This article puts forward a critical investigation and comparative assessment of Julia Kristeva's political writing on Europe and cosmopolitanism. Kristeva's reflections on the status of the stranger in the European religious and secular traditions, and her persistent argument on the need to constructively reformulate what is most conducive to a present and future cosmopolitanism from within those traditions and discourses, have already been recognized. What this article addresses is the need for a constructive critical dialogue with the themes and (...) arguments of Kristeva's writing on these issues in the context of recent writing on cosmopolitanism. The article is concerned with ethical cosmopolitanism, as Kristeva's thought mostly bears on the subjective, interpersonal and communal dimensions of cosmopolitanism. Two main problems are identified that crucially undermine Kristeva's thinking on Europe. First, Kristeva's views on the present and future of Europe repeatedly confine the idea of Europe to the representation of a very particular history of French modernity that is only tempered by occasional, comparative yet complementary, references to the USA. The second problem concerns the use of psychoanalytic theories of questionable validity to support cultural analyses and theoretical propositions of dubious value for a cosmopolitan ethos or politics. (shrink)

This article discusses the Idea of Europe as it is developed within the phenomenological tradition by Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida and Jan Patočka. It shows how Derrida and Patočka try to preser...

This paper would like to contribute to the discussion on the formation of the idea of Europe and contextually shaping of the debate on the New World in early modern and modern history. Following an important Italian historiographic tradition, the paper discusses the eighteenth-century within a wider objective and subjective historical development.The first part of the paper focuses on the Eurocentric realigning of the relations in the Atlantic world. It argues that this realignment remains basically a middle period phenomenon. (...) The resistance by the Anglo and Hispano-American colonies to the “reforms” and the internationalisation of the crisis of American Empires actually caused a real caesura in the political history of the Atlantic.The second part of the paper focuses on the impact of the Eurocentric reorganisation of European/American relations on collective consciousness, political ideologies and historical discourses on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that this impact was much more lasting and profound.The paper focuses finally on the anti-Eurocentrism matured in the Americas in the late eighteenth-century. It argues that this attitude declines to present the European cultural and ideological heritage, on the basis of an age-long American experience that historiography presents by now as multiethnic, multicultural and métisse. The paper suggests in particular that this American anti-Eurocentrism can be considered to some extent prototypical of a phenomenon destined to develop in nineteenth and twentieth century in the framework of the apogee, crisis and decline of Europe in the international world system and international world society. (shrink)

This paper would like to contribute to the discussion on the formation of the idea of Europe and contextually shaping of the debate on the New World in early modern and modern history. Following an important Italian historiographic tradition, the paper discusses the eighteenth-century within a wider objective and subjective historical development. The first part of the paper focuses on the Eurocentric realigning of the relations in the Atlantic world. It argues that this realignment remains basically a middle period (...) phenomenon. The resistance by the Anglo and Hispano-American colonies to the “reforms” and the internationalisation of the crisis of American Empires actually caused a real caesura in the political history of the Atlantic. The second part of the paper focuses on the impact of the Eurocentric reorganisation of European/american relations on collective consciousness, political ideologies and historical discourses on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that this impact was much more lasting and profound. The paper focuses finally on the anti-Eurocentrism matured in the Americas in the late eighteenth-century. It argues that this attitude declines to present the European cultural and ideological heritage, on the basis of an age-long American experience that historiography presents by now as multiethnic, multicultural and métisse. The paper suggests in particular that this American anti-Eurocentrism can be considered to some extent prototypical of a phenomenon destined to develop in nineteenth and twentieth century in the framework of the apogee, crisis and decline of Europe in the international world system and international world society. (shrink)

Ïntroductory remarks to the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Special Issue "Phenomenology and the Idea of Europe".

In this article, the author discusses two aspects of the representation of “Europe” as a historical subject that are bound to prove controversial: its relationship to universality, and the conditions of its becoming democratic as a polity. The paradox of “European identity” is that it conceived of itself as the particular site of the invention of the universal and its revelation to the world. A dialectics of recognition through the confrontation with the Other was always involved (above all in (...) the colonial form), but it must pass now from projection to exposure to alterity. In that way a planetary construction of the universal can include a decisive contribution from Europe as one of its “provinces.” Democratizing democracy itself via the invention of a trans-national “co-citizenship” would be an element of this contribution. This is the object of a “material constitution” of Europe already on its way, but still lacking a clear representation of its “constituent power.” Debates on the absence of a European demos and the positive conditions for a federal government have shown that it will require a deconstruction of the notion of “sovereignty of the people,” separating its insurgent dimension from its function as a legitimation of the monopoly of violence, which was closely associated in nation-states with the legal guarantee of individual subjective rights. (shrink)

During the last thirty three years which elapsed from General Franco’s death there disappeared cleared divisions into two camps which saw relationships between Spain and Europe as well as Europe itself from disparate perspectives. For the sake of social peace and normalizing the political situation which ensued after the fascist coup on 18 July 1936 and which continued till the death of caudillo in 1975, or even a bit longer till funding the new constitution in 1978, the Spanish (...) left behind clear exposition of their political visions and their aggressive imposition on their adversaries. This common agreement resulted in, what is important, Spain’s access to the European Union in 1986. It can be seen as an unambiguous sign of its citizens’ agreement to subject their country to the processes of Europeanization (since such an opportunity appeared the Spanish saw EU accession as a solution to their homeland’s problems). Thus even the slogan from the 1960s aimed at tourists and saying: España es diferente (“Spain is different”, “eccentric”, different than other European countries) was forgotten. Undoubtedly, the modern Spain is in all the aspects of life a fully European country, and even, as it is often proudly emphasized by the Spanish authors, in many spheres of political, economic, cultural or social life it belongs to the European avant-garde. Of course, Spain has kept its national identity, its national culture (which, despite all this, has become cosmopolitan to a certain degree, as it is in the case of other European national cultures in the era of globalization) and its political, economic, social and other structures are the ones which characterize a modern, liberal, secular, democratic European state. (shrink)

This article explores the meaning and relevance of the ‘Idea of Europe’ in the context of a multicultural and multi-ethnic continent that increasingly draws on the presence and practices of people from non-European backgrounds. The Idea of Europe, even in its contemporary use, remains an ideal based on a Christian-Enlightenment-Romantic heritage, mobilized by supporters of European integration as the bridge between diverse European national cultures. In a Europe of extraordinary cultural interchange and immigration from all corners of (...) the world, the classical Idea of Europe is strikingly exclusionary and backward looking – a poor motif for the future. The article tries to develop an alternative Idea of Europe, one based on a particular politics of the public domain and a particular ethos of belonging in Europe seen as a migrant space, rather than one based on the enduring cultural values of a body of people called Europeans. It outlines a commons, protected by appropriate EU-level rights, that can both support and bind cultural pluralism and difference, and it proposes democratic vitalism as Europe’s core political project, an idea of becoming European, read as the process of never-settled cultural invention resulting from the vibrant clashes of an equal and empowered multiple public. No myth of origin, no myth of destination, only the commitment to a plural demos. (shrink)

This collection, born of a 2017 conference at the University of Vienna, is ambitious from the outset, with editors Vladimir Biti, Joep Leerssen, and Vivian Liska declaring the work an attempt to un...

Even if its constituent members still define particular positions and pursue at times somewhat independent policies, the EU acts increasingly in important areas as the unified federal state many have long wanted it to be. It may have come into being in response to practical problems, and pragmatic considerations are likely to ensure its continued consolidation, but its most committed champions have also presented it as the realization of an idea, as a longstanding project finally fulfilled. What is the idea (...) that a federal European state can claim to embody or represent or be animated by? How well do the various versions of the idea that have been articulated so far fit the current and emerging reality of the EU? Attention in the article focuses especially on the pan-European movement that emerged after the unprecedented destruction of World War I. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reconstruct and pinpoint the peculiarities of Ismail Kadare’s idea of Europe. Kadare’s idea of Europe, it is argued, differs from the ideas of Europe embraced or presumed by intellectuals like Paul Valéry, Georg Simmel, Danilo Kiš, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, or Milan Kundera, or from that of the European Union. For Kadare it is literature rather than the polis or its particular ideology that is the guardian of European values. (...) Thus the European legacy, in his view, is primarily Homeric rather than Socratic. I suggest first that the persecution of writers and the repression of literature in totalitarian regimes underlies Kadare’s idea of Europe. I then further characterize Kadare’s theme of persecution as a dialectic between regime and culture. Finally, I reconstruct Kadare’s narrative of Albania’s “return to Europe” as the struggle for recognizing Albania as the birthplace of European culture. (shrink)

Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from (...) certain despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket. (shrink)

This book is the first general introduction to the topic of Europe in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology.

Europe's long sixteenth century—a period spanning the years roughly from the voyages of Columbus in the 1490s to the English Civil War in the 1640s—was an era of power struggles between avaricious and unscrupulous princes, inquisitions and torture chambers, and religious differences of ever more violent fervor. Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe argues that this turbulent age also laid the conceptual foundations of our modern ideas about liberty, justice, and democracy. Hilary Gatti shows how (...) these ideas emerged in response to the often-violent entrenchment of monarchical power and the fragmentation of religious authority, against the backdrop of the westward advance of Islam and the discovery of the New World. She looks at Machiavelli's defense of republican political liberty, and traces how liberty became intertwined with free will and religious pluralism in the writings of Luther, Erasmus, Jean Bodin, and Giordano Bruno. She examines how the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the clash of science and religion gave rise to concepts of liberty as freedom of thought and expression. Returning to Machiavelli and moving on to Jacques Auguste de Thou, Paolo Sarpi, and Milton, Gatti delves into debates about the roles of parliamentary government and a free press in guaranteeing liberties. Drawing on a breadth of canonical and lesser-known writings, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe reveals how an era stricken by war and injustice gave birth to a more enlightened world. (shrink)

What is the self? The question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today. In this 2005 book, Jerrold Seigel provides an original and penetrating narrative of how major Western European thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. From an approach that is at once theoretical and contextual, he examines the way figures in Britain, France, (...) and Germany have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of the inner tensions and external pressures that threaten to divide or overwhelm them. He makes clear that recent 'postmodernist' accounts of the self belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to supersede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged. (shrink)

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. By Harald Weinrich.

It examines the context of the referendum in Greece in the summer of 2015 in view of theories of sovereignty and theories of judgment.

The field of the history of the idea of Europe has been very popular for some years now in History, Politics, and European Studies departments, and so there are many monographs and collections of e...

Timo Miettinen’s recent book aims to re-articulate Edmund Husserl’s whole phenomenological project by reading him as a “universalist cosmopolitan” thinker (123). Drawing on Husserl’s late works, es...

Ordoliberalism is often recognized as a powerful ideational source during the Euro crisis; however, there is no pure ordoliberal vision of European integration, and ordoliberal ideas have been used to support both Eurosceptical and Europeanist positions during the crisis. This article reconstructs the ordoliberal theoretical and political debate on European integration and argues that there exist two ordoliberal paradigms of European integration: one bottom-up, whereby the commitment to liberal economic policies at the national level is the precondition for a (...) liberal international order; the other top-down, whereby a liberal international order can help the establishment of a liberal order at the national level. The article compares two ordoliberal visions of the international order: Wilhelm Röpke’s ‘liberalism from below’ (which follows the bottom-up logic) and Viktor Vanberg’s ‘competitive federalism’ (which follows the top-down logic). Then, it explores the ordoliberal political debate on two episodes of the European integration process – the Maastricht Treaty and the Euro crisis – to argue that the bottom-up and the top-down logics underpinned, respectively, Eurosceptical and Europeanist arguments. (shrink)

Charles Bernheimer described decadence as a "stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds." In this posthumously published work, Bernheimer succeeds in making a critical concept out of this perennially fashionable, rarely understood term. Decadent Subjects is a coherent and moving picture of fin de siècle decadence. Mature, ironic, iconoclastic, and thoughtful, this remarkable collection of essays shows the contradictions of the phenomenon, which is both a condition and a state of mind. In seeking to show why (...) people have failed to give a satisfactory account of the term decadence, Bernheimer argues that we often mistakenly take decadence to represent something concrete, that we see as some sort of agent. His salutary response is to return to those authors and artists whose work constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key late nineteenth-century authors such as Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. Through careful analysis of the literature, art, and music of the fin de siècle including a riveting discussion of the many faces of Salome, Bernheimer leaves us with a fascinating and multidimensional look at decadence, all the more important as we emerge from our own fin de siècle. (shrink)

This article explores some of the ways in which ideas about and attempts to construct a European identity and sense of belonging inscribe an imaginary of Europe that is exclusionary and elitist. It suggests that the symbolic figure of ‘the immigrant woman’ is a container category that simultaneously signifies the non-European and tests and destabilizes claims to Europe's essential characteristics. It also argues that traces of this imaginary of Europe can be found in feminist scholarship on (...) global care chains and that the spatial category of ‘the domestic’ is the invisible seam that ties this scholarship to the hegemonic imaginary of Europe. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 5, August 2020, Page 600-605.

Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 1 examines debates about religious and constitutional liberties, as well as exploring the tensions between free will and divine omnipotence across a continent of proliferating religious denominations. Volume 2 considers free persons and free (...) states, examining differing views about freedom of thought and action and their relations to conceptions of citizenship. Debates about freedom have been fundamental to the construction of modern Europe, but represent a part of our intellectual heritage that is rarely examined in depth. These volumes provide materials for thinking in fresh ways not merely about the concept of freedom, but how it has come to be understood in our own time. (shrink)

In his essay ‘The Idea of Europe’ George Steiner claims that European culture derives from “a primordial duality, the twofold inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem.” For Steiner, the relationship between Greek rationalism and Jewish religion, which is at once conflictual and syncretic, has engaged the entire history of European philosophy, morality, and politics. However, given this definition, at present the United States of America seem to be more European than ‘the old Europe’ itself. Against Steiner, it will be (...) argued that in order to fathom the distinctive characteristic of European culture, we have to take a third European tradition into account, which is inextricably bound up with Athens: the tradition of Greek tragedy. If we may call Europe a tragic continent, it is not only because its history is characterised by an abundance of real political tragedies, but also because it embodies, as an idea and an ideal, a tragic awareness of the fragility of human life. Instead of reducing the ‘idea of Europe’ to a financial and economic issue, Europe should remain faithful to this idea and ideal. (shrink)

The idea of incarnation is one of the Christian theological concepts that has exerted the strongest influence on philosophical thought in Europe and which was repeatedly referred to in the twentieth century. The paper presents three reinterpretations of this biblical category. Carl Gustav Jung interprets incarnation in the spirit of Gnosticism, as a process of the psychological individuation of God and man; Hans‑Georg Gadamer employs the idea of the inner Word, Verbum interius, to analyse the dogmas of incarnation and (...) the Trinity: seeking in them a solution to the mystery of language; while Michel Henry reaches for the Bible and theology to face anew the issue of human corporeality. These attempts to rethink the theological aspects of the Incarnation of the Son of God reveal the role of this notion in the development of modern psychology, the hermeneutic philosophy of language as well as in anthropology. At the same time, a philosophical reinterpretation of incarnation provides an impulse to rephrase the questions about the relationship between philosophy and theology, as well as faith and reason, good and evil, the relationship between God and man, the mind and the body, as well as speech and thinking. On the other hand, provisional answers to these questions may rekindle theological thought and contribute to the revival of reflection on issues such as the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate and Virgin Conception, or a privation theory of evil. The article provides a starting point for just such a multi‑faceted analysis. (shrink)