The Limits and Possibility of a European Identity

http://psc.sagepub.com/Philosophy & Social Criticism

http://psc.sagepub.com/content/21/4/15.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/019145379502100402

1995 21: 15Philosophy Social CriticismGerard Delanty

cultural essentialismThe limits and possibilities of a European identity : A critique of

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Philosophy & Social CriticismAdditional services and information for

http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

What is This?

- Jan 1, 1995Version of Record >>

at University of Sussex Library on May 29, 2012psc.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://psc.sagepub.com/

http://psc.sagepub.com/content/21/4/15.citation

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://psc.sagepub.com/content/21/4/15.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml


15-

Gerard Delanty

The limits and possibilitiesof a European identityA critique of cultural essentialism

During the Cold War period European identity was largely secured bythe notion of the West; despite its lofty ideals it was a Cold Warconstruct shaped and defined by the global confrontation of capitalismand communism. Europe was secure in its identity as the easternfrontier of the United States. Today, however, European identity is

being redefined, but the terms of its redefinition are uncertain. With thecollapse of the old bi-polar constructs of West versus East, the

European idea is becoming the focus for a new struggle for hegemonym what is coming to be increasingly recognized as a multi-polar world.

The problem I address in this article is the normative foundationsof European identity. More fundamentally this is related to thequestion whether we in fact need a European identity, particularly ifthis is to be another totalirrng idea m the grand style of Christendom,the West, Modernity, the Nation. Integral to this critique is a concernwith the possibility of post-national collective identity aS the basis of anew kind of identity. Is European identity just another ideologicalconstruct in the increasingly international stage of politics? Or does itrepresent a genuine attempt to come to terms with the problem of thecrisis of identity in the modern polity?’ I

It is evident that European identity is more than a political identity;it embraces a wide range of questions that are cultural and are

historically rooted. But it is also heavily laden with unretlectivenormative assumptions which attribute to it a lofty and, indeed,frequently, a spiritual mission, the mission of the West. What is in need



16

of clarification is exactly what are its normative reference points andwhether these can be found in what is called ’European culture’. Inother words can a European identity escape its Eurocentricism andembody the self-reflective norms of modern culture? Most studies onthe European idea do not address themselves to thrs. For example, therecent three volume L’Esprit de 1’Europe is an exploration of Europeanculture as an expression of a unique mind or spirit that manifests itselfin diverse cultural forms.-’ There is a general absence of a critical

engagement with European identity which is usually equated with anabstract notion of culture. In short, the terms of the discourse ofEuropean identity have been too much linked to ontological or

essentialist notions of meaning. What I think needs to be demystified isthis spiritual notion of Europe and the essentialist ideas of identity thataccompany it, the ideology that may be summed up as ’from Platu toNato’.’

In this article I examine some famous philosophical proponents ofthis idea of European identity as a cultural discourse. A majordimension to these older ideas on Europe was a sense of disen-chantment and nostalgia for a lost totality. This is the theme of ’the endof the European age’ and is best exhibited in the cultural pessimism ofthe fÙl-de-siècle period. If it is possible to find one common strand inthese diverse notions of Europeanism it is the rejection of politicaldefinitions of Europe for cultural ones. But the notion of culture that isgenerally postulated is that of an essentialist and nostalgic discourse:Europe is the high culture of the past, the unity of its traditions. Sincethis notion of Europe is still very much with us, there is some value insurveying the history of the notion of the end of the European age inorder to identify its pervasive essentiilism. In conclusion, withoutelucidating it in detail, I point to a possible normative option to theabstract appeal to the ’European heritage’.

a a a

The 20th century was the century of the superpowers. With the rise ofthe United States as world power,in 1918 and the Bolshevik Revolutionin 1917 the European Age for many had ended. The end of the long19th century in 1918 with the collapse of the central European powerswitnessed what for the West was the rise of an ’Asiatic’ ideology,communism, which supplied it with its adversarial terms of referencefollowing the collapse of Europe’s age-old foe, the Sublllnc I’orte.

The bi-polar post-European world was predicted as early as 1835by Alexis de Tocqueville when he wrote in Deemocracy in America:



17

There arc at the present time two great nations in the world, whichstarted from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. Iallude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown upunnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed else-where, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank amongthe nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatnessat a)most the same time

With this insight the end of the European age was within sight. Europebecame a museum, a nostalgic philosophy of history.

Already in 1799 Novalis in his famous essay ’Die Christenhelt oderEuropa’ (Christendom or Europe) wrote of Europe as the unity ofChristendom, a unity that had been shattered by the disruptive forcesof modernity, which in his view were the Protestant Reformation, theEnlightenment and philosophy: _

Those were beautiful and splendid times, when Europe was a

Christian land; when a single and humanly shaped Christendominhabited the continent; a great community of interests united thefurthest provinces of this spiritual empire. Free from worldly concernsa single supreme ruler led and united the great political forces.’

With the lofty prose of the German counter-Enlightenment,Novalis attacks the Enlightenment ideal of a post-Christian Europe.Europe can exist only as a unity, and since this has been possible onlyby Christendom, the present time is post-European. This notion of theend of Europe is also to be found in that other pillar of counter-revolution, Edmund Burke. In his Reflections on the Revolution inFrûllce, in 1790, Burke wrote: ’our manners and civilization, in thisEuropean world of ours, depended for ages on two principles, andwere, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of agentleman, and the spirit of religion.’‘’ This also perfectly captures thespirit of Nletternich’s Restoration Europe and its rejection of thesecular ideologies of modernity: Europe is the past, it is the culture ofChristendom, modernity is the present and a product of liberalism andI1~1t1onMlISIT7. In this intellectual tradition Europe is interpreted as

Alteuropa, Old Europe, a term that expresses the idea of Europe heldby conservative l9th-century intellectuals for whom it was somethingmcompanbte with modernity and the ideas of the French Revolution.Its leading proponent was Metternich but the term was also used byhistorians such as Burckhardt for whom it signified the humanistspirit. Europe was also an important motif for Willtalm Blake. In his’Europe: A Prophecy’ ( 1794) he depicted by means of visionary imageshow European humanity became a victim of an enslaving religion and



18

morality, while on the other hand America was inspired by the

revolutionary impulse.’ S

~ ~ *

Europe according to Baudrillard is a ’nineteenth-century bourgeoisdream’.’ Europe is the culture of the past; it is negativity andcontradiction while America is the present and future, the paradox of arealized utopia. The ’transcendental, historical Weltal1schawmg ofEurope’, Baudrrllard writes, has abandoned modernity which has beentaken up by the American. So America is modernity while the SovietUnion is an anti-modernity. Europe lies somewhere in between, as ahistorically rooted consciousness, a manifestation of decay anddecadence. This view has also been reiterated by Heller for whom thel9th century

... was in the main the century of European culture. Modernity, aliasthe West, alias Europe, was then self-confidcnt. What can he termedEuropean culture thus nourished during the period rrom the Napole-onic wars to the outbreak of World War One. During this time, theproject of modernity succeeded. However, the European gemus,which had created not only a new, but a completely unprecedentedsocio-political and cultural framework, apparently became exhaustedafter so great a labour. The twentieth century thus begins with thenarrative of the decline of the West. Europeans begin to refer to theirown culture as the civilization of a new barbarism. &dquo;’ ’

The idea of the end of the European age was to a certain extent anAmerican invention. It received one of its most famous expressions inHenry James’s novels on Americans wandering in a Europe which wasalien to them. Europe for Henry James was the Old World whileAmerica was youth and vitality. The old world was the land of ruinsand tyranny for Mark Twain.&dquo; T. S. Eliot reflected this mood when, inwriting about Henry James, he said: ’It is the final perfection, theconsummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but aEuropean - something which no born European, no person of anyEuropean nationality can become.’ 12 Europe in Jefferson’s vision wasloaded ’with misery, by kings, nobles and priests’ while America wasthe land of ’dreams of the future’. &dquo; Americans associated Europe withdecadence and decay. In particular Europe was the city, which wasboth fascinating and repelling. The malign city - the ’unreal city’ of7’he Wasteland - represented not only the past but also its twin evils ofclass and nation over which Americans had triumphed. Americapersonified a freedom destroyed by Europe.



19

In the early 20th century Europeans themselves began to refer totheir own civilization as decadent. One of the most famous statementsof the decline of Europe was Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline ofthe West, written in 1918. This was one of the most widely read booksof the Weimar Republic whose spirit it perfectly captured in its

portrayal of modernity as the turning-point in world history. The nadirof western history had been reached and European civilization wasdoomed to decay. The ’transition from culture to civilization’ for

Europe took place in the 19th century and its consequences weremanifest in the 20th century with the ’decline of that West-EuropeanCulture which is now spread over the entire globe’.14 In Russia too theidea of the decline of the European age had emerged in the context ofthe debate between Slavophils and Westerns. Dostoevsky, for instance,a supporter of the uniqueness of Slav civilization, opposed Europeanculture, and Europe itself, ’as a cemetery of great men and greatthoughts that have disappeared from the surface of the earth’.

Scepticism of the ability of European civilization to generate anenduring cultural ethos lay also behind Nietzsche’s critique of the’malaise of modern European civilization’. Beyond Good and Euilcontains Nietzsche’s most important views on European identity, the’slow emergence of an essentially supranational and nomadic type ofman’. But for Nietzsche ’this process of becoming European’, which islinked to the ’democratization of Europe’, is ’at the same time an

involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants’.5 His mockingcharacterization of ’good Europeans’ as victims of ’atavistic attacks ofpatriotism’ suggests that the modern European spirit is still enslaved inthe secularized products of Christianity, which for Nietzsche is

essentially the democratic mingling of ’classes and races’. As a result ofthe ’corruption of the European race’ by Christianity, ’a shrunkenalmost ludicrous species, a herd animal, something full of good will,sickly and mediocre has been born, the European of today’.16European modernity has betrayed itself for it has failed to break freefrom the Christian heritage. His unbridled sexism led him to abhor theemancipation of women which he sees as a symptom of modern

degeneration associated with the French Revolution and the Enlighten-ment. 17 But ’European manliness’ too is ’sick’, corrupted by love, fearand pity:

O Europe! Europe! We know the horned beast which always attractedyou most, which again and again threatens you with danger! Yourancient fable would once again become ’history’ - once again a

monstrous fable could again master you and carry you off! And nogod concealed within it, no! merely an ’idea&dquo; a ’modern idea’!&dquo; .



20

The decline of the European age is central to Nietzsche’s critique ofmodernity. But what has degenerated IS culture In its highest and mostsublime form. The spirit of high culture is now fading away: ’howstrange to our ears sounds the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley,Byron, in whom together the same European destiny that in Beethovenknew how to sing found its way into words!&dquo; He praises Schopen-hauer, as well as Goethe and Hegel, as a ’European event’.’&dquo; Nietzschesaw himself as a European: ’I am a Doppelgarrger, I have a &dquo;second&dquo;face in addition to the first one. And perhaps also a third.... Even byvirtue of my descent I am permitted to look beyond all merely locally,merely nationally conditioned perspectives, it costs me nothmg to be a&dquo;good European&dquo;. ’21 Human institutions, too, have collapsed: ’Ourinstitutions are no longer fit for anything, everyone is unanimousabout that. But the fault lies not in them but in us. Having lost all theinstincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutionsthemselves, because we are no longer fit for them.’ 22 The greatestdanger according to Nietzsche is ’that of losing the voice for the soul ofEurope and sinking into a merely nationalistic affair’.~~ The spirit ofEurope to which Nietzsche appeals is not that of mass or nationalculture but a transvaluation of all values which is supposed to rescuethe European spirit from corruption at the hands of national cultures.The retrieval of the dionysiac elements of the European ’will to power’,which is also the ’return of the Greek spirit’, is the basis of Nietzsche’sevocation of Europeanism, which can only be a state of mind and nevera concrete political reality.

n 0 a

The theme of the end of Europe was the leitmotif of two novels widelyread in the 1930s. In the now forgotten novels of Robert Briffault,Europa: A Nouel ill the Age o f Ignorance ( 1936) and its sequel, Europaill timbo ( 1937) Europe itself is a reality-structuring force but onewhich can never be grasped. The theme of the end of Europe is stated atthe beginning: Europe is a creation of the Hellenic spirit and above allthe ’architecture of its mind’ is laid out according to ’the schema ofRoman values and standards’ which today in the course of history havebeen corrupted by the two great pathologies: Christianity andnationalism. The result is the ’cracking of the mould’ of westerncivilization:

Europe has been robbed of all intelligence and meaning.... Crazed bythe neurosis called Nationahsm and the paltry politics that go with it,European man has before him the glgantl task of tr L1I1~valu.1ting the



21

values handed down to him by degenerated, Christianized Rome. Notuntil that task shall have been accomplished will he be able to begin tobe civilized, to surpass himself. Europe as a political configurationmay have, incidentally, to be suppressed and destroyed in the

process.’’’

The idea of Europe becomes intertwined in the personal life-histories of its protagonists, whose destinies reflect the decadent spiritof the period prior to the First World War:

In those fin de siècle ’nineties, as to-day, men were beginning to doubtand to fear. A sense of impending disaster, or recoil before theunknown towards which they were drifting, mingled with theover-shrill paeans of the march of progress, and the forecasts of thewonders which would transform Europe in the new age that wasabout to dawn. The spectre of war haunted men’s minds like a

nightmare.... Europe was drifting whither they knew not, m thehands of a Fate, which seemed mysterious and inscrutable, not

because it was invisible, but because their mental eyes were incapaci-tated, the keenest of them, from discerning the realities of the factsabout them.2’

_

.

Briffautt’s novels are an interrogation of European consciousnessas revealed both in the lives of the characters and the European-widescenario where the plot unfolds. The decadent metropoles of Europe -London, St Petersburg, Naples, Berlin - are interwoven in a narrativeabout love and war, and the reality from which these forces spring:Europe, the ’inescapable tradition of the European world’. Whethersomething can be rescued from the destructive course of Europeanhistory and the ’cancer of European culture’ remains in the end a t.11I1thope, but one which is not forfeited.

This pessimism is also to be found in Freud’s Ciuili~ntiort 711(1 itsDiscontents (1929) which revealed civilization to be ruled by deeplyrooted instincts which are not under the conscious control of itsculture.’~’ The result Is that culture is deeply vulnerable to the threat ofviolence and it may be that the whole of mankmd has become neurotic.Freud’s conclusion was that civilization itself was in need of therapyand he spoke of the possibility of a ’pathology of cultural communi-tICS,. 2

The idea of a Europcan identity had become a theme of literaryreflection in the interwar period. There was, for instance, Pierre DrieuLa IZochelle’s essay Le Jezt1le Européen, in 1927.21’ Though a pro-Europeanist and cosmopolitan, Drieu expressed his disgust at thedegeneration of the European spirit into a war-psychosis. The Great



22

War was ’the last passion of the Europeans’, a sign of their greatdecadence. There was also the now forgotten work of ,Jullen Benda,Discolirs à lû lwtiOll etrmpeenne, 111 1933..~y But pcrhaps the quintes-sential novel on European consciousness was Thomas Mann’s TheMagic MOlmtûl1l, written in 1924. One of the unifying constructs inthis great work is the Todessel~rr:rml~t, the longing for death, which is ametaphor for European civilization as it approaches its demise in theGreat War. The novel is set in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps in theyears prior to the war. This is a place of death, which fascinates theyoung Hans Castorp who goes there to visit his ill cusin but remainsthere to engage in the principal activity of its residents, which is todiscuss the affairs of the world in serene detachment and in antici-

pation of death. Settembrini, the cosmopolitan Italian liberal, rep-resents the European idea which m m pcrpetual conflict with the’Asiatic principle’ for possession of the world. ’The Asiatic principlemust be met and crushed in its stronghold and vital centre, that is tosay, Vienna.’;&dquo; The heart of Europe, Mitteleuropa, had becomedegenerate, a prison of nations, and negated the universalist principlesof the French Revolution, which were alive in the tradition Settembrinirepresented -which is why the Asiatic principle had to be conquered inVienna. In the end the European idea, which, we are told, stands forjustice, freedom and knowledge, collapsed ’when humanity in an

outburst of enthusrasm united itself with politics in support of a

triumphant and dominating world-civilization’.

s m m

The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega Y Gasset, in The RCl’olt of theMasses, in 19 30/ 1932, wrote about the crisis of the European spirit inthe age of masses: ’The world to-day is suffering from a gravedemoralization which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by anextraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in thedemoralization of Europe.’;’ The problem for him was that in the ageof the masses ’Europe has been left without a moral code’. Headvocates the unification of Europe, which he understands as a ’greatunifying landscape’, into a ‘great national state’ in order to opposewhat he calls the ’Slavonic code’, which he equates with communism.Ironically he argues that comniunisiii - which in fact of course was aEuropean ideology - cannot triumph in Europe since it is opposed tothe values Europeans cherish.

The appeal to the spirit of Europe of course was also a means ofexpressing contempt for ’mass society’. This notion of the crisis ofcivilization had special appeal for Catholic intellectuals for whom the



23

Great War had undermined the unity of European culture. The notionof the end of Europe as an intellectual motif and the need for its

regeneration also predominates the writings of Hilaire Belloc, ReneGuenon, Jacques Maritain.’2 Henri Massis’s Defence of the West( 19?8), for instance, speaks of the need to regenerate Europe’s spiritualheritage and overcome the crisis of civilization:

European unity, which had been spiritually undone since the Refor-mation, was physlcally broken in 1914.... It is civilization, the ideaeven of civilization, of whlch Europe claimed to be the holder, that ismost deeply wounded. In the eyes of the world which lived in theillusion of our homogeneity, civilizatlon seems vanquished. The warhas made it unrecognizable.&dquo;But it is not only the war that has led to the degeneration of Europe;

it has failed in its mission as a result of ’an exclusive attention tomaterial satisfactions’. Massis advocates the recovery of the Christiantradition, which he equates with the soul of Europe, in order to resistthe ’threatening powers of Asia’.

In his essay ’Notes sur I,i grandeur et decadence de )’Europe’ (TheGrandeur and Decadence of Europe) Paul Val6ry set up an oppositionof politics versus culture. Europe’s greatness is its culture, but theproblem is that in the modern age culture becomes implicated in

politics. The European spirit emerged not through politics but rather inspite of or indeed against it.&dquo; ’Europe wasn’t to get the politics of itsspirit’, wrote Valery.;’ The result is the ’crisis of the spirit’.

Jaspers, in Vow Elrrop~iisc‘~en Geist (The Spirit of Europe), spokeof the need to place European identity on new foundations, whichwould recognize that Europe is only one power among many. HisEurope is an intellectual Europe: ’It is only in the last four hundredyears that the radical difference between Europe and China and Indiahas come to light: the universality of science and technology Europeis characterized by freedom, out of which comes the will to history, andknowledge. The unity of these forces constitutes the European spirit.Rather than admit the ‘decline of the West’, as Spengler had, he insteadspeaks of a crisis out of whose resolution something positive canemerge. Rejecting the aspiration to be the primary factor in the‘world-order’, he advocates the goal of a MerlSChl7eltsldeE’, the idea ofhumanity, which is ultirnately a reappropriation of Europe’s religiousfoundation in Christianity.

Earlier in the century Max Weber’s sociology of ’Occideiitilrationalism’ expressed the prevailing firl-de-siW !e cultural pessimismwith its portrayal of modermty as a disenchanted and r ,HiOll.1lizedworld-view: ’The fate of our tunes is cliiricterizcd hv rLHIOl1.1lIzLHion



24

and intellectualization and, above all, by the &dquo;disenchantment of theworld&dquo;. , 3 For Weber the notion of universality had a meaning entirelydifferent from what it had for the Enlightenment, or, for instance,Hegel, for whom Europe was the ’end of history’.&dquo; Weber rejects thestruggle for universality as a secularized Illusion: ’Our civilizationdestines us to realize more clearly these struggles again, after our eyeshave been blinded for a thousand years - blinded by the allcgedly orpresumably exclusive orientation towards the grandlose moral fervourof Christian ethics.’ ,9 European culture has finally been superseded byEuropean science, whose most exalted products are the Platonic

concept and the rational experiment, but science, that ’Irreligiouspower’, has no meaning. The universal is a product of historicallybound cultures:

A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem ofunlversal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination ofcircumstances the fact should be attributed than in western civiliz-

ation, and in western civilization only, cultural phenomena haveappeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development havingrrrrrr~E~rsal ~ignific.1rlce. 411This, the famous opening sentence of The I’rotestant Ethic L11ld the

Spirit of CapifLl/ism, poses the unifying question in Weber’s historicalsociology and one which cannot be normatively answered for ulti-inately, in Weber’s eyes, cultural values are relative. Hence his

pessimistic Conclusion:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at theend of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise,or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive

self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, itmight well be truly said: ‘specialwts wlthout spirit, sensu allsts wlthoutheart; this nullity imagines that it his attamed a level of ovthzattonnever before achieved.&dquo;’

Weber’s contemporary, the sociologist Ernst Troeltsch, addressedhimself specifically to the question of ’Europe.1ni...m’ In 1922. In hisview Europeanism embodies the illusion of ’world history’. Troeltschargues that ’humanity as a whole docs not have any spiritual unlty andcannot therefore have d unified development’.42 In contrast to thesehistorically minded sociologists, many intellectual figures of the early20th century Sought the recovery of a primordial or essential Europeanmind. The Germ an junst. Car) Schmltt, for instar~ce, in a seminal essay,’The Plight of European Jurisprudence’, written in 1943, sought to



25

define the ’European spirit’ in the specifically European tradition ofjurisprudence, which in his view had emerged out of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and Roman law to become an autonomous

discipline after the 12th century through its struggle with theology:’European jurisprudence is the first-born child of the modern Europeanspirit, of the ’occidental rationalism’ of the modern agc.’4 ~ Europeanidentity, he suggests, is ultimately dependent on this tradition of

thought which m his tit-ne is in danger of ’unctlonaliz.uion’ by the state.In this sense it is also a normative category since it can offer a means ofreorientation for the future. The task of a European identity is then forSchmitt the recovery of this common European legal tradition in orderto oppose the totalitarian state (whose official state jurist he had hopedto be). European identity is cleirly not founded on geography but on anintellectual tradition based on the reception of Roman law - the JrrsPrrf~lrcrrrrt Europaetrrn - and one which in its most important aspectdefines a juridical rel atiomhip between society and the state.

The crisis of European consciousness was also the dominatingtheme in Edmund Husserl’s diagnosis of the age in his 1935 essay’Phrlowphv and the Crisis of European HumL1I11ty’. HLi,,,,serl advocateda return to the origins of European phrlo5ophy in order to recoversomething lost by modernity and the positivistic sciences of n ature.’The European nations are sick; Europe itself’, he wrote, ’is in a cnticalcondition.&dquo;’ His Europe ’designates the unity of a spiritual life and acreative activity’ which is immanent in the history of a spiritualEurope.&dquo;’ ’Europe’ does not refer to geography but to ‘Europeanhumanity’ and above all to its sciences and philosophy. Integral to theEuropean project is an ’entelechy’, a teleological concept of history.According to Husserl

... in our European humanity there is an innate entelechy that

thoroughly controls the changes in the European image and gives to itthe sense of development in the direction of an ideal image of life andof being, as moving towards an eternal pole ... the supernationalityEurope has not, a mature form that has been or can be reached, noform of regular repetition. From the point of view of soul, humanityhas never been i finished product, nor will it be, nor can it ever repeatitself. The spiritual tctos of European ~l.1n, in which is included the

particular telos of separate nations and of individual human beings,lies in infinity; it is an infinite idea, toward which in secret thecollective spiritual becoming, so to speak, strives.~&dquo;

In Husserl’s view the original spiritual substance of Europeanthought, born in the classical age of ancient Greece in the 7th and 6thcenturies BC, was lost in the course of history, having been blinded by



26

naturalism and rationalism. This ’universal and pure science of spirit’which encapsulates the ’spiritual form of Europe’ must be recoveredand philosophy ’must exercise through European man its role of

leadership of free thought’. Hu»erl rejects the modern age for a newbeginning which would also be a reapproprratron of European culture.His diagnosis of the sickness of the European spirit is similar to that ofNietzsche: ,

The crisis of European existence can end in only one of two ways: inthe rum of a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life, fallen intoa barbarian hatred of spirit; or in the rebirth of Europe from the spiritof philosophy, through a heroism of reason that will definitivelyovercome naturalism. Europe’s greatest danger is weariness. Let us’good Europeans’ do battle with this danger of dangers with the sort ofcourage that does not shirk even the endless battle. If we do, then fromthe annihilating configuration of disbelief, from the fiery torrent ofdespair regarding the West’s mission to humanity, from the ashes ofthe great w~earrness, the phoemx of a new inner life of spirit mll ariseas the underpinning of a great and distant future, for the spirit alone isimmortal

In the same year as Husserl’s essay Paul Hazard published La Crisede la Corrscimrce F.uropoeurie, an analysis of the spiritual and moralcrisis of the l7th and 18th centuries.&dquo; The unifying theme in this workis that after the break-up of European Christendom following theRefermation and the wars of religion, the unity of the continent can befound only m the higher re.llm of ideas. Divided agamst itself Europe isa ‘seething cauldron of neighbours fighting one against the other’; it is a’living paradc>x’, a ’jigsaw of b,irriers’.~&dquo; But Hazard does not dismissEurope outright: ’And now, yet once again, what is this Europe? Aspirit that is forever seeking. Unsparing of herself, she is ceaselesslypursuing two goals: one of them Happiness, the other - and this sheholds the more vital and more dear - is TrLIth.’5&dquo; Despite its dividedpolitical condition, on the level of ideas Europe represents a spiritualforce as well as a destiny.

Similarly for Heidegger the entire Enlightenment tradition hadcorrupted the original European essence which can be recovered onlyin the return to early Greek philosophy. Something has been lost as aresult of technology and the dominance of European ratioiiality.ii I

Heidegger quotes with approval the ’West’s last thinker’, Nietzsche,who wrote ’when he was &dquo;most distant from cloudy, damp, me)an-choly Old Europe&dquo;’. ’The wasteland grows: woe to him who hideswastelands within.’5’ Heidegger recognized that Nietzsche ‘sees clearlythat in the history of Western man something is coming to an end’.&dquo;



27

But it is an ending that is also a beginning, an ’unspoken gathering ofthe whole of western fate, the gathering from which alone the Occidentcan go forth to meet the coming decisions - to become, perhaps and ina wholly other mode, a land of dawn, an Orient’. ~~ ’The name Europesuggests to Heidegger the ’late-comers’. Europeans are living in thetwilight of a world on which sunset is about to fall and the new age thatis to dawn will be a post-historical age but one in which the originalGreek insights into the most fundamental questions of human existencewill be revealed.&dquo;

...

One of the most abiding influences on European identity, then, was thefiction of the unity of European tradition. ’And this is possible’,T.S. Eliot said in a radio broadcast in 1946, ’because there is a commonelement in European culture, an interrelated history of thought andfeellng and behaviour, an interchange of arts and of Ide.1s.’’ih For Eliotthis Ulllty the ’common tradition of Christianity which has m adeEurope what it rs’.’’ The Eurocentriosm underlying Eliot’s vision ofEurope m only too apparent: ’If Asra were converted to Christianitytomorrow, it would not thereby become a part of Europe. It is in

Christianity that our arts have developed, it is in Christianity that thelaws of Europe have - until recently - been rooted. ,’is This is a

Eurocentric notion of European identity not because of its recognitionthat Christianity has been the single most important cultural intluencem the making of European identity, but because of the absence of acritical attitude to what has been a most divisive world-view.

At this point it is apparent that the notion of a European identity isvery much constructed In opposition to Europe as a political com-munity. The notion of ’the political collapse of Europe’, to use

H<>16<>rn’s phrase,5’ appeared to have been a prerequisite for anintellectual notion of Europe. It was particularly prevalent in thecontext of the Second World War which exhausted the European idealas a political venture. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1947, dismissed theEuropean idea: ’The word Europe formerly referred to the geogr .1phi-cal, economic and political unity of the continent. Today it preserves amusty smell of Germanism and servitude.’‘’&dquo; An increasingly prevalentview was that European history had exhausted both its political and itscultural integrity. Alfred Weber in Farewell to European History or theCOllquest of Nihilrs111, written in 1945, wrote th.H the conquest of‘nihilism’, by which he means the destructive element in Europeanhistory, could be achieved only at the price of surmounting Europeanhistory itself:



28

It is as imperative for us to overcome this Nihilism as it is to overcomeour old hlstorrco-sociological conceptions regardlng the possibleoutward patterns of human life, which were rooted In the now

obsolete spatial conditions.6 J

The belief in totality was irretrievably lost and with it the hope thatEurope could regenerate itself spiritually. Intellectual critiques of theidea that history reveals a meaningful order made nihilism, the denialof absolute meaning, the new philosophy of the ’end of history’ . 12

In the aftermath of the war many Intellectuab looked to a newAtlantic culture which was emerging in what was coming to berecognized as a post-European age. In The A1cetmg of F,zst 1.111d WestNorthrop wrote in 1946 of the supersession of occidental and orientalcultures in the formation of a new world civilization.&dquo; Andr6 Malrauxsaid in 1945: ,

There is no Europe. There never was one. There was a Christianity.There was a vague European culture, in the seventeenth alld eighteenthcenturies. These great domains were defined by their own life. What isunderstood today by Europe can only be defined negatively: Europe iswhat Asia is not (because if we want to say that Europe is whatAmerica is not, it is much more clever).... I believe that a new mltureis taking shape today ... this is the Culture of the Atliiitic.&dquo;’

Arnold Toynbee in his monumental work, A Study of History,revealed the relativity of the concept of Europe, by means of a cyclicaltheory of history, the process by which all world civilizations collapseon reaching their nadir. Moreover, the fiction of a European civiliz-atlon was achieved only at the price of ignoring its oriental Influencesand the construction of a false continuity ln history,. Originally aHellenic mLuinerB distinction to describe the tandmass that Ll)’ to thewest of the navigable waterw-ays of the Aegean, which led through theDardanelles and the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, it was, accordingto Toynbee, reinvented in the age of exploration as a name for acivilization: ’the geographers’ error here lay in attempting to transtatea serviceable piece of navigational nomenclature into political andcultural terms.&dquo;’ Thus it came about that at the end of the 17th centurywhen western Christendom could no longer be the unquestioned namefor the continent, the term ’Europe’ was applied to designate westernculture and society:

This mirage of a ’European Civilization’ was another h allucination towhich modern man condemned himself when he approprrateci theword ’Europe’ for a deconsecrated Western World. His cultural

misapplication of a nautical term inevitahly led hlrn into two historical



29

aberrations. One of these was the notion that Orthodox Christendomand Western Christendom Constituted a ;ingle society.... The secondaberration was the notion that Hellenic history and Western historywere ... historically conrmuous as well as chromcally successive actsin a single Europe an drama whIch was deemed to be a umty.’’’’

Toynbee thus dismisses the historical mystique of Europe as a’chimaera’, for in ’adopting the name &dquo;Europe&dquo; as a substitute forWestern Christendom, the Modern Western World had replaced amisnomer that was rnerely an anachronism by a misnomer that wasseriously misleading’.&dquo;°

One of the greatest indictments of European civilization, Adornoand Horkhermer’S Dw/ectlc o f Eultghtemrtertt, written in 1944,proclaims the unity of European culture to be itself the source oftyranny for it was a unity that rested upon the ’autocratic subject’ andthe ’self-destruction of the Eiillgli ten iiient’.&dquo; The conservative criticsof civilization, Jaspers and Ortega Y Gasset, claimed that civilizationengendered barbarism but clung to the belief that the Europeanculture, the ’spirit of Europe’, held out a promise of redemption;Adorno and Horkheimer reject the illusion of a spiritual essence,claiming that the problem is European culture itself. Or, as WalterBenjamin wrote: ’There is no document of civilization which is not atthe same time a document of barbarism.&dquo;’‘’

r

The older notion of the disenchantment of civilization and the declineof Europe took on a new dimension with the destruction of the Jewswho were an essential part of the culture of Europe. The Jewsthemselves ’saw antisemitism both as a major pathological symptom ofthe European essence and as a result of fil1 de siècle decadence’.-’) Withthe division of Europe into West and East after 194-i the political andCultural unity of the continent had been destroyed. What was Europethen It is instructive to look at the search for a new norrmative

standpoint in writings of two Czech writers, Jan Patocka and Ivlt1.1nKundera.

In P/4.1tol1 et /’Europe (1973/1983), Patouka 5ought to redefine thespiritual essence of Europe as a philosophical quest. -I The foundationsof Europe are those of the Mind, not politics, which is divisive. Afterthe two world wars Europe had destroyed itself., both politic111y andculturally, with the result that as a unified framework it reached its end.Europe was born out of the ruins of the Greek polis and the RomanEmpire and after a fated course collipsed upon itself as a result of the



30

triumph of the nation-state, the instrumentalizing logic of science andtechnology and Its own destructive bid for world mastery. Like his

great philosophical mentor Edmund Husserl, Patocka seeks to recoversomething that was lost and he finds this in the tradition of

metaphysical thinking inaugurated by Plato. So thc cultural and

political decline of Europe forces the recognition that the unity ofEurope must be found in something else, which for Patocka is its

splritual permanence. The concept of humamty is an essential part ofthis project but the task of uncovering it can be entrusted only tophilosophy. In his philosophical vision it is crystallized in the Platonicnotion of what he calls the ‘care of the soul which is the basis of the

European heritage’. ‘’ The ’concern with the soul constitutes the centraltheme around which the project of the life of Europe is crystallized’.^‘In his view the ’history of Europe until the fifteenth century was thehistory of attempts made to realize the concern with the ~our.-4 Inmodern times the attempt to realize politicalln, a European order led tothe collapse of Europe itself. Only its spiritual heritage remained intactand it is this that should be redeemed today.

Another Czech writer, Mlilan Kundera, in a notable essay writtenin exile in Paris in 1984, reflected on the theme of Europe. ~ His focuswas central Europe, or Mitteleuropa, which under communism wasseparated from Europe, with its departure ’culture has bowed out’leaving a ’vOId In the European space’. The disappearance of centralEurope raises major questions about European identity. The questionin particular Kundera poses is how could central Europe have goneunnoticed by the West which so quickly redefined Europe ~15 westernEurope? ’The answer is simple; Europe hasn’t noticed the dis-

appearance of its Cultural home because Europe no longer perceives itsunity as a cultural umty/ The tragedy of central Europe w as not thenseen as one that questioned the very meaning of Europe which hadfound new reference points for its Identity. So ’just as God long agogave way to culture, Culture in turn is giving way’, but the result isunsatisfactory. Unity is not to be h ad In the market-place, in

technology or the mass mcdra, not even in politics. Kundera bemoansthe fact that ’culture no longer exists as a redlm ln which supremevalues were enacted’. In its place is an ’immense loneliness’.

m n 0 -

In all of these accounts of the possibility of a European identity we findan excessive concern with Its cultural or spiritual foundations and theseparation of the political from the cultural: culture is pure anduntamted with the corruption of politics. Ultitiiitely this IS as much ,1



31

reification of identity as is the equation of European identity witheconomic and political processes. Identity implies a particular state-ment about the Self and not about cultural discourses constructed aswhat Lyotard has called ’grand narratives of legitimation’.&dquo;&dquo; Thenormative alternative I should like to propose is a focusing ofEuropean identity on to that other European tradition, namelycitizenship. In citizenship the identity of the self is defined not byculture but by law.

Today, however, there is a concerted attempt to define citizenshipin cultural terms.&dquo; This cannot be anything but an essentialistdiscourse since the domlnant understanding of European culture hasbeen that of the unity of a specifically European tradition. Definitionsof European identity in terms of a universalizing cultural discourse thatSupposedly began in ancient Greece and Rome, continued through theCarolingian period and the Holy Roman Empire, was taken up by theRenaissance and, after the temporary inconvenience of the Refor-mation, was affirmed by the EnlIghtenment and somehow survived therise of modern nationalism and the world wars which followed in itswake, should be treated with scepticisrll.^‘ The sanctity of thisnarrative has been in any case demolished by major Intellectual

critiques. -9 Europe is no longer the land of white national bourgeoisies,but belongs to a wider spectrum of humanity who do not see theiridentity as the product of something callcd ’the spiritual heritage of theWest’, a lost tc)talltv that must be retrieved. The diversity to whichEuropean identity must reconcile Itself should not be that of nations orsubjectless discourses of culture, but of mutti-cuttures.

One of the domul.1nt critiques of the movement towards Europeanunification Is that it lacks a cultural dimension, that without a deeperspiritual dimension processes of economic and pohtica) unification wit)111tlllutely lack legitimation. As an observation of a general tendencythis IS undeniahle; the movement towards greater integration lndeventual unification ends up paradoxically by releasing new forms ofnationalism and xenophobia precisely because it does not have culturalresources comparable with those that c an be mobllized by thenation-state. However, if European identity is to be a rational-foundations for ‘t post-nationa) 2)st century it wlll have to break fromthis way of thinking whereby European identity 15 detined in tcrms ofculture and citizeii,,Iiip relegated to the province of the nation-state. Inthis framework culture I all kind of meta-tegitimation tor definitions ofcitizenship, which is a mere extension of nLHionL1l1ty. An alternativenormative framework will have to address itself to the question of

citizenship, Io this context what needs re-examining is the notion of’world citi/enshipB proposed by tminanue) Kant in lllv I’er~c’trrnl I’emE’



32

in 1795. xo A European Identity as opposed to a national identity couldthen be a new form of collectIve Identity that emerges 111 the space thatis beginning to open between the decline of the nation-state and the riseof new transnational institutions.~’ The conquest of this space has notyet been won by the groups and institutions ~trugglll1g to g.ll11 he-

gemony. In the context of the end of the Cold War, the present, it is

frequently observed, far from typifying the ’end of history’ or some ver-s)on ofpo.s~/~o/~, is characterized by the end of hegemony. This sug-gests that new definitions of reality and consequently new realities canbe created. It is therefore not a question of defining a Europe an essence,a spiritual substratum, whmh has wpposedlv survived the dislocationsof history, but of arncu)atmg a new European C01bClou~ness.

Hannover, Germany

Notes

1 I have explored some of the points raised here in my book InventingEurope: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Macmillan, 1995). I shouldlike to acknowledge the support of the Centre for European SocialResearch, University College Cork, Ireland, in writing this article.

2 A. Compagnon and J. Seebacher (eds) L’Esprit de l’Europe, 3 vols(Paris: Flammarion, 1993).

3 See J. Nederveen Pieterse, ’Fictions of Europe’, Race and Class 32, 3(1991): 3.

4 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (New York: Knopf,1948), p. 434.

5 Novalis, ’Die Christenheit oder Europa’, in Schriften, Vol. 3 (Darm-stadt: Wissenschaftliche Bichgesellschaft, 1968), p. 507; my trans-lation.

6 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dent,1967), p. 76.

7 J. Nurdin, ’L’ldée d’Europe en Allemagne 1815-1914’, in A. Rijksba-ron et al. (eds) Europe from a Cultural Perspective (The Hague: Nijghtand Van Ditmar Universitair, 1987), p. 50.

8 W. Blake, ’America: A Prophecy’ and ’Europe: A Prophecy’ (NewYork: Dover, 1983).

9 J. Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), p. 75. 10 A. Heller, ’Europe: An Epilogue?’, in B. Nelson et al. (eds) The Idea of

Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 15.11 D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990), pp. 14-17.



33

12 Quoted in R. Kroes, ’The Image of Europe in America’, in Rijksbaronet al., Europe from a Cultural Perspective, p. 124.

13 C. Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper& Row, 1963), pp. 27 and 33.

14 O. Spengler, The Decline of the West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971).15 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin,

1973), pp. 153-4.16 ibid., pp. 70-1.17 ibid., pp. 144-50.18 ibid., p. 150.19 ibid., p. 158.20 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin,

1968), p. 79.21 F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1979), p.

41.22 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods, p. 93.23 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 159.24 R. Briffault, Europa: A Novel in the Age of Ignorance (London: Hale,

1936), pp. 18-19. See also R. Briffault, Europa in Limbo (London:Hale, 1937).

25 Briffault, Europa: A Novel in the Age of Ignorance, pp. 19 and 22.26 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (London: Hogarth Press,

1969).27 ibid., p. 81.28 P. Drieu La Rochelle, Le Jeune Européen (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).29 J. Benda, Discours à la nation européenne (Paris: Gallimard, 1933).30 T. Mann, The Magic Mountain (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin,

1960), p. 157.31 J. Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton,

1932), p. 195. (Original Spanish edn 1930)32 J. Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization (London: Sheed & Ward,

1945); H. Belloc, The Crisis of Civilization (Westport, CT: Green-wood Press, 1973); René Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World(London: Lucaz, 1942).

33 H. Massis, Defence of the West (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928),pp.6-7.

34 P. Valéry, ’Notes sur la grandeur et décadence de l’Europe’, in Regardssur le Monde Actuel (Paris: Vialetay, 1973).

35 P. Valéry, Regards sur le Monde Actuel, p. 20; my translation.36 K. Jaspers, Vom Europäischen Geist (Munich: Piper, 1947), p. 8; my

translation.37 M. Weber, ’Science as Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in

Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 155.



34

38 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956),p. 103.

39 Weber, ’Science as Vocation’, p. 149.40 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London:

Allen & Unwin, 1978), p. 13.41 ibid., p. 182.42 E. Troeltsch, ’Der Europäismus’, in der Historismus und Seine

Probleme, Vol. 1 (Tübingen: Sceintia Verlag Aalen, 1977), p. 706; mytranslation.

43 C. Schmitt, ’The Plight of European Jurisprudence’, Telos 83(1990):65. See also P. Picconne and G.L. Ulmen, ’Schmitt’s "Testament" andthe Future of Europe’, Telos 83(1990): 3-34. See especially C.Schmitt’s Der Nomos Der Erde im Völkerecht des Jus PublicumEuropaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974).

44 In E. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences (New York: Harper& Row, 1965), p. 150.

45 ibid., pp. 155-6.46 ibid., pp. 157-8.47 ibid., p. 192.48 Translated into English as The European Mind: The Critical Years,

1680-1715 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990).49 ibid., pp. 435 and 437.50 ibid., p. 440.51 M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York:

Harper & Row, 1977). 52 M. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row,

1968), p. 51.53 ibid., p. 55.54 ibid., pp. 69-70.55 M. Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957), pp. 300-1.56 T.S. Eliot, Die Einheit der Europäischen Kultur (Berlin: Habel, 1946),

p. 40.57 ibid., p. 50.58 ibid., p. 52.59 H. Holborn, The Political Collapse of Europe (New York: Knopf,

1951).60 J.-P. Sartre, What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 209.61 A. Weber, Farewell to European History or the Conquest of Nihilism

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), p. xi. Anotherexample is E. Fischer, The Passing of the European Age (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1943).

62 See L. Niethammer, PostHistoire: Has History Come to an End?(London: Verso, 1994).



35

63 F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (New York:Macmillan, 1946).

64 Quoted in J. Heldring, ’Perceptions of Europe in the Netherlands’, inRijksbaron et al., Europe from a Cultural Perspective, p. 93, op. cit.;my translation.

65 A. Toynbee, "Asia" and "Europe": Facts and Fantasies’, in A Studyof History, Vol. 8 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 713.

66 ibid., pp. 725-6. 67 ibid., p. 729.68 T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London:

Verso, 1979).69 W. Benjamin, ’Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations

(London: Collins, 1973), p. 258.70 Y. Shavit, ’The "Glorious Century" or the "Cursed Century":

Fin-de-Siècle Europe and the Emergence of Modern Jewish National-ism’, in J. Rienharz and George L. Mosse (eds) The Impact of WesternNationalism (London: Sage, 1992), p. 201. See also Z. Bauman,Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); J.-F.Lyotard, ’Europe, the Jews, and the Book’, in Political Writings(London: UCL Press, 1993); A. Mayer, Why the Heavens Did NotDarken? The ’Final Solution’ in History (New York: Pantheon,1988);G. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism(New York: Fertig, 1978); L. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History ofRacist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York: Basic Books,1974); and D.A. Puzzo, ’Racism and the Western Tradition’, Journalof the History of Ideas 25: 579-86.

71 J. Patocka, Platon et l’Europe (Lagresse: Verdier, 1973/1983). See alsofor an overview E. Tassin, ’Europe: A Political Community?’, in C.Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radicial Democracy (London: Verso,1992).

72 Patocka, Platon et l’Europe, p. 21; my translation.73 ibid., p. 23.74 ibid., p. 45.75 M. Kundera, ’The Tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review of

Books 26 (April 1984): 33-8.76 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1984).77 This is evident in the rise of the European New Right. See P.-A.

Taguieff, ’From Race to Culture: the New Right’s View of EuropeanCulture’, Telos 98-9 (1993-4): 99-125.

78 For an example see Denis de Rougement, ’L’Europe, Invention

Culturelle’, History of European Ideas 1(1980): 31-8. Also A.

Finkielkraut, ’What is Europe?’, New York Review of Books (15



36

December 1985). J.-B. Duroselle, ’1948: Les Débuts de la Construc-tion Européenne’, in R. Poidevin (ed.) Histoire des Débuts de laConstruction Européenne (Brussels: Bruylant, 1986).

79 M. Bernal, Black Athena: The A froasiatic Roots of Classical Civiliz-ation, Vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). H. Blumenberg, TheLegitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1983). V.Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993).

80 I. Kant, Perpetual Peace (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957): Foran overview of the historical foundations of citizenship see D.

Heather, Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History, Politics andEducation (London: Longman, 1990).

81 The following are some of the few texts that are addressed to this issue:F. Cerutti, ’Can there be a Supranational Identity?’, Philosophy andSocial Criticism 18, 2(1992):147-62; S. Garcia (ed.) EuropeanIdentity and the Search for Identity (London: Pinter, 1993); J.Habermas, ’Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections ofthe Future of Europe’, Praxis International 12, 1 (1992): 1-19; E.Meehan, Citizenship and the European Community (London: Sage,1993); Tassin, ’Europe: A Political Community’, op. cit.



The Limits and Possibility of a European Identity

Documents