By a quick phone call to a few journalists, he always detailed, with a tasty accent recalling his birth, on August 3, 1950, in Cremona, in Lombardy, his opinion on all the important subjects relating to his passion: Europe. Mario Telo, who died on March 6, in Brussels, liked to share with a few commentators the immense knowledge that he also communicated to thousands of students at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). He joined this institution in 1987 and taught international relations and comparative politics there for three decades.
When his death was announced, messages poured in from all over the world. They came from Florence, where he acquired the title of doctor of philosophy, from New York (he was a researcher at Columbia University), from Sweden, from Canada and from China, a country with which, he pleaded against winds and tides , contact and dialogue had to be maintained at all costs.
“He was present everywhere, in universities, think tanks, conferences, and never stopped advocating a Europe that was more united, more progressive, more open to dialogue.underlines, moved, Jean-Michel De Waele, who was his pupil before becoming a professor of political science, then one of his relatives. But he was above all a man of immense kindness, which many of his former students point out in their messages. »
A stronger and more integrated Europe
A hard worker, capable of spending hours re-reading a memoir, negotiating a resolution or preparing an intervention, Mario Telo has devoted his entire career to studying both the distant past and the possible future of a Europe that he also wanted to be stronger and more integrated. “That’s politics, it takes time”he quipped, sporting a smile that rarely left him.
Having moved from amphitheaters to political action, Paul Magnette, president of the Belgian (Francophone) Socialist Party, was also the student of Mario Telo, director of his thesis devoted to European citizenship after having supervised his dissertation on the filmmaker, writer and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Professor Telo was a great intellectual nourished by all cultures, Italian, French, Anglo-Saxon, German, Nordic, comments the man who was also the director of the Institute of European Studies at the ULB. And in recent years, he had opened up to Chinese and Latin American intellectual traditions. »
Mario Telo, emphasize his former colleagues, made a fundamental contribution to the development of European political studies. A pioneering role in a long untapped field. “He built bridges between comparative politics and international politics, very compartmentalized in the French-speaking field”says Paul Magnette.
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