3 summer 2011 - Prince Claus Fund

Critical Humanismin a Multicultural Worldby Carlos FuentesYour Majesty,Your Royal Highness,Your Excellencies,Ladies and Gentlemen,It is a very high honour indeed for me to address you today, as the keynotespeaker at this ceremony marking the announcement of the 1998 Prince ClausAwards. I come to you as a citizen of Mexico, a Latin American and a writer in theSpanish language. The greatest Spanish author, Miguel de Cervantes, is also thegreatest literary descendant of the Dutch thinker who shaped, throughCervantes, the literature that we write in Latin America today: Erasmus ofRotterdam, with his “Praise of Folly” and his conviction that, in a humanisticuniverse, neither reason nor faith can be absolutes, since both are - and shouldbe - the object of critical and ironical imagination.Personally, I am not a stranger to this wonderful nation, the Netherlands, sincemy parents were the Mexican Ambassadors to The Hague in the 1960s, andmaintained the highest regard and fondest memories, Your Majesty, of yourparents Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard.Furthermore, as a lawyer I am steeped in the works of the great founder ofinternational law, Hugo Grotius, and, as a cultural citizen, in those of yourmagnificent painters, from Rembrandt and Vermeer to an artist extremely closeto my own literature, Hyeronimus Bosch; while, on my first visit to this beautifulcountry after the bleak years of the Second World War, I soon discovered akinship with the imagination of your great post-war novelist, Willem FredrikHermans, an admiration which I have maintained and renewed to this day in thesplendid novels of my most admired contemporary Cees Noteboom. Thank you,then, for receiving me back in a country for which I have such great affection.We meet at the doors of a new century and a new millennium and, as never beforein the 20th Century, we have the strong sensation that something is ending andsomething is beginning.This has been, in the words of the British historian Eric Hobsbaum, ‘the shortestcentury’ - a century of barely eighty years, beginning in Sarajevo in 1914 onlyto end, again in Sarajevo, in 1994.Compare it with the latitude of the 19th Century, which began, according totaste, with the American Revolution of 1776 or with the French Revolution ofl789, only to end, with the Guns of August, in 1914: a century of as much as 138and at least 125 years. Ours has been a short century and a cruel century.The unlimited faith in progress and human happiness announced by theEnlightenment of the 18th Century and sustained by the optimism of the l9thCentury, did not prepare us for the horrors of the 20th Century. 9 Million dead inthe trenches of World War I. 3 Million Jews murdered in the Nazi holocaust.Countless millions sacrificed in the purges and the Gulag of Sta1inist Russia. Andnumberless, as well, the victims, tortured, murdered, disappeared, of the LatinAmerican dictatorships.A short century, a cruel century, and a paradoxical century: Never hastechnological and scientific advancement been greater, never has moral andpolitical regression been more damaging, never has the chasm between them beenPrince Claus Fund Reader #1 · Summer 2011 · 86