European political integration has reached a standstill. Trying to revive it without creating a European public opinion is unthinkable. We need to discuss what kind of Europe we want to build and do it in Europe, overcoming the linguistic and cultural barriers between countries.
Eutopia, the first European webzine to address crucial issues for our future as Europeans, in a rigorous, structured but accessible way, has been created for this purpose. With this in mind, we have brought together, for a unique collaboration, four prestigious European publishers: S.Fischer Verlag in Germany, Editorial Debate in Spain, Éditions du Seuil in France and Editori Laterza in Italy. They will work with other partners including Telecom Italia and the European Institute - London School of Economics as the Academic Partner.
The magazine's director is Eric Joszef, Italian correspondent of the French newspaper Libération.
Authors including Zygmunt Bauman, Luciano Canfora, Paul Collier, to name a few, will express their thoughts, interpreting current issues with a continental perspective, because a united Europe needs a public debate that goes beyond national borders. We're convinced that a European culture and approach are missing when it comes to dealing with the big issues of our time.
The magazine will be presented at 5.00 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 April at the offices of the publisher Laterza (Via di Villa Sacchetti 17, Rome). The presentation will be attended by Giuseppe Laterza, Marcella Logli, Eric Joszef, Lucio Caracciolo as well as others including Giuliano Amato, Tullio De Mauro, Andrea Giardina, Stefano Rodotà.
With its concern for social responsibility, Telecom Italia has played an enthusiastic part in implementing the Eutopia project from the very beginning, providing the best that it has: technology and human experience.
The connecting strength of the Internet is the tool that allows excellence to be shared: it shortens distances, creates shared interests and enriches people.
Now more than ever, culture is the driving force behind economic and social recovery in Italy and the rest of Europe.
Telecom Italia has become an active player in this project, particularly by creating the Eutopia website and hosting it on its servers, because it strongly believes in technology as an enabler for cultural development and the spread of ideas and collective debate, because only a choral approach will allow a new model of sustainable living to emerge.
Once a month, Eutopia (at the website: www.eutopiamagazine.eu) will deal with a particular issue associated with European political priorities. The first will be Immigration: migration flows from other areas of the world and the demographic, economic and social consequences, the impact of policy choices and regulatory changes, the misalignment between national and European citizenships, a comparison with European attitudes to other people in the past. There will be contributions from economists including Paul Collier, lawyers including Costanza Margiotta, demographers including Ludger Pries and Kyoko Shinozaki, historians including Andrea Giardina. Subsequent issues will deal with welfare, democracy, education and citizenship. Each issue will be illustrated with original photographs.
The Speakers Corner section will compare opinions, including very critical ones, on essential aspects of the European tradition and the choices the Union will have to make in future. In the first issue of Eutopia, philosopher Fernando Savater will talk about
'Citizens and natives' based on the case of Catalonia, political expert Jan Zielonka will put forward the idea of rebuilding a federal Europe on a non-national basis, historian Massimo Montanari will describe how the identity of European cooking has developed.
Other sections will allow readers to appreciate
the depth and variety of European culture. The great historian Jacques Le Goff wrote a contribution on the eras of Europe in a section we have called The Alphabet of Europe. Turning points: a historical event that changed the fate of Europe, such as the Battle of Poitiers of 732 AD, retold by Alessandro Barbero; Contrappunti (Counterpoints): Romanticism and Enlightenment, free cities and seignories, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the culture of oil and the culture of butter - a place to explore the biases, opposites and dualities that criss-cross Europe. Liaisons dangereuses: two European figures from the world of art, literature, science or politics who were influenced by one another. For example, Christian Goeschel will write about the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini and Amedeo Feniello will tell us about the relationship between a 14th century Genoese merchant and the English king Richard II. The strand will continue with the relationships between Beethoven and his Scottish publisher, Picasso and Braques, etc.
Theatres of memory: from monuments to battlefields, from palaces to city squares, European places that symbolise its identity. Anna Foa, for example, will write about ghettos in Europe. Ipse Dixit: essential writings that have shaped European culture and identity: from Thomas More to John Maynard Keynes and Vaclav Havel. Eureka!: European genius, scientific, political and other inventions. Portraits: Europeans who have excelled in various fields, in the past and the present. New Europeans: people who have decided to settle in another European country, former Erasmus students or mixed families of different European nationalities. Top of Europe: what kind of books do Europeans read? What kind of films do they watch? What are their favourite dishes? A section to compare and discover European tastes and consumption trends. Key figures: graphs, tables, figures, a place to reflect based on data and statistics.
Each contribution will appear both in the original language and in English.
This is an ambitious project, just like Europe, which, to quote Zygmunt Bauman, “is an active utopia, struggling to coalesce and consolidate the otherwise disconnected, multidirectional actions. How active that utopia will ultimately turn, depends on its actors.”
