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Heller DerridaIdeaEurope 2008
Heller DerridaIdeaEurope 2008
Heller DerridaIdeaEurope 2008
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Dalhousie French Studies
Margaret Heller
Europe as History
¿^yaclav Havel, in a speech to the European Parliament in 1994, had this to say about
V contemporary Europe:
Many people might be left with understandable impression that the European
Union, to put it a bit crudely - is no more than endless arguments over how
many carrots can be exported from somewhere, who sets the amount, who
checks it and who eventually punishes the delinquent who contravenes the
regulations . . . This is why it seems to me that perhaps the most important task
facing the European Union today is to come up with a new and genuinely clear
reflection on what might be called European identity, a new articulation of
European responsibility, and intensified interest of the very meaning of
European integration in all its wider implications for the contemporary world,
and the recreation of its ethos, or, if you like, its charisma, (qtd. in Groothues 1)
Here Havel repeats some of the common themes belonging to the traditional discourse
about "the idea of Europe": that Europe has a task, to be made clear by an authentic
thinking, that its common cultural identity is in question, that it has a unique
responsibility, that its unity has global (perhaps world-historical) meaning, and that its
true reality is a spiritual one, as an ethos or as a charisma, with the latter suggestive both
of charm and leadership. What Europe needs is something new - a new reflection, a new
articulation - yet also a return to the old: there should be cultural re-creation,
reconstitution. These all prescribe what Europe should do or be; they tell us "what is
Europe" in truth. The call to responsibility, creation, recreation, is in contrast to the drab
reality of "what is Europe" in Havel's today of 1994. He depicts his present Europe as
being only an administrative structure, a regulatory regime, with little more purpose than
to oversee the proper functioning of the merely economic, indeed, the merely vegetable.
Europe is about petty disputation; it should be about genuine thought. It is about carrots,
it should be about charisma.
I have called this a traditional discourse about Europe, but the tradition in not as old
as one might think. Our ideas of Europe as a geographical space, as a continent, as an
economic and political union, as a civilization, our ideas of what Europe is, what it has
been, what it could be, are not only various and contested, but also rather recent. As
Derrida will claim rightly, the question of Europe belongs to the discourse of modernity.
While the name of Europe originates with the ancient Greeks, our conception of Europe
as a particular place (that is, where it actually is), as having a particular history, and as
bearing a distinctive culture, does not. And, according to Peter Bugge's analysis of the
idea of Europe, Europe has never denoted a particular geography but rather a shifting set
of values used to identify one group of people in contrast to another one, usually Asiatic.
Both Europe and Asia are accordingly "discursive constructs, relational and subject to
constant negotiations and change" (4). The mantra of social history in the seventies was
the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson's claim that class is not a thing, but a relationship.
Something similar could be said about a geopolitical entity such as Europe; it is not a
thing, but a relationship and thus it has had borders that have moved according to
changing standpoints.
WORKS CITED
Bugge, Peter. "Asia and the Idea of Europe - Europe and Its Others." Kontur: Tidsskrift
fur Kulturstudier 2 (2001): 3-13.
Clarke, J. J. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western
Thought. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.