Europe and Migrants. For a Shared Project of Our Future

The migration processes which, coming especially from the Mediterranean, have been flooding Europe for some time now, represent for our continent, and for the life of its inhabitants, a decisive challenge. Europe is actually faced with a dilemma: it can risk a real dissolution and ultimately being lost as a civilization, or it can try to renew its common identity presenting itself to the world as a possible model of peaceful and inclusive democracy. Faced with this alternative, and in order for it to make a choice for life, and not, instead, a possibly suicidal one, limited policies and short-breath projects are no longer enough. Even after the demise of the great nineteenth-century’s and twentieth-century’s ideologies, which promised a meaning and a goal to human action, guaranteed in some way, what is needed today is at least a worldview, a comprehensive project of society and civilization that could represent a possible, shared horizon to all Europeans. Old Europeans and also new Europeans, the ones coming in with the migration processes that characterize the new century. It is worth reflecting, to understand the complexity and severity of the challenge we are facing and also the need of a shared vision of the world, on what is placed “upstream” and at the same time on what is placed “downstream” of the migration flows in progress. “Upstream”, as is well known, there are wars, civil conflicts, oppressive and police-controlled political regimes, social, environmental and economic crises that disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East and Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, which essentially force those people to leave.