Belonging Europe

Keynote Speech by Mahir Namur, "A Soul for Europe" Meeting, Jean Monnet House, Houjarray, France | 20 April 2026

We are here, in this house. A house that holds a particular kind of silence — the silence of ideas that changed history.

Jean Monnet sat in this garden. He walked these corridors. He looked out at this landscape and asked himself a question that must have seemed, in the ruins of Europe after two world wars, almost reckless in its optimism: What if peace could be made durable? Not just declared. Not just wished for. But built — through concrete, small steps. Through shared structures. Through practice.

We are here today because that work is not finished — because the question of Europe, and of what it means to belong to Europe, has become urgent again in a way that none of us can afford to ignore.

I work as a cultural manager and as a psychological counsellor working within an existential approach. Belonging sits at the exact crossroads of both of my professions. In cultural work, we are always asking: How do we create shared spaces? How do we bring people together across difference? How do we build something that feels like "us"? And in existential counseling, we sit with individuals facing perhaps the deepest version of the same question: where do I belong? Do I belong anywhere at all?

So, I am here to do what I try to do in both of my professions: to bring the questions alive in the room. To share the questions that live in my own mind, and to offer the perspectives I have arrived at — not as truths to be accepted, but as starting points for us to reflect on together.

This house is a good place to begin. Because what happened here — in this garden, at this table — was an act of belonging of a particular kind. Not belonging to a nation, not belonging to a flag. Belonging to a possibility. To something that did not yet exist.

Jean Monnet did not belong to the Europe of his time. He belonged to a Europe that had not yet been built. And that distinction, I will argue, is at the heart of everything we are here to discuss.

But before we speak about belonging in a European context — before we even say the word "Europe" — I believe we need to do something harder. Something we rarely allow ourselves the time to do. We need to think carefully about the concept of belonging itself.

I. The Womb and the World

Let me begin at the beginning. The very beginning.

When a human being is in the mother's womb, it lives within an ideal ecosystem. A perfect state of wellbeing. It is protected, safe, held. The baby floats in warm fluid, fully sheltered, with all needs met effortlessly. There is total connection with the surrounding environment: a state of complete unity and harmony. To belong, in its deepest sense.

And then birth happens. The physical connection is cut. Suddenly, instead of warm liquid, there is cool air. Instead of effortless fulfillment, there is distance, need, and effort. Instinctively, the baby resists separation and wants to remain attached. Yet day by day, something extraordinary happens: the child differentiates. It slowly discovers the distinction between I and the Other.

From that point on, the human being is no longer physically connected to everything it needs. It must begin to identify its needs and make efforts to meet them.

This paradox remains with us throughout life. On the one hand, we strive to become independent individuals, separating from our original conditions. On the other hand, we carry a deep longing to return to that original sense of unity — to a feeling of being fully connected within an ideal ecosystem. We long, in other words, for an ideal state of belonging.

The social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm described this tension as a fundamental human condition: once human beings separate from their original unity with nature and with others, they spend their lives searching for new forms of connection — for the feeling of an ideal belonging. That may be one reason why, whenever we return to nature, we often feel closer to that sense of belonging.

II. The Forest and the Herd

And yet life in the outer world is not like the womb. It is structured by paradox.

The forest, for example, is peaceful — but it is also dangerous. It contains beauty and threat at the same time. The poisonous snake, the spider, the bear, the wolf — all may threaten our existence, but they are also part of the life cycle of the forest itself. The beauty of the forest comes precisely from the coexistence of all these forms of life.

A human-centred worldview, however, sees the whole ecosystem merely as a collection of resources and tools that must serve human needs. It behaves greedily, as if everything belongs to it. From this perspective, the universe is no longer perceived as a living whole, but as a field of things that either serve us or threaten us. What serves us is enslaved and consumed until exhausted. What threatens us is destroyed — even exterminated. And then one day we discover that the forest to which we once felt we belonged has disappeared.

In the process, the belonging we long for is displaced. Instead of being found in relationship with the larger ecosystem of life, it is sought within alliances of those who resemble us — within the herd, the tribe, the group that shares our fears and confirms our superiority. This kind of belonging is nourished by arrogance: by the belief that one's own group matters more than others and therefore deserves more rights than others.

By contrast, the person who does not see themselves as the master of the ecosystem — but as only a small part of it, no more important than other forms of life — is searching for a different kind of belonging. A belonging nourished not by arrogance and pride, but by humility and compassion that leads to care and collective wellbeing.

III. The Womb, the Forest, and Europe

Let us now place these two metaphors before Europe. Because the history of Europe is, at its core, a history of reckoning with precisely these two questions. From the womb, we carry this question: Where do we want to belong? From the forest, we carry this question: On what moral foundation do we build that belonging?

And Europe's honest answer must be this: we have answered both questions badly, throughout our history. Colonialism, wars, centuries of destruction within the continent itself — these cannot be denied. Instead of tending the forest, we consumed it. Instead of collective wellbeing, we chose the belonging of the herd, again and again.

And yet we must also say this: Europe is one of the rare political projects that has attempted to reckon with those failures and build something from them. That was the question Monnet and his generation carried out of the ruins: What if peace could be built rather than merely declared?

This is why belonging to Europe is not belonging to the Europe that already exists. It is belonging to the Europe it is trying to become. A belonging rooted not in fear, but in values. But to take that distinction seriously, we first need to understand belonging itself more deeply.

IV. The Many Faces of Belonging

Belonging can take many different forms. And we must be honest about all of them.

In one sense, it can arise from a basic need for safety — much like animals staying in a herd. Human beings, too, often feel safer among those who resemble them. A common enemy creates a strong sense of belonging. In another sense, it can resemble the loyalty of a football fan to their team. The players change, some even join rival teams with high transfer fees, but the fan's attachment remains.

Belonging can even arise in harmful relationships. A person may remain unable to leave a violent family system because a sense of belonging still binds them to it. Likewise, belonging can emerge through complicity. A group of people who have committed crimes together may remain deeply loyal to one another in order to hide the truth.

As we can see, the same word can describe both life-giving and destructive bonds. That is why, when we use this concept, we must be careful to ask: what kind of belonging are we talking about?

V. Fate and Choice

Human beings enter the world already belonging to a community they did not choose — a family, a religion, a nation, a culture. These are conditions of birth, not of will. But what distinguishes us from other animals is the capacity for critical reflection and freedom of choice. We do not choose the community we are born into — but we can learn to take a distance from it, to question it, and ultimately to construct the community we wish to belong to.

Every human life unfolds between two environments: the first is the environment of fate — the one we are born into. The second is the environment we choose.

This distinction is not abstract. Monnet was born into the Europe of his time — a Europe of wars, nationalism, and destruction. But he chose to belong to a different Europe. One that did not yet exist. And that choice is the moral foundation of the European project. Today, the question for us is: which Europe do we choose?

VI. Democracy, Identity, and Populism

But in making that choice, there is something we must be honest about — about Europe's own complexity. What reason does a person living in a village in rural Portugal, or inland France, or eastern Hungary have to feel European? Not in theory — but in the morning, in their market, in their daily life? If Europe has never appeared in their street, never touched their school or their hospital or their livelihood in a way they could see and name — why would they belong to it?

This is perhaps the hardest question we face. And it is not a rhetorical one. Because the answer — or the absence of one — is exactly where populism enters. Populism works precisely because it exploits this need. It creates a powerful "we" — not around shared values, but around shared fear. The herd dynamic dressed in democratic language.

Therefore democracy alone cannot protect us from this. It must always be spoken in the same breath as the values it is meant to protect: the rule of law, rights, pluralism, human dignity. Without these, democracy becomes the mechanism through which the herd elects its own shepherd.

And today there is a new forest — the digital environment. Like the old one, it contains both beauty and danger. But in this forest, the danger is invisible: it shapes not what we see, but how we think. In a space where speed replaces depth and repetition replaces understanding, we risk mistaking familiarity for truth. And we are already seeing how this is being used — deliberately, in certain contexts — to spread the belonging of the herd. It is not difficult to foresee what the acceleration of AI could do to this forest.

VII. Why Art?

There is one more thing we need if we are to move from the belonging of the herd toward the belonging of choice. Art. Not as decoration. Not as entertainment. Not as a cultural programme annexed to a policy agenda. But as the practice through which human beings do something the herd cannot: turn inward, question what they have taken for granted, and encounter the other as something more than a threat or a mirror.

The herd works by silencing the individual voice and replacing it with the voice of the group. The digital forest works by replacing depth with speed, and thought with reflex. Both move us away from ourselves. Both make us easier to manipulate, and harder to reach. Art moves in the opposite direction. It slows us down. It makes us feel before we conclude. It places us in front of what we assumed was simply true — our certainties, our taboos, the boundaries of what we believe is possible — and quietly refuses to let those assumptions go unexamined.

In existential terms, this is precisely what it means to take distance from the community we were born into. Not to reject it — but to see it. To stop mistaking fate for choice. Art is one of the few forces in public life capable of producing that shift — not through argument, but through experience.

And when that experience is shared — when people from different communities, different languages, different histories sit together in the dark and watch the same stage, or work together to build something that did not exist before — something else happens. The paradox of separation softens. A community emerges through creativity, presence, and shared meaning that echoes, however briefly, the unity we once knew at the very beginning of life.

Culture's deepest contribution is actually not only the experience it creates — it is the process through which it is created. When people invest, negotiate, and build something together, they are not just making a festival or a performance. They are practising a different kind of belonging. One rooted not in fear, but in the willingness to be changed by the encounter. This is why the question for us is not only: how do we bring people to cultural experiences? But: how do we bring people into cultural processes?

VIII. What We Are Here to Build

So what does all of this mean for us — here, in Europe?

Not a fortress. Not a gated community — prosperous within its walls, indifferent to what happens beyond them. That vision is not only morally hollow; it is, in the end, simply not possible. Look at the world as it is today. Climate, migration, conflict, the erosion of democratic norms — none of these stop at a border.

The Europe worth belonging to is not only the wealthiest Europe, or only the most protected Europe. It is a Europe that is imagined together and built together. It is a Europe where freedom, justice, the rule of law, human rights, and human dignity are not aspirations written into treaties — but the lived culture of its institutions, its communities, its daily life.

And here is what follows from that: when you genuinely belong to those human values — not to a flag, not to a border, but to the belief that every human being deserves dignity and freedom — you cannot logically want those values only for yourself. The belonging becomes bigger than Europe. It becomes a responsibility toward the world. This is why the right question we should ask is: what responsibility do we carry, as Europeans, for making the world more livable?

How fortunate we are to still live in a context where that responsibility can actually be exercised — where freedoms exist, where individuals and institutions are still able to shape the system. Freedom, by its nature, makes responsibility inevitable.

Perhaps the belonging we need to discuss is not belonging to Europe as such — but belonging to the European ideal. Not to the reality that already exists, but to the possibility of what could exist. To a community that aims to create collective wellbeing, a community of active citizens, a community faithful to shared human values. To a future we are willing to build together.

That is why we are here. In this house, in this garden, at this table. And that is why we have brought cultural actors and policymakers into the same room. Not because culture is a tool to illustrate political ideas. But because culture is where belonging is actually made — in neighbourhoods, in shared experiences, in the emotional life of communities. Identity is not adopted from policy frameworks. It is lived. And it can only be reimagined from within that lived experience.

But culture alone is not enough. Policy is what gives cultural practice the conditions to scale, to sustain, and to reach those who need it most. Politicians and local authorities are not here as observers of this work — they are here as its enablers. That means creating the conditions for a generation that grows up with art and culture — not as a luxury, not as an extracurricular — but as a fundamental part of how they learn to think, question, and participate. A generation raised in openness. A generation for whom active civic participation feels natural, because they have practised it — through making, through collaboration, through the experience of building something together that belongs to all of them. And from that generation, in time, the political leaders we need will emerge — leaders who understand belonging not as a slogan, but as something they have lived.

This requires cultural policies oriented toward collective wellbeing. And for that to happen, culture can no longer be treated as an event management activity administered from a separate department. It must be recognised as a horizontal force — one that cuts across education, urban planning, social policy, and democratic life — and through which the values we have been describing today are not merely celebrated, but genuinely planted.

What we are asking of this gathering is not agreement. It is something harder: the willingness to think together about what kind of belonging we want to build — and then to begin building it.

In a few moments, you will sit down at the workshop tables. Some of you will be thinking about your city. Some about your institution. Some about the communities you represent. I would like to leave you with one question to carry into those conversations: what would it look like, concretely, in your city, in your neighbourhood, in your work — to become a laboratory of this new kind of belonging?

Jean Monnet once asked: what if peace could be made durable? He did not wait for an answer. He began building. Today, our question is no less ambitious: what if belonging — real, ethical, humane belonging — could be made durable?

Let us begin.