, we will gradually lose values that, from their origin, constitute the foundation of the European project.
That is, our deep identity beyond cultural diversity.
Copyright La Vanguardia, 2024