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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25.3 (2003) 26-41



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A New Europe

Johannes Birringer

[Figures]

War and Peace

The widespread outrage and contempt, which many European citizens, old and young, expressed this past spring in their protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, are the background for my examination of the new Europe that has evolved since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The technological gap between U.S. military might and that of all other states has become obvious; the ideological shift, and the current chasm that has opened up between the New and the Old World, is more difficult to interpret. Some commentators, including the German Chancellor, have spoken of the "return of the political" (Rückkehr des Politischen ). The phrase resonates with understated European irony vis-à-vis the more ambitious millennial theses heard in the U.S. since 1989, from the "end of history" (Fukuyama) and the "clash of civilizations" (Huntington) to "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus" (Robert Kagan).

In the context of the military invasion of Iraq, and the Bush administration's global war on terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, this phrase points to a hegemonic foreign policy defining itself against any or all enemies. Concerning Iraq, the policy points towards control over the Middle East, and many European countries, with millions of Muslims living in their communities, dread the familiar outcome of invasion and occupation. Such a politics indeed seemed a thing of the past, and we are now forced to confront the paradox that the unilateral and imperial foreign policy stance promoted by the U.S. belittles or even dismisses the United Nations and the opposition from most European allies who had pursued a different path over the past decade, striving for peace and economic cooperation through treaty-based diplomacy and multilateral negotiation. Indeed, the entire process of gradual integration within the EU itself, with the creation of a single market and a single currency, has been founded upon the latter.

Chancellor Schröder's phrase, however, was uttered in June 2000, at a conference on "Modern Governing in the 21st Century," to which he invited all European prime ministers in order to discuss the challenges of globalization and what was to become [End Page 26] apparent a year later (during the massive protests at the Genoa G-8 summit), namely that the elite leadership of global economic policy makers faced a growing activist opposition that took to the streets to protest the management of "modern governing." The return of the political betrays a deep irony, with a dissident movement criticizing the global economic policy makers and their rhetorical claims (for human rights and the equal distribution of wealth) in the very moment when the "postnational constellation" (Jürgen Habermas) throws the old nation states and their governing democratic principles into crisis. This crisis and the rifts that opened up during the Iraq war suggest no easy answer to the question whether a new civil society and a new culture have emerged in Europe. But the anti-war demonstrations in 2002-2003 were a clear echo of the mass mobilizations in 1989 and underscored the protest movement against globalization already active for a number of years now. Spontaneous and sustained protests, such as the camps built on the public squares of Barcelona, also echoed the more recent student protests in Belgrade which pushed the Milosevic regime to the brink. Do such echoes indicate a common culture or a growing consensus that would overcome the many historical particularities and the mosaic-like regionalism of cultures in Europe?

Europe—A Work in Progress

The tradition of dissident and activist movements is part of the European culture I have known since 1968. The evolution of civil society in Western Europe after the conflagration of World War II, the advance of social democracy, and the ideological opposition of the Left against conservative state power, was shaped by a radical politics which had its reference points in the class-based struggle of labor against capitalism. Student protests had sought alliances...

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