Europe is exhausted. It is exhausted after long years of what is labeled as the Eurozone crisis. It is exhausted after pro-longed years of political failure. Every single attempt of deepening the political union of Europe after the enactment of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 and the common currency that followed in 1999, failed in consecutive referendums. Remember Ireland 2001 with the Nice Treaty, remember the Netherlands and France in 2005 with the European constitution. This elitist concept of Europe was too much rooted in an overtly rationalist model of economic necessities. But humans are more than economic machines doing what markets expect and require from them.
At the same time, the European Union still remains the largest economic entity in the global economy. The continent is also still unrivaled in terms of the economic and social welfare that it provides to its citizens. But these two core distinctions are pretty much it. Of course, there are the beautiful old towns and picturesque cities, the natural grandeur of Europe’s diverse landscapes, its rich cultural and historic heritage. It is a museum for the entire world to remind everyone of a great past. Quite oddly, the name “Europe” and its association with something like the continent or a certain way of life is a rather recent invention. The European idea of an ever-greater union – based on liberty, democracy, social welfare for its citizens, a common market and free borders – is merely 60 odd years old.
Advent of Europe
Yet, when we look at the last 500 years or so, we see the unfolding of Europe on a global scale, its translation into different contexts and a multitude of “clones,” if you like. The precise start date of the global rise of Europe is hard to nail down, but its many forces of fusion came together and eventually increased to boiling temperature somewhere between 1450 and 1550. These converging developments were:
- the invention of the mechanical printing press,
- the Renaissance,
- the rise of Protestantism,
- the first modern business organizations (publishers and trading companies),
- the great geographical discoveries starting the sad story of colonialism.
All this happened in close spatial and temporal proximity in Europe.
American-Asian Centuries in a European World
And today, our world of over seven billion people is beyond reasonable doubt a European world. How can I say that? Have we not just witnessed an American century? And is this new 21st century not supposed to be the arena in which the United States and China are battling for economic, political and cultural dominance? Well, yes in a way. But these are just examples of the many Europes that are out there today. America is a European invention. Its very foundations are firmly set on the great civilizing experiment Europe started we call “Modernity” or simply “the West”. You might be able to call America a form of “Europe 2.0”, with a stronger focus on economic and political freedom, less on traditions or history. In that same framework, China and East Asia are different and newer versions of Europe, maybe “Europe 3.0”. They exhibit an almost exclusive emphasis on economic freedom. Regardless of the differences between these versions, Europe and for what it stands has triumphed. The United States probably has some advantage over China in becoming a new Europe. China only recently switched into its “European mode” and changed quite heavily. With the rest of the world, the situation is similar.
“Neurope” and the End of History
These new Europes are joining old Europe only in its consequences, in its results. By that, I mean that they benefit from the essence of 500 years of emancipation in politics, economics, arts, science, religion, education and personal life. In short: Europe spawned it all – individualism, institutionalism, economism, capitalism – and had 500 years of experimenting and learning, of unfolding its history, of bringing forth the best and worst examples of human ingenuity. Moreover this experience of “becoming Europe” is engraved in the physical landscape, the urban architecture of the Old continent. European towns and cities they are not mere assemblies of where people live, but a cultural mimetic landscape. In every town you are reminded of yourself and your history as a European. You breathe it in quite simply, without reflecting upon it.
For the rest of the world, all these new Europes, especially Asia and also Africa, this Europeanization does not unfold over centuries allowing for drawing their own lessons, creating new indigenous cultural memories in dealing with this brave new world. No, it comes in the form of a dramatic breach with their own cultural history. All that rich Eastern and Southern heritage that evolved differently and at a different pace is now under severe stress. The pressures of adjustment are probably more severe than during the era of colonialism in the 19th century. Why?
Because now, these new Europes are doing it voluntarily to themselves. And they are accelerating the process through the dramatic economic growth of recent years – and their general readiness to make any effort to move ahead. But you cannot jump 500 years nor can you just cut off your own historical trajectories and cultures and assume that everything will be fine. They now live in a hyphenated European way, an Asian-European way or an African-European way. The world society has finally arrived and there is no way out. It arrived in the worst possible way, in erasing all of our history. This includes us Europeans. We are wondering where we came from and what this turmoil is that we are finding ourselves in right now.
This does not mean that the entire world is now a mere extension of the European continent. Far from it, this is the world of New Europe – “Neurope.” It may have the same advertisements running on TV, the same movies showing in theaters and you can probably buy a decent Rioja or Riesling somewhere. But this is all at the surface. There is no Old Europe below it. And maybe this process has even destroyed what was indigenously there before. Being from Old Europe, I do not assume knowledge or insight to tell others what they should or want to do. We Europeans did this for way too long. What matters most to me now is the consequences this post-historic development has on Europe and its cultural identity itself.
Continental Soul Lost
The end of history? Was Francis Fukuyama rightly declaring it, along with his reference to Friedrich Nietzsches “Last Man”? Well, call it globalizing the European experience. It happened through severing the head from the body, the results of 500 years of Europe unfolding from the unfolding process itself. Quite ironically this is what bears down heavily on Europe’s cultural psyche. The very idea of Europe is that of being the project for humanity’s progress. That means its arc is that of a steady evolution, sometimes the revolution of ideas, as well as new concepts of how the world should be organized. Pankaj Mishra noted that this longing for grand ideas is in fact truly European and alien to other cultures, especially Eastern cultures. But when the West has been won, where to go now? When all horizons have been met, what next? This is the situation for Europe now. It is directionless and aimless – now that the rest of the world has happily Europeanized itself. We Europeans look to ourselves in bewilderment as we see that the Neuropeans are only sharing things on the surface with us. And when we watch ourselves very closely we become afraid. Why? Because we feel hollow down to the core.
The call of Giorgio Agamben in Libération in March 2013 for installing a Latin Union in Europe as some form of counter-power against the overweight of Northern Europe – well, let us be clear and blunt about that: Germanic Europe – was based on one very strong argument. That argument was that people live on the basis of their cultures. That is why living actually means to have a lifestyle. And that this lifestyle is informed, infused, held together by the history of your local cultural landscapes. For Agamben as a man from the Midi, from Latin Europe, the cultural landscape is the Mediterranean and all that for which it stands, the children of the olive tree. But even if you are from Germanic Europe as myself, you cannot help but commemorate the loss of something significant, something deep within yourself. German writers Thea Dorn and Richard Wagner – no, not the 19th century opera composer – titled their recent book “Die Deutsche Seele” – “The German Soul” and picked up the notion of culture and need for history that Agamben drew from his Latin perspective.
With the Europeanization of the world and the end of history, Old Europe lost its soul. When we talk of Europe today, there is no spark. There are no great feelings of hope, no weight of history felt on our shoulders. Not like in the immediate aftermath of the last War, when “Europe” finally promised the end of all borders, the end of all wars. Then, “Europe” was all about the future. Today, “Europe” is about EFSF, ESM, ECB, OMT and, of course, the famous banana regulation. A project for humanity’s progress? Not here, not anymore. And if the present is meant to be progress, progress has looked much better in the past. But when your own identity has fulfilled itself – and proven to be quite ugly in its results, at least pretty boring – what do you do then?
New Hope for Old Europe
Europe is exhausted. After 500 years, it succeeded in its great project of transforming humanity at the price of erasing history. At the same time Europe becomes increasingly attached with the feeling of nostalgia, of becoming a museum for the world. But even in Neurope there is hardly progress anywhere, unless you call something like the mindless succession of one smartphone generation after the other progress. Where is progress on an ideational level, where are new concepts of society? The wise men of Europe – Rousseau, Locke, Smith, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard – are a fainting memory and apparently there is no need to find a replacement. The ends of human development themselves have ended. They seem to be fulfilled, now the means have taken over. How to achieve something becomes the important question, not what to achieve. If all ends have been met, if all horizons have been conquered, this is only logical. When I have written “economism” before, I mean exactly that: the absolutist instrumentality with technology and economics dominating all debates in society.
But some advocate that there still is room for ends and goals, even within such a post-historic and technocratic mindset. The battle against climate change in the form of a “Green New Deal”, based on “Green Growth” and investments into green technologies and renewable energy could form a new project for progress in Europe, as former Irish president Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu pointed out. In fact it made it into the core strategies of the European Union for becoming the most innovative knowledge economy on the planet. Of course, climate change and the greater ecological crisis we see unfolding today is the heritage of Europeanization, starting with the first shovel of coal into James Watt’s steam engine. So it would be only consequent for Europe to redeem its past sins by investing in green technologies, by setting up the right institutional framework with emissions trading, feed-in tariffs for renewables, by fostering green entrepreneurialism and rejuvenile itself. This is of course a prime example for an a-historic, means-oriented, culturally oblivious approach in our all-too European world. Will that quench the thirst for soul? For being woven into a rich cultural tapestry of 500 years? I would probably rather bet my money on the Eurovision Song Contest then!
Europe of our Hearts and our Grassroots
The quintessence of this entire essay is this: No one lives on bread alone. If there is hope for the old continent, Europe needs an intellectual project that speaks to the heart and soul beyond 500 years of progress. This intellectual project might well be found in the unprecedented proliferation of grassroots movements responding to the dismantling of social and political arrangements following the momentous and ongoing financial crisis of 2008. Christina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox managed to edit an insightful compendium “Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global justice Strugges, anti-Austerity Protest” on this recent rise of bottom-up activism across the old continent. Common ground amongst all these different grassroots movements is a strong questioning of the results of the European project:
- They confront unbounded individualism that neglects the importance of communal embeddedness, as we people are no social atoms after all;
- They confront institutionalism that only seeks refuge in regulations and large-scale bureaucracies, be it government or business.
- They confront economism, the absurd idea that efficiency is everything, that everything can be calculated with a price and thus made substitutable;
- Finally they confront capitalism, unbound commodification and aggregation of productive power in the hands of the few.
Above all, all these initiatives challenge the expansionist logic of the European project that moved us beyond every border, every horizon, every soul and now to the very limits of our planet and our existence.
What is probably most fascinating about all these movements is that they span the whole breadth and width of Europe, from East to West and, most notably, from North to South. Take for example the transition towns movement started in Ireland, a dedicated grassroots, civil society activist idea of permaculture and local resilience whereas the Romanic battle cry for “décroissance” originated in France and took to the streets of Spain and Italy. But now, they are all over Europe, resonating deeply with people everywhere. Everywhere people come together in the sense of commonality, of collaboration, of local reference and global responsibility. Show me something that has achieved that in the last 25 years, without any government intervention, without any initiative from Brussels! These movements bring in a breath of fresh air against the instrumentalist reasoning clouding our minds, against the end of history and the false heralds of “there is no alternative”. It is breathed into this exhaustion that befell us Europeans and blocked any progressive idea of our own future.
Exhaustion is not our fate. There are alternatives. But the alternatives have to take into account people’s cultural heritage, the need to feel at home in a cultural landscape. For us in Europe, they have to reflect our 500 years. Renewing Europe is possible, maybe even renewing Neurope and our European world. But this is surely not a job for post-historic technocrats or elitist engineers. It is something for people with real hearts and real souls.