Eppur si muove – “But still it moves”

Galileo lived in various cities in Italy from 1564 to 1642. These were decades of great upheaval for Europe and the world. Following a long period of decline, the Christian Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, which had existed for more than 1,000 years, had come to an end in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire. In 1492, while searching for a new sea route to India leading westward, Christopher Columbus discovered islands in the Caribbean and later the American mainland. This was not only the beginning of European states’ colonial expansion, policies that continue to this day, but also a boost for scientific research and technological innovation.
    In Central and Northern Europe, the Reformation movements in the first half of the 16th century finally broke the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church. The Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648, fought with unimaginable brutality on all sides, were the last, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to restore the joint hegemony of imperial power and the Catholic Church in Europe.
    Galileo was an Italian scientist and polymath of his time. He became famous for his scientifically substantiated thesis that, contrary to the world view of the Roman Catholic Church at the time, the Earth revolves around the sun and not the sun around the Earth. After many years of back and forth, the church leaders, already weakened and challenged by the upheavals of the time, resorted to threats of inquisition, torture and burning at the stake for heresy, and in 1633 they brought Galileo to trial. To escape torture and to save his life, he recanted his findings. Galileo was placed under house arrest and used the last years of his life to record his scientific research findings and leave them to posterity – findings that have long been universally recognised, even though the Church itself did not rehabilitate Galileo until 1992.
    Soon after his death it was rumoured that, despite his official recantation before the Inquisition, he had whispered quietly to himself: “But still it [the Earth] moves” – a sign of his inner resistance. Galileo’s little sentence, just four words – three in the Latin, Eppure si muove – is a metaphor still used to insist that, despite all adversities, one should stick to the truth and be confident that sooner or later the truth cannot be denied any longer.
    And today? The representatives of a power structure and power politics that are being questioned by more and more people around the world have openly switched to pure power politics. Politicians behave like the masters of the world, and states are rapidly becoming unjust states – in their international relations, but also against their own citizens. The dams that people have tried to build over centuries of legal development have become fragile and are in danger of being completely washed away. Who today would dare, as the German constitutional law professor Martin Kriele did in 1987, to write and publish a book titled The Democratic World Revolution: Why Freedom Will Prevail? In 1987, many people in Europe and around the world hoped – not without reason – that the Cold War, which had defined the postwar decades, would come to an end and that a new, better world order would be possible.
    The back cover of Kriele’s book provides a good summary of its contents:
    The history of the democratic revolution is the history of the emancipation of humankind. The legal system that guarantees individuals and peoples the freedom to shape their own lives, while at the same time limiting this freedom so that other individuals and peoples enjoy the same freedom, is the form of coexistence that is solely in accordance with human nature. This is the reason why the democratic revolution has an inherent tendency towards universal expansion. It is the world revolution par excellence.
    What a relief!
    However, Kriele’s view needs to be broadened. In 1987, he himself wrote – in view of a still-bipolar world with the heavily armed bloc centres of the Soviet Union and the US – that the “military balance” corresponded to a “political balance.” And: “The policy of détente and mutual recognition of the territorial status quo is based on this idea. This policy is indispensable for the sake of maintaining world peace.”
    He also wrote: “The great tasks of our time – such as securing peace, averting ecological disasters and overcoming poverty, especially in the Third World – [… require] reason and cooperation …” These are formulations that would also fit well into a multipolar world. Kriele, however, qualified this by saying that the world’s problems would become “completely unsolvable under socialist tyranny” and that, fundamentally, only a state and constitutional order based on the Western model would be forward-looking.
    Broadening our horizons through a genuine “dialogue of civilisations,” to take Hans Köchler’s phrase, meaning a move away from dividing the world into “good” and “evil” and instead developing a cultural and historical sensitivity to “the other,” would be a necessary corrective.¹ Implicit in this is a recognition that cultures are indeed different, and without such a dialogue there can be no equal cooperation to solve the world’s problems and to achieve progress for all peoples and states.
    A book like Martin Kriele’s is captivating in its confidence that “human nature” has an “inherent tendency towards universal expansion.” Expansion would therefore mean pursuing his fundamental statements further while asking the question of “human nature” more precisely and not reducing it to the framework of a Western constitutional order. In other words: What is the actual substance of “democracy,” “the rule of law,” and “freedom” when viewed from the perspective of human nature and its traditions and culture? What potential for development do all the peoples and states of the world have, and what is more conducive to development and what is more disruptive?
    These questions become even more urgent as it becomes clearer that the states with Western constitutional orders have formulated many fine things on paper, but in reality – for a very long time now – have been practising quite different things. In this the United States and the European Union are altogether exemplary. The past 500 years and the current state of affairs have abundantly demonstrated that “humanitarian interventions,” “nation building,” hegemonic “spheres of influence,” the expansion of power, the use of force in violation of international law, and the deprivation of rights at home are certainly disrupting factors.
    The vast majority of humanity suffers from injustice, violence, and the pursuit of power and has at least a natural, if unmanifest, protest against this. A protest that becomes all the stronger and more explicit the more one feels connected to one’s fellow human beings and lives in mutual aid. In his 1919 essay Die andere Seite. Eine massenpsychologische Studie über die Schuld des Volkes,” in English as The Other Side: A Mass-Psychological Study of a Nation’s Guilt, Alfred Adler rejected the idea that his people, who killed and died in the millions on the front lines, were to blame for the horrors of war. He pointed to the thunderous propaganda and daily humiliations of Germans in the run-up to the war, but he also wrote:
    A strong bond of mutual trust, a strong and educated sense of community that would have allowed open efforts of resistance was lacking in this people that was made to move with a blanket pulled over its head.
    Despite the many individual sacrifices that we rightly mourn today and whose suffering has not yet ended, the knowledge of the power of bonding and mutual aid gives us confidence. •

¹ see, for example: Köchler, Hans. “Die Bedeutung des Dialoges der Zivilisationen für die internationalen Beziehungen” (The significance of dialogue between civilisations for international relations). Abbreviated text of a lecture given on 30 August 2014 at the Mut zur Ethik conference in Sirnach, Switzerland. https://i-p-o.org/Koechler-Dialog-der-Zivilisationen-int-Beziehungen--IPO-OP-2014.pdf.