The Garden and the Jungle: Address to Europe on How It Sees the World

An award-winning French journalist’s far-ranging critique of Europe’s betrayal of universal values and equal rights as war and right-wing populism spread worldwide, with a new introduction for U.S. readers.

＂Europe is a garden...It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build...Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.＂ This is how Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, characterized the situation in 2022, several months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and one year before Israel’s war against Gaza.

Europe has a singular image of itself and of the world. It persists in thinking of itself as the cradle of civilization, the incarnation of good and justice, threatened by a global environment where savagery, darkness, and evil reign. Clinging to this fantasy inherited from a colonial past, it is lost and misguided, turning its back on the values of humanism and equality to which it nevertheless claims to adhere. As long as Europe and, with it, the political West, have not renounced their desire for power, there will unite against them the resentment of all the peoples who have had the bitter experience of their domination over the last five centuries. Because the ＂jungle＂ is Europe’s own creation, produced by the blindness of conquest and exploitation.

This powerful essay is an invitation to rebuild a Europe that is truly concerned about the fragility of the world and of life, with an acute awareness of the perils that threaten humanity.

Edwy Plenel is an award-winning journalist, former Editorial Director of Le Monde, essayist, and cofounder of the independent journalism platform Mediapart. He is the author of For the Muslims: Islamophobia in France.

Luke Leafgren is an Assistant Dean of Harvard College. He has translated seven novels from Arabic and has twice received the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, in 2018 for Muhsin Al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens and in 2023 for Najwa Barakat’s Mister N.