The Garden and the Jungle - by Edwy Plenel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"For more than two centuries, the garden-and-jungle metaphor has been a customary Western trope, an elegant aphorism that legitimized colonialism while hiding its domination and unspeakable violence. In this thoughtful and highly readable essay, Edwy Plenel analyzes the most significant expressions of this congratulatory self-depiction of the West, from the classical philosophies of history celebrating the conquests of civilization against barbarism to the most recent racist campaigns against the 'great replacement' (the original French was published before Trump's infamous joke on Gaza without Palestinians as 'the Riviera of the Middle-East, ' which perfectly fits this paradigm). Far from being an obsolete relic of the past, Edwy Plenel suggests, this trope still shapes Europe's intellectual and political landscape, where it continually resurfaces behind the conventional rhetoric about democracy and human rights. A brilliant, timely, and salutary critical essay." --Enzo Traverso, author of Gaza Faces History

"Insistently historical, geopolitically capacious, Edwy Plenel's The Garden and the Jungle is bracing. It insists that we take a step back so that we face, without flinching, the truth of our world. Because it is only in so doing that we can undo the ugliness that has for too long marred human existence." --Grant Farred, author of The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education and Grievance: In Fragments

"This passionate, eloquent book is an outstanding portrait of the savagery of our times in the heart of civilization. Edwy Plenel, France's outstanding journalist, writes of an empire of radical evil bent on the destruction of ideals of universal human rights and law. The source of toxicity in the ruling classes is the greed for riches never satisfied. Western imperial attitudes of superiority inside its walled garden keeping out the feared jungle, must change--this book is a trigger." --Victoria Brittain, author of Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror

About the Author

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.