15/07/2015
On July 3, at headquarters of the Press Association of Madrid, the opening of the international course of the FAES Campus was held.
The course has been something of a tour around the battered state of freedom in various parts of the world. The battered freedom of Venezuela; freedom yearned for in Cuba; freedom bloodily denied to Christians in the Middle East and North Africa by the expansive and heinous drive of jihadist terrorism. But also a freedom severely compromised in Europe, as FAES wanted to exemplify in the case of the Danish journalist, threatened and persecuted, Flemming Rose, with regard to freedom of expression.
We have sought to address these issues as a founded reminder that freedom, as much as it may seem a good forever achieved, is still a scarce and threatened right. Therefore, around freedom, and for freedom, democratic, civic and political challenges also incumbent upon us, are still being waged. Not only because we have a solidarity debt with those who are fighting, but because we ourselves, the democratic and open societies in which we want to continue living, will have to wage them.
When we talk about free and open societies, we are not talking about abstractions. We are talking about representative democracy, the Rule of Law, open economy, human rights, and scientific rationality. Of those items which comprise what we call the European model, or maybe, the Western one.
This paradigm is the great cultural success from which we benefit, but above all, of which we are custodians. A success based on institutions and civil society with a complex historical development but with an essential notion: the building of a precise idea of freedom, and its expansion and guarantee in the constitutional regime.
Freedom enables to vote, but also to undertake, to innovate, to investigate, to work and to believe; to create and of course to communicate, inform and express. Freedom is the engine of progress and the condition of peace.
In the idea of freedom, the values of dignity, reason, and right merge together. Therefore, we recognize it as an attribute that, being as it is human, we consider universal.
At this point, two reproaches usually emerge. One, that of dogmatism. The other, that of Eurocentrism.
Stressing the universality of human rights and the right to freedom is, for some, an excess of dogmatic zeal, a kind of democratic fundamentalism which, at best, is incapable of understanding that the particular conditions of a given society or group make them inherently unfit to access and enjoy freedom. The final argument of this position is that the remedy is worse than the disease, so it is better not to get involved in an interference that is doomed to fail.
From other stances, the argument is different but joins the previous one in the conclusion. It is not that you cannot advocate freedom in certain towns, societies or communities; you just should not. In the name of cultural difference, some believe that talking about these things is nothing but a disguised attempt of western imposition on those whose only claim and right, at the moment, is difference.
I will not go into the multicultural controversy. I will just recall the words of someone not very suspicious of being a reactionary, the words of Zygmunt Bauman:
‘The universality and respect for the rights of citizens are preconditions of any policy of recognition deemed sensible. It is worth adding,’ Bauman continues, ‘that the universality of mankind is the benchmark against which all sensible policy of recognition must be measured.’
‘The new culturalism,’ Bauman states, ‘like, previously, racism, strives to stifle conscience and accept human inequality as a fact that exceeds the capabilities of human intervention (in the case of racism) or as a condition against which we should not interfere, in deference to its venerable cultural values.’
In other words: on many occasions it is enough to just rename inequality and call it ‘diversity’ and a denial of fundamental rights, which would seem unacceptable to all, will become a cultural difference worthy of respect and protection. This exercise in conceptual sleight does not seem very progressive indeed.
So, the fight to preserve freedom is not an unnecessary commitment, a dangerous naiveté, or an undesirable interference with other life forms. Nor is the influence of those who preach the sacrifice of fundamental rights in the name of respect for difference, identity or recognition, only theoretical.
Whoever doubts this can ask Flemming Rose.
On September 30, 2005, Flemming Rose, as the cultural editor of the Jyllands Posten published a series of 12 cartoons of various authors who had been invited to express their vision of Islam. These cartoons, particularly one of the Prophet Muhammad, was used by the most active Islamist radicals to make the publication of the Jyllands Posten trigger a reaction which reached very serious episodes of violence and repression.
Rose, the cartoonists who published in this issue of the Jyllands Posten, and several members of the newspaper, were threatened. Their lives changed and became part of the lists of targets of jihadist terrorism.
Theirs is a story that is no longer unknown in Europe. In Spain, it is a story that sounds dramatically familiar when, for decades, the tyranny of silence denounced by Rose tried to impose itself over thousands of citizens and their most basic political and civil rights. Yet this story so crudely real needs to be remembered to stop it from hiding behind its victims or giving in to the intimidation they themselves suffer.
It is important to clearly state why we wanted to address the issue of freedom of expression from the notion proposed by the case of Flemming Rose which, at the same time, offers other sides that are also very important for the future of freedom in Europe. From his experience of real persecution, Rose himself has discussed the possibility of an Islam assuming the secularity of Western societies, the role of the left before Islam and the consequences of their insistence on identity and recognition policies, on the conditions of pluricultural dialogue, the limits of multiculturalism or the true meaning of tolerance.
Flemming Rose wrote on February 19, 2006 an article in The Washington Post titled ‘Why I published those cartoons. ’
In that article, Rose said he was not willing to publish anything in the name of freedom of expression. He denied being a fundamentalist in his a support of freedom of expression, as he stated in Madrid, declaring himself to endorse the punishing of expressions that incite violence and unlawful interference with privacy. But he also endorsed the satirical tradition of the Danish press when depicting the royal family and the great public figures of the country.
Flemming Rose remembered that cartoonists had treated Islam the same way they had treated Christianity, Buddhism or Judaism. He denied having demonized Muslims and acknowledged that some people had been offended by the publication of the cartoons. He apologized for that, but claiming his right to publish the artwork while recalling that nowhere else than in a democracy where freedom of expression is guaranteed can a greater number of religions peacefully coexist.
Somewhat later, in an interview, Rose posed the problem in the terms in which we want to address them today. Rose said:
‘There are two narratives here: There are those who say that the controversy was about free- speech and self-censorship—about denying a religious group special treatment in the public domain. Then, you have another narrative saying: This was not about free speech or self-censorship; it was about a powerful newspaper insulting a minority. This was a fair argument until the moment when the threats were issued. The twelve cartoonists and I received death threats; newspapers were closed in Russia and in Malaysia, and newspaper editors were jailed in Jordan and Yemen. At that point, it became an issue exclusively about free speech.’
And indeed, this is where one should get when talking about the most serious threats to freedom of expression weighing on this right in Europe. This is due to three main reasons:
First. Freedom of expression and its limits are subject to ongoing debate. The democratic and liberal consensus on freedom of expression unites us in many coincidences and its debate would probably identify some discrepancies. Needless to insist on how the digital revolution is affecting this debate and its impact on this right. But violence, denial of the right, the imposition of silence, civil and even physical death, render pointless any discussion about the limits of freedom of expression and transform it into a debate about the limits that we have to put to those who deny it and want to end it with threats and violence.
Second. The defence of freedom of expression is a result, among other reasons, of the defence of such an essential freedom as religious freedom, which has historically proven to be a sensitive and very precise indicator of the state of the other freedoms in a society. We are talking about freedoms that have their own legal uniqueness, that belong to a common core, and as such we have to keep it in full.
Third, because diversity is not the end station but a starting point for what someone defined as ‘an ongoing debate in pursuit of a common conception of welfare.’ But we must add that this debate requires value judgments, not accepting all positions as morally equivalent or equally valuable, and that it can only take place in the ‘democratic constitutional regime’ as it uses the Habermas frame.
In other words, we must accept many debates about difference, identity and recognition in a pluralistic society. But we cannot and must not accept any that begins by establishing that loyalty to beliefs is incompatible with loyalty to our status as free citizens.