What if the future of freedom were being written in the Maghreb? What if we looked to the other side of the Mediterranean to find the most exciting collective adventures, to discern the outline of a new form of democracy where people questioned violence, economic power and the development of society in a new way?

Between 2011 and 2019, popular uprisings changed the destinies of first Tunisia and then Algeria. I was on Avenue Bourguiba when the Jasmine revolution began, and I have some extraordinary memories of those moments shared with the Tunisian people. I covered Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia as a journalist from 2008 to 2011, and I had the feeling at the time that this country and its youth were dying. Young people were being driven to illegal emigration and suicide by the nation’s ills: police brutality, the economic crisis, endemic corruption and mass unemployment. Tunisia had been undermined so deeply and systematically by its ruling regime that it was hard to see a way out of the situation. In Algeria, similar causes produced comparable effects. And there was a sense of amazement there too, among observers and the protesters. As the Algerian journalist and author Kamel Daoud put it: “We had forgotten that we were a people, and in the street, we were united once again, amid joy and laughter.”

In Europe, nobody had forecast the rise of these popular movements because it was nearly 10 years since the European Union has stopped taking an interest in the Maghreb. When I was a student, the Mediterranean was still talked about as a sphere of influence on Europe. Remember Turkey presenting its arguments for joining the club of 27 member states? Even Morocco did not exclude the possibility of gradually joining the union. There’s a story that King Hassan II hired teams of Moroccan and Spanish engineers to make a presentation – at a meeting with Jacques Delors, who was president of the European Commission at the time – for his plan to build a bridge that would connect Africa to the Old Continent. In 2008, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to pursue this dream of bringing together the peoples of the north and south by launching the Union for the Mediterranean. But no solid union could ever be forged with a band of dictators such as Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and Hosni Mubarak.

A pro-government protester at a demonstration in Algiers, February 2011. Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

I am from the Maghreb; I am from the Mediterranean. My attachment to Europe was built across that sea. For me, mare nostrum was not a border and not yet a cemetery; it was the outline of a community. In Homer, the Mediterranean is hygra keleutha, the liquid road, a space of transition and sharing. It is our common heritage. Odysseus made stopovers on the coast of Africa just as he did in the Greek islands. When I first visited Spain, Portugal and Italy, I was struck by this feeling of familiarity. So how can we explain Europe’s current inability to face that sea? How can we understand the way it has deliberately turned its back on the Mediterranean, when this southward tropism is one of the most fortunate aspects of our continent? We have lost the sea and betrayed that essential part of our identity. How devastating to see the youth of the Maghreb and Africa turning away from the continent that has rejected them and let them down.

The Austrian author Stefan Zweig devoted a large part of his critical work to the European question. In an article published before the second world war, he writes that a Russian exile once told him: “In the old days, a man had only a body and a soul. Now, he needs a passport too, otherwise he is not treated like a man.” And Zweig, who saw the European continent sink into the horrors of fascism and genocide, adds: “The first visible manifestation of our century’s moral epidemic was xenophobia: the hatred or, at the very least, the fear of the other. Everywhere, people defended themselves against the foreigner, they excluded and separated him. All those humiliations that before had been reserved for criminals were now inflicted on travellers.” And still today, the question of migration is fundamental, central, because the future of our continent will be decided in terms of our capacity to welcome and also to think about the Other.

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The European Union, built on the ruins of the second world war, was intended to be an incarnation of pacifism and the virtues of dialogue. Whether through Schengen or Erasmus, it championed the ground-breaking idea of a future based on reducing borders and encouraging the circulation of people, products and ideas. It is easy to forget this now, but when the European project was first conceived by its founding fathers, it was profoundly innovative, even subversive. Turning its back on a warlike, dog-eat-dog vision of the world, the European Union was designed to promote mutual assistance and cooperation. It seems such a sad waste that this democratic ideal is now considered by some to be a sort of outdated, rancid utopianism, while nationalist speeches are cheered, and walls are being built on our doorsteps.

Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen at a Front National conference, 2011. Photograph: Patrick Durand/Getty Images

But the EU also bears some responsibility for what has happened to it. During the past 10 years, the union has too often renounced its own moral principles, providing fuel for nationalist and populist arguments. Europe’s leaders have demonstrated shameful cynicism by constantly prioritising finance and economics over the construction of a genuine “European people”. The management of the 2008 economic crisis in Greece constituted the EU’s first moral failure: by showing its reactionary side, it reduced Europe to a union that was essentially commercial, cold and heartless, embodied by a dominant elite obsessed with profit. Man’s indifference to man seemed to become the norm. The second stage in the EU’s fall came in 2015, with the migrant crisis. The image of those masses of people fleeing poverty and war and coming up against Europe’s haughty indifference left a deep wound in the hearts of many of us. Even today, this continent that sees itself as a lighthouse for the world is, in reality, incapable of fighting against the slavery at its doorstep, the death on its shores, the poverty within its borders.

Faced with populists promising simple answers and playing on people’s fears, the EU must cast aside its fear of what it is and boldly proclaim that utopia is possible. It must reduce inequality, improve the democratic process, fight climate change, and welcome refugees fleeing wars and poverty. To be European is to believe that we are, at once, diverse and united, that the Other is different but equal. That cultures are not irreconcilable; that we are capable of building a dialogue and a friendship by seeking out what we have in common. The universalism of the Enlightenment must be at the heart of the European project.

It was probably in Europe that the awareness of what is today called “globalisation” was first forged. Zweig wrote that, after the first world war, the intellectuals of the Old Continent were both enthusiastic and anxious about the fact that the destiny of different peoples was now so closely linked: “Humanity, as it spread across the earth, became more intimately interconnected, and today it is shaken by a fever, the entire cosmos shivering with dread.” European integration was driven by that awareness: the great problems of tomorrow will not be resolved at a national scale. Only by combining our efforts will we find solutions to the challenges of the future, and the best example of this is obviously the planet’s ecological ultimatum.

It seems to me that Europe must look southward, with interest, respect and passion. It must look to those shores, too, in order to move on to the next chapter in its history; to cease defining itself as an old colonising power, and to find strength in its egalitarian values. To stop wallowing in nostalgia, and instead pour its energy into inventing a better future. Europe must no longer be defined by Christianity or by exclusive, irreconcilable national identities, but must return to the Greek matrix that unites the two sides of mare nostrum. In Greek, the term crisis comes from crineo, which means to choose. That’s where Europe is now: at a crossroads. And our common future will depend on which path we take next, which moral and philosophical choice we make.

• Translated from French by Sam Taylor. Leïla Slimani represents France in the Hay Festival Europa28 project. An anthology, Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe is published by Comma. Join contributors to the project at the UK book launch with 5x15 Stories on 19 March in London (5x15.com) and at subsequent events in the UK and further afield. Full details at hayfestival.org/europa28.





