Social resilience, respect and willingness to care for others are the foundation stone of our lives, particularly in the aftermath of blind violence
AS THE French community and our Scottish and international friends gathered in Edinburgh and Glasgow for a festive programme of celebrations on Thursday, our national day, I chose to share a reflection on the meaning of the national community.
It was that we were not an inward looking tribe cut off from the outside but an institutional and emotional matrix that gives us a place in the wider world. The tragic loss of life and casualties that resulted from Thursday night’s terror attacks in Nice reduces us to tears and disbelief.
I doubt whether anyone would sincerely imagine the return to some state of nature as a positive step. Laws and rules, made legitimate through democratic processes, reduce our individual and collective vulnerability and enable us to fulfil peacefully our potentials. Social resilience, respect and the willingness to care for others are the foundation stone for our lives, a treasure we should never stop to nurture and develop, particularly in the stressful aftermath of blind violence and hateful crimes.
Each society has its distinctive fabric of relations, regulations, compromises, strengths and weaknesses which we should always strive to improve.
However, it takes quite a specific combination of personal alienation, self-contempt, hatred, and sickness to draw from international events and national shortcomings the impulse to destroy randomly and in one blow as many lives as possible including one’s own.
This will always be exceptional in nature, even when the current assessments of the numbers of persons who have become critically radical, through direct exposure to terrorist training or propaganda, runs into thousands in several western countries.
Resilience helps us limit its impact on sane minds and the core of our communities. But the pursuit of a determined endeavour to defeat organised crime and terrorist organisations which are the beneficiaries of chaos remains as essential as ever. Universally publicised atrocities may earn them a toxic prestige in the minds of a few but they come precisely as a distraction from the reality of their dwindling control on the ground in war torn parts of the world.
The national community fundamentally relates us to the rest of the world. As much as we need national institutions for individual women and men to thrive and accomplish themselves, our States, nation States or federal States, all depend on the quality of international co-operation, and effective regional and universal organisations, to achieve their potential.
We should be quite grateful to our forefathers they have transmitted us a history that is not only full of dreadful conflicts but also comprises an international system that acts as a powerful, if not absolutely effective, antidote to war, violence and greed. Without being complacent about this system, it is my deepest belief the world would be terribly worse off without the United Nations, the European Union and other international endeavours to nurture peaceful and virtuous relations among nations.
The world needs responsible behaviours and commitment.
A responsible and engaged actor, that is what France has always wanted to be, throughout its 15-century long history.
Even when it collapsed almost totally during Nazi occupation, the Free French, who sought refuge in Great Britain, and Scotland in particular, upheld the honour of the national community and fought to rebuild the world on the basis of peace, justice, human rights and the rule of law.
That same spirit must live on in these, our tumultuous times. Selfish national communities will achieve no gain.