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99 9 Sovereignty and Alterity Europe was in crisis when Husserl gave the lectures sponsored by the Wiener Kulturbund. In 1935 her democracies were weakened by the economic depression, while fascism and communism seemed triumphant. Everywhere there was a sense of menace, of the impending renewal of the European civil war whose first stage had ended in 1918. Husserl said in Vienna, “The European nations are sick; Europe itself, they say, is in critical condition.” Asserting the “obvious difference . . . between health and sickness . . . for societies, for peoples, for states,” he turned his questioning to Europe.1 How do we distinguish between its “healthy growth and decline”? Does it have an inner, spiritual destiny, one whose abandonment would signal its decline? Can we find within Europe a recognizable shape, an identifying characteristic, whose loss would be a symptom of illness? Finally, and most importantly for Husserl, was the question of the specific sense of European responsibility: To what does the idea of Europe respond? What is the task, the destiny corresponding to its “healthy growth”? Readers of Patočka’s Heretical Essays know how the same questions exercised him forty years later. He also raised the question of the “decadent” and the “positive” with regard to Europe.2 Like Husserl, he attempted to define European responsibility in these terms. Drawing on both Patočka and Husserl, I would like to use the insights of the previous chapter to raise these questions again. Europe’s situation has, of course, radically altered. Instead of the depression that prevailed when Husserl spoke, there has been until recently general prosperity. Both fascism and communism have disappeared. The cold war divide that in Patočka’s time threatened to bring on a third, annihilating phase of the European civil war has also ended. For the first time a majority of eastern and western European nations are bound together in a union that is not an imperium. What does this new situation tell us about Europe, about its identity and prospects? I am going to argue that its identity is that of a task. This task is that of undoing the error of conflating sovereignty with freedom. Positively expressed, the task is that of reconciling sovereignty and alterity. The corresponding sense of responsibility that grows out of this task is that of responding to the other, who, precisely as other, makes sovereignty possible by putting it into question. 100 E M B O D I M E N T S Alterity as Marking Europe No great effort is required to show how alterity characterizes Europe. Both its history and present reality exhibit a mélange of states, peoples, cultures, and languages offering distinct perspectives on the European reality. What is significant is the interpenetration that characterizes this diversity. The individual cultures have provoked each other; they have put one another into question. As we know from Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance spread far beyond its original borders, questioning and transforming the cultures north of the Alps. The same transformative power is evident in the Protestant Reformation of the north, the Industrial Revolution that spread outward from England, the political revolution initiated in France, and the host of specific cultural influences from Kafka to Schoenberg, each of which caused others to question their premises, their ways of seeing and expressing the world. The city is the crucial element here. As Ortega y Gasset observed, “Greeks and Latins appear in history lodged, like bees in their hives, within cities, poleis. This is a simple fact, mysterious in its origin, a fact from which we must start.”3 He adds: “The city is . . . the creation of an entity higher and more abstract than the oikos [the house] of the family.”4 It “is not primarily a collection of habitable dwellings, but a meeting-place for citizens, a space set apart for public functions.”5 What we have with the city is “the invention of a new kind of space,” a “new dimension.”6 It is a place set apart for encounter and debate. Those whom one meets in this public space are not necessarily relatives or friends. They can be members, as in Athens, of ten separate tribes. As Plato’s dialogues witness, they can also be visitors from distant places, mysterious “strangers.” The European successor states of the classical world also bear the sense of being places of interpenetration, of cultural exchange. In Ortega y Gasset’s words, “In its origins, the State consists of the mixture of races and...

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