Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

Introduction: Europe

Introduction: Europe The world is in large part a European invention. Europe has created, named, and shaped every historical era, from the classical world and the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and their culmination in the modern age of the nation-state, and now to the postmodern lease of life promised by the supranationalism of the European Union.1 It is instructive that Europeans — and only Europeans — have succeeded in travelling beyond the nation-state into a quasi-federal union.2 It took two world wars — Europe’s two great “civil wars”3 — to set that process of integration in motion through the transnational control of coal and steel, two commodities that are crucial to the conduct of modern warfare. Certainly, the collective idea of Europe as an inherited political and cultural domain is marked by great contention and contest, but this disagreement is natural because, like all identities, the identity of Europe is constructed around “shifting discursive practices” that emerge from a rich register of political, cultural, and economic languages.4 The chapters that follow constitute a modest attempt to relate anAsian’s encounters with Europe. My understanding of Europe was mediated by my family’s experience of the contradictory British impulses of colonialism and liberalism; that understanding was nuanced later by  Celebrating Europe my student life at Cambridge, to which I went, following in my father’s footsteps. Two chapters in the book are about Britain. Europe’s colonial depredations were echoed in the horrors of the Holocaust, which form the subject of an early chapter. The chapter, “Gentiles”, is a defence of the intellectual basis of European secularism in the face of the international assault mounted by confessional societies and their states. It examines how secularism was crucial to the very evolution of Europe as a civilization; how the secular impulse is related to the struggle between Hebraism and Hellenism for the European imagination; how that struggle has evolved into the ironic sense of life (compared with the tragic sense of life); and what some implications of the ironic life might be for Europe’s role as a sanctuary for dissidence and heresy today. In this context, the Swiss vote in favour of banning the construction of mosque minarets grates on the secular sensibility, as it should. However, why are the reflexes of societies such as those of the Swiss, the Dutch, and the French, societies that are disposed liberally towards both belief and disbelief, hardening against members of an immigrant religion? In posing this question, a commentator argues that the point is not to wonder how liberal societies could behave in this way, but to understand that they behave in this way precisely because they are liberal.5 That is a disturbing thought, but one that cannot be dismissed. The agency of secularism cannot be detached from that of liberty as a governing principle in the life of nations. The recognition inherent in secularism — that the state is not mandated to impose religious beliefs on its citizens even if most of them treat those beliefs as absolute truths — finds Introduction to Europe  its political expression in the essence of liberty, which is that nothing is inevitable, let alone permanent, in history — because, just as men have made their history, they are free to change it. Hence there is no perfect or final form of government or society. Instead, history is the graveyard of absolutes. The chapter on The Leopard analyses the mood of political mortality present in a great Italian historical novel based on the confrontation between feudal nobility in decay and the bourgeoisie that seeks to replace it. The chapters on the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Fall of the Soviet Union derive fundamentally from questions about the nature of history. The first fall released around the world an exhilarating sense of peoples’ liberation from a totalitarian system. That liberation was followed soon, however, by a palpable sense of loss over the second fall, with which the greatest attempt in history to liberate man from exploitation by man disappeared. That story has not ended. When the Soviet Union disappeared, so did the Soviet empire, in an implosion that freed Marxism-Leninism to resume its theoretical journey towards being an international rendezvous again. Thus, in a review of Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire, Gopal Balakrishnan writes of “a world overflowing with insurgent energies” that has embarked on...