Deeply Emotional Feb23 2016, Amsterdam

Umberto Eco: “A sexual revolution can make us all ‘European’”

Umberto Eco was the father of semiotics, a scholar of mass culture, and author of essays for the academic elite as well as global bestsellers for a wider audience. But he was also an outspoken advocate for intercultural understanding and an intellectual who sought to define European identity beyond the economic and political.

In an interview, with journalist Gianni Riotta, he once said: “The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we’ve been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity.” The Europe of the founding fathers, indeed, reacted to war, but this is not enough anymore. Now we must work towards building a more profound identity.

"The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers."

Asked to describe European identity in 2012, Eco said it is widespread but shallow: “I am using an English word that is not the same as the Italian word “superficiale”, but which is somewhere between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’.” In the face of both economic and identity crises in Europe, Eco pleaded for more human exchanges across borders, with his understanding of European integration embracing a “sexual process.” For Eco, it was the Erasmus programme that created the first generation of young Europeans. The sexual revolution he called for is simple: when people meet each other they can fall in love. “The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers.”

In the same interview to Gianni Riotta, Eco points out how Europe’s weak identity was already evident, for example, when the constitution – written by politicians, with no participation from educated men and no discussions with voters – was rejected in a referendum. It was also evident when euro banknotes were designed “without the usual faces of important men and women – instead, there were just frigid architectures, as in a De Chirico landscape”. Eco would have chosen European men and women, “perhaps not politicians or the leaders who have divided us – not Cavour or Radetzky, but men of culture who have united us, from Dante to Shakespeare, from Balzac to Rossellini”.

He never advocated a coherent identity, recognising – with a sentence that became famous – that multiculturalism is instead in the fabric of Europe’s identity: “The language of Europe is translation”. Even “the idea of an unique [European] newspaper is for now just a utopia. The web, meanwhile, makes us bump into one another.”

For Umberto Eco, it is the arts that can help us reflect on cultures different from our own as well as the kind of encounter stimulated by the Erasmus programme. “Little by little: that is how our European identity will become more profound.”

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