Abstract

For centuries Europe has been the power that determined the “course of the world”, affirming its own identity through the assimilation of the diverse. This Europe has waned in 1989 together with the fall of the Berlin wall, an event that represents the point of maximum identification between Europe and the world. But this involves the danger of the disappearance of Europe and of the contradiction that has been its profound soul, the contradiction between the power and impotence of reason. If we can still imagine for Europe a role in the history of the world, it can’t only consist in a struggle for power with the USA or with China, or with a resurgent Russia, becoming thus the copy of its worst copies. Europe must instead turn towards the other side of the contradiction that marked it: the side of impotence, of heteronomy, of incompleteness. Europe survives if it has the courage to reduce itself, to diminish itself after having expanded to all the world