
Dénia, city of thought. It is a motto, a strong idea that catches on throughout the year with the organization of various activities, but that comes especially to life during the three days of the Festival de les Humanitats, which brings together dozens of thinkers, writers, scientists, linguistics and journalists. The third edition of this meeting in front of the sea in the town of Alicante began this Thursday with the inaugural intervention of the philosopher and mayor of Venice for 12 years between 1993 and 2010, Massimo Cacciari.
Europe as a bridge between the great hegemonic spaces of the world and federalism as the basis of relations between nations focused the discourse of the left-wing Italian thinker. “The world is only thinkable today from the basis of a faith of the principle of federalism among the great political spaces of the planet. The world does not tolerate monarchy. Either there is this federalism between the United States, India, China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa or we have the rupture that is occurring. “We are so blind that we do not see what happens outside the West in terms of friend and enemy,” said the 80-year-old university professor via videoconference, because a surgical intervention made it impossible for him to travel to Dénia.
In the current situation, should it be the West and nothing else? how long will it last? All you need to do is look at the birth rates of the countries mentioned and compare them with those of Europe, he continued his argument. “Europe without immigration will disappear within a century,” he stated from a large screen that presided over a room full of people, located in the maritime station, with views of the sea and the Dénia castle. There is the option of fighting to “delay the twilight” with the mission of preserving our privileges for as long as possible, he added. “We have been reduced to that, to defending ourselves, building walls, erecting barricades, symbols of tragic decadence,” lamented Cacciari, one of the political leaders of the European left at the end of the 20th century.
The mission must be different: to move towards global federalism. And in this sense, Europe must play a key role as an intermediary, because it represents the culture “of pact, of law, of the search for peace.” A Europe that definitively lost the hegemony of the West with the Second World War. “We went from the European West to the American, Atlantic West. “Europe is becoming more and more Atlantic,” he said. “We Europeans must be allies of the United States, but not servants,” said the head of the chair of Philosophical Thought and Metaphysics at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan. “Our culture, rooted in philosophy and science, has to guide towards a new global federalism among the great political spaces of the planet,” reaffirmed the author of the essays. The power that stops oh Europe or philosophy.
The general trend towards the globalization of all the economic, financial and scientific relations that make up the world seemed to make it irreversible that it would entail the creation of a single space of governance, as many thought, Cacciari continued his argument, who reasoned for an hour without papers, without silent intervals, with his face in the foreground due to the proximity of his face to the camera that was recording him from Italy. However, the world is multipolar. ”Globalization forces us to think about the direction we want to take. Be aware that the world is multipolar and that the differences on the planet are a value,” said the philosopher on the first day of the festival.
The Humanities Festival is an initiative promoted by the Dénia City Council and the Baleària company, organized by the Dénia Creative Foundation, with the academic direction of Josep Ramoneda and Jordi Alberich (from the magazine The PortBou Suitcase). In his brief intervention, the mayor of Dénia, the socialist Vicent Grimalt, recalled some of the great current tragedies and underlined the transformative vocation of the festival and its function not only as a forum for thought, but also as “a platform to promote humanity.” , equality and solidarity”, values that Dénia defends, as a Mediterranean city.
Ramoneda warned that “misinformation is one of the problems of this transition from the communication system from the era of industrial capitalism and conventional democracy to the current situation installed on digital communication.” “Lies spread at a speed eight times faster than truths. And he recalled that people like the magnate owner of X, former Twitter, Elon Musk, who “manage” the large communication networks, despite maintaining that “freedom is incompatible with democracy.” For the journalist, writer and philosopher, the humanities are more relevant than ever “at a time when the world is undergoing an accelerated transformation and where technology seems to permanently overwhelm us.”
The “most aberrant” leader
In his talk with Ramoneda, journalist John Carlin showed his ironic personal vision of international reality. He considered it an “undemocratic injustice” that only “Americans and not everyone” vote in the next US elections, which he will cover for the newspaper. The vanguard. “These are more important elections for Ukrainians than for Texans,” he said in his speech, in which he was highly critical of Trump, the “most aberrant” leader he has met in his “40 years as a reporter in 60 countries.” “He is a clown without principles, an absolute narcissist, zero empathy for anyone other than him. I’m not defending Milei, he’s pretty crazy, but he wants to do what’s best for his country. You could be totally wrong. Trump doesn’t give a damn about his country, he said.
In the United States, two souls coexist, “two different species, two absolutely different ways of thinking.” “It is much more difficult to reconcile the United States than South Africa,” said the author of The human factorthat inspired the movie Unbeaten. An admirable country, on the other hand, for its great cultural influence, for the attendance of so many brilliant people, like the writer Cormac McCarthy, for example, and who, however, later votes for Trump. He predicted that Kamala Harris will win in votes, as Hillary Clinton already did, but it is not clear who will inhabit the White House due to the electoral system.
He was also very critical of Putin, “the Hitler of the 21st century”, although there were no “gas chambers”, whom he described as a “narcissist with zero empathy.” The journalist declared himself “passionately in favor of Ukraine.”
Already in the audience’s question time, one person referred to the fact that NATO had also provoked the war in Ukraine with the possibility of its implementation in the country, together with Russia, and compared the situation to the Cuban missile crisis. , when the United States discovered weapons from the USSR on the neighboring Caribbean island in 1962. Visibly upset, Carlin disqualified the intervener and said: “I can’t lower myself.” But he answered. He pointed out that it is “a brutal simplistic” to think that the war was caused by NATO and not the primary fact that Russia considers that Ukraine belongs to it.