english text 177 foment confessional conflicts, spreading the idea that Christianity was a link of cultural homogeneity between Arab Christians and Europeans, placing their Muslim compatriots on the other side of the dividing line. As a result, a selective interpretation of history erected another excluding myth to establish the founding principle of European thought based on a single original Graeco-Roman source. The oriental heritage and the contribution of Muslim thinking (to which we are indebted for the revival of Hellenistic thinking and its reinterpretation, and for its great rational and humanistic philosophical contribution) were authoritatively excluded as sources of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Although the thinking of the new European left later developed a radical criticism of colonisation, in all its conceptual development it questioned the legitimacy of the methods used but not the myth of being the model for the modernisation of the world. European cultural ethnocentrism, based on the idea that modernisation and progress could only be mimetic reproductions of the experience of Europe and the West, has continued to provide the structure of public opinion, the discourse of the media and the teaching of intellectuals in our Western societies. The experience of fright A cumulative sensation of frustration and a profound feeling of misfortune have been growing on the Islamic, Arab side of the Mediterranean. And those feelings come not only from the experience of local authoritarianism and underdevelopment but also from the historical sense of powerlessness and dispossession that permanent exposure to conflict and war has created, generating immense human suffering subjected to abandonment. The collective memory of belonging to one of the world’s decisive territories (a cradle of great civilisations, a strategic situation of great geopolitical value and, in its soil, an accumulation of the world’s main sources of hydrocarbons) was offset by the experience of having completely lost control of that territory over a century ago. And the feeling that now remains is, as the Lebanese writer Samir Kassir pointed out in his book Being Arab, “Powerlessness to act to affirm your existence, even merely theoretically, in the face of the Other who denies your right to exist, despises you and has once again reasserted his domination over you. Powerlessness to suppress the feeling that you are no more than a lowly pawn on the global chessboard even as the game is being played in your backyard.” The humanity of that half of the Mediterranean has been systematically punished in the contemporary era. It has become a fixed image subject to clichés and stereotypes or a cultural stigmatisation that supposedly converts it into the possessor of a culture that is intrinsically antagonistic to modern values; dispossessed of human and civic rights by despotic governors protected by their Western allies; condemned to become an immense mass of internally displaced persons or refugees, from Palestine, Iraq or Syria, because of conflicts that the international community has no political will to resolve or has even helped directly to create; mass victims, innumerable victims of the radical outgrowths that local despotism and Western interference have created, whatever their name may be, al-Qaeda or ISIS; subjected to an islamophobia that does not wish to pronounce their name. The civil revolutions of 2010–2011 signified the first great hope of the present Arab generations. A critical moment in the historical development of those societies. They were not limited to a popular revolt or a social uprising brought about by the terrible socioeconomic conditions of their existence. They were a firm demand to enjoy the rights of citizenship, to exercise their sovereignty and their human dignity. That civic movement was the outcome of an inherent, internal, autochthonous dynamic. Nobody was “liberating” them with tanks and siren songs. To the surprise of some, no doubt, democracy was liked by the Arabs. But the surprise was caused by the mistake of identifying regimes with countries, and by not paying attention to the enormous dynamics of change and civic maturity that the women and young people and most of the society had been putting into effect in those countries for many years, despite the despotism that governed them. A political break of such dimensions required a modification of the substantial parameters of Western policy in that region. There was a need to cease to understand as a synonym of stability a status quo that had only engendered anger, humiliation, poverty and extremism; and to face the fact that it was possible to have good allies there, but not clienteles. A change that had many consequences in that part of the world. The declarations that were made displayed prudence and lack of political will rather than substantial support for the downfall of the dictatorships (contrasting with the incisive declarations made two years previously, at the time of the demonstrations against the regime in Iran). The European Union did not detach itself substantially from the line taken by the United States, although, after its inexplicable initial absence during the revolutions (the High Representative, Catherine Ashton, did not appear until a month after the fall of the Tunisian president, Ben Ali), a kind of mea culpa was intoned in European quarters for having marginalised political reforms in favour of security agreements with the Arab autocrats; and, with a joint statement by Ashton and Barroso on 8 May 2011, the EU confined itself to a rather unenthusiastic restructuring of the European Neighbourhood Policy in accordance with the new Arab scenario. The manifest Western lack of enthusiasm for change in the Arab world and for the benefit of its citizens was shown in the disastrous management of the Syrian situation and in the approval given to the Egyptian military coup that put a definitive end to the people’s
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