Euromint

My liberated,

Sequeiros

At the beginning of the year, I wrote to Albert Rivera. We have an oscillating epistolary relationship, of political opinions exchange. Nothing transcendental, but cordial. I wrote him with certain uneasiness, because I was about to ask him for something and this is always a bad moment in human relations. My relationship with Ciudadanos has no mystery. I collaborated in its foundation and I vote for them since it exists, except for the previous European elections when they chose to go with the wrong company. I write about their fates as I do with any other party: what I think. Sometimes journalists ask me for opinion about some of their decisions, on account of an alleged plus as a founder. Social democrat press, for instance, only write my name when they suspect that I can harm somehow the party. Any of those conversations with my colleagues always begins with the warning that Fundador [Founder] is only for me the name of some sort of rat killer very popular back then. However, they always skip it during the transcription. Acne journalism always comes to the point*.

Asking Ciudadanos’ President and Ciudadanos itself for something was uncomfortable, as well as unprecedented. Since the party’s foundation, my participation in its internal life - unlike many other founders - was non-existent. Not to mention my intrusion. Neither had Ciudadanos intruded in my internal life. The biggest example was three years ago when during a TV debate with Rivera, Pablo Iglesias said, amongst other names: “When Arcadi Espada says ‘we prefer Albert Rivera, it hurts you and it is bad for you’”. Rivera replied: “So it is when Maduro says that about you, but I will not play that game as people are fed up with the and you more”.

Nevertheless, this time I felt obliged to interfere and ask him for help so Teresa Giménez Barbat would be in the lists with possibilities to be elected and, therefore, could continue her job as MEP. It is true that Teresa and I are friends for a long time. But objectivity mandates include that you cannot stop doing something because it benefits a friend. Teresa arrived to the European Parliament four years ago. She took part of the UPyD lists and the relentless destruction of this party whose activists and voters went to Ciudadanos, made many candidates resign so she could have her chance to become a Member of the EP. As soon as she arrived, she started working, surprising affair. She kept herself busy unmasking the petulant smile of the “process” in the European scene and organizing Euromind. Regarding the first I want to say that - besides the many public samples of her activity - she also preached with the example personally and denied the smile to every secessionist with whom she had to work with, including the ones inside her own Parliamentary group. This a capital political fact, because the secessionists are very rarely treated - and especially outside Spain - with the gestural severity that their sinister political face deserves.

For two decades, Teresa Giménez has been one of the main popularizers in Spain of the Third Culture. It is fairly known that Third Culture pursues the suture of sciences and humanities, or to put it more blatantly, the necessity that humanities stop being linked with myths. But, besides that, Third Culture has a radical political character, because it intends that Politics take their decisions based on the know of the real, meaning, based on scientistic diagnostics. Tradition uses to keep unpolluted the spheres of what is normative and real in the name of Good, without attending that this pollution is also, as in the classic examples of slavery or communism, the source of evil. Third Culture, generically considered, watches so the norm does not operate in the emptiness: meaning that, in severe contemporary problems, being climate change or cultural wars, the norm knows and assumes when it acts in the name of what is real or, even, against it. During its three years of life, Euromind, invited a large part of the best contemporary intelligence to talk about this. These names include Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jean Bricmont, Michael Shermer, Sissela Bok, Michael P. Lynch, Thomas Metzinger, Susan Pinker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Robert Redeker, Ibn Warraq, Hugo Mercier, Julian Baggini, Frans de Waal, Bjorn Lomborg or Claire Lehmann. Some other Spaniards also collaborated with Eurimind.

An essential virtue of Euromind is that its work developed amidst political activity, negotiating with it and involving professional politicians to debate about every single question during their working hours, to put it like this. I want to outline that Euromind was not proposed as one of the many intellectual forums, some of them even respectable, but whose conclusions have to take a long detour until they reach those who are politically influential. This MEP’s will of facing politics always reminded me to her attitude during Ciudadanos’ beginnings. She was one of those who defended the idea that Ciudadanos should grow until it could become a political party and not another babel forum. Or not even, in this picturesque provisional leftist party doomed to extinction once, according to some skulls, the socialists recover their sanity.

Well, this intellectual and political project, which in reality searched the reconciliation of the adjectives, nowadays that politics have become a way of subnormality and baseness -apparently has no place in the party that Ms Giménez Barbat contributed to found and with which ideology she recognises herself. A party that points populism as one of their enemies, but that might believe that populism is not fought with intelligence (and Science) but with emotional ejaculations. Which is how populists, fairly, combat democracy. Euromind has been forced to make way to the imperious necessities of placing remains of series. This practice, so usual, denigrates politics and denigrates Ciudadanos. Not to mention what is really memorable which is that the MEP’s project had to yield also against the inexorable clauses of the negotiation with UPyD. A negotiation - rough as they are transcendental - that took place at the highest level and, that ended up with the incorporation of the UPyD’s president and councillor in Las Rozas. Finally, the long dreamed constitutionalist chlorophyll coalition. Euromint. Always something is lost.

Rivera replied sincerely: “I will take it into account”. And us to what is ours, which is to draw up manifestos: https://salvemoseuromind.blogspot.com

Although blind, keep your way.

A.

Arcadi Espada, El Mundo, April 14, 2019