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The Question of European Identity : Europe in the American Mirror

Krishan Kumar European Journal of Social Theory 2008 11: 87 DOI: 10.1177/1368431007085289 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/content/11/1/87

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European Journal of Social Theory 11(1): 87105

Copyright 2008 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore

The Question of European Identity Europe in the American Mirror

Krishan Kumar
U N I V E R S I T Y O F V I RG I N I A

Abstract In the wake of the Iraq war of 2003, and in response to the European reaction to the war, a number of prominent European intellectuals launched a new debate on Europes identity, and in particular the extent to which it differed from American identity. The debate was sparked by a newspaper article by Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, which was circulated to several other intellectuals for comment. The Europe-wide debate which ensued in which several Americans joined provides a revealing snap-shot of European opinion on the question of Europes identity. It illustrates in particular the dangers as well as the seductions of seeing that identity mainly in terms of a contrast with America, putatively to the advantage of the Europeans. This article argues that such a contrast fuels an anti-Americanism that is disabling to Europe and conceals many signicant and less selfattering aspects of the European inheritance. Key words anti-Americanism America Europe identity intellectuals

In the end Europe dwells in one house, America in another. (Georg Simmel, 2005 [1915]: 71) As we continue to reect upon why we feel European and not American, we are bound to encounter a different view of existence, a different notion of what constitutes a good life, a different existential plan. (Gianni Vattimo, 2005: 33) The renewal of Europe is necessary. But this will never be accomplished by an endeavored self-determination of Europe as un- or even anti-American. Each attempt to dene Europe vis--vis the United States will not unify Europe but divide it. (Timothy Garton Ash and Ralf Dahrendorf, 2005: 143)

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DOI: 10.1177/1368431007085289
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The Idea of Core Europe On 31 May 2003, an article appeared simultaneously in two newspapers, the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the French Libration. It was written by two prominent European intellectuals, Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. On 15 February 2003, mass demonstrations the largest since the Second World War had taken place in all the major European capitals in protest against the American-led invasion of Iraq. Habermas and Derrida both felt that here was the opportunity, and the need, for a re-statement of core European values, especially regarding their difference from American values and traditions. In pursuit of this end, they circulated the text of their article in advance to a number of other well-known intellectuals, such as Umberto Eco, Adolf Muschg, Gianni Vattimo and Fernando Savater. The result was that on the same day as their own article was published there simultaneously appeared articles by these other authors, responding to it, in a number of leading newspapers in France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. This in turn triggered a widespread debate on the meaning of Europe in which intellectuals from practically every European country including several from Eastern Europe weighed in.1 The article by Habermas and Derrida was clearly in the nature of a manifesto, a Declaration of European Independence. It was independence above all from America. The two authors wished to assert the distinctiveness, as well as the autonomy, of European political and cultural values, particularly in the context of the controversy over the war in Iraq, which pitted Europeans against Americans in a more serious way than at any time since the Second World War. To do so Habermas and Derrida put the stress on the commonality of European values, the fact that there were strongly shared values that overrode all national differences:
Only the consciousness of a shared political fate, and the prospect of a common future, can halt out-voted minorities from obstructing a majority will. The citizens of one nation must regard the citizens of another nation as fundamentally one of us. This desideratum leads to the question that so many skeptics have called attention to: are there historical experiences, traditions, and achievements offering European citizens the consciousness of a shared political fate that can be shaped together ?2

It is hardly necessary to point out that, despite the particular context of the Iraq war which gave it or so it seemed a particular urgency, this attempt to state the core values of European civilization was in many ways complementary to that being attempted, on a more formal level, by the statesmen of the European Union as they struggled to draw up a European Constitution. A necessary part of this task seemed to involve a preamble that would voice the common values and aspirations of all members of the Union. The disputes and difculties attending this effort raised a high degree of scepticism regarding the possibility or even the desirability of attempting such a codication of European values.3 What Habermas and Derrida were aiming at therefore carried with it the similar risk of rejection, and the sense that the exercise would be invidious not simply to Americans but to many fellow-Europeans. At all events it was likely to be highly controversial, and so it proved.

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Habermas and Derrida accepted that much that constitutes the European legacy Christianity and capitalism, natural science and technology, Roman Law and the Code Napoleon, the bourgeois-urban form of life, democracy and human rights, the secularization of the state and society had become the common property of the West, if not indeed much of the world as a whole. The West as a spiritual form encompasses more than just Europe. They also admitted that Europe had been repeatedly convulsed by divisive bouts of nationalism. However those very experiences of division had produced a common outlook and attitude.
In reaction to the destructive power of this nationalism, values and habits have also developed which have given contemporary Europe, in its incomparably rich cultural diversity, its own fate. This is how Europe presents itself to non-Europeans. A culture which for centuries has been beset more than any other culture by conicts between town and country, sacred and secular authorities, by the competition between faith and knowledge, the struggle between states and antagonistic classes, has had to painfully learn how differences can be communicated, contradictions institutionalized, and tensions stabilized. The acknowledgement of differences the reciprocal acknowledgement of the Other in her otherness can also become a feature of common identity. (2005: 89)

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In any case, Habermas and Derrida insist, the variety of European experiences simply emphasizes that, as with all identities, European identity will have something constructed about it from the very beginning. It will be a matter of conscious choices, distinguishing between the legacy we appropriate, and the one we want to refuse. Historical experiences are only candidates for a selfconscious appropriation; without such a self-conscious they cannot attain the power to shape our identity (2005: 10). Let us leave aside for the moment the question, who decides? Who makes the choice between the legacy we want to appropriate, and the one we want to refuse? Can we be so blithely unencumbered in our choices? Is history so open? Are historical legacies things that we can accept or shrug off at will? Accepting that legacies are not all of one kind, not seamless or homogeneous, is it still open to us simply to choose the nice parts and reject the nasty ones? Does the effort to master our history not involve a more tortuous and painful process? The idea that we can construct our collective identity at will seems as problematic as the idea that we can, or do, construct our individual identities at will. We will return to this. Let us though rst consider what Habermas and Derrida following their own injunction to select choose as the values of core Europe (a troubling implication of this concept must be that there are European countries that, not being at the core, either share these values only imperfectly or not at all and if so, cannot really be considered fully European). Most of these, implicitly or explicitly, are contrasted with what are taken to be dominant American values. First is the privatization of faith : For us, a president who opens his daily business with public prayer, and associates his signicant political decisions with a divine mission, is hard to imagine (2005: 10). Next is the legacy of the French Revolution, and the experience of sharp class conicts in the development of

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capitalism. These have led to differing evaluations of politics and markets [that] may explain Europeans trust in the civilizing power of the state, and their expectations for its capacity to correct market failures (2005:11). This pointed contrast with America is echoed by the view that the European party system, with its competition between conservative, liberal and socialist agendas, has uniquely at least in the West fostered the sensitivity of citizens to the paradoxes of progress. It has made Europeans, to a far greater degree than Americans with their worship of technology, acutely aware of the losses as well as the gains created by technological and other forms of progress. The real ideological competition between the major European parties has sharpened European senses and led them to subject the socio-political results of capitalist modernization to an ongoing political evaluation (2005: 11). Then there is the tradition of collective action bred by a history of class consciousness and class conicts. In the context of workers movements and the Christian socialist traditions, an ethics of solidarity, the struggle for more social justice, with the goal of equal provision for all, asserted itself against the individualistic ethos of market justice that accepts glaring social inequalities as part of the bargain (2005:11). Habermas and Derrida do not skate over Europes more sinister episodes, such as the experience of totalitarianism and the Holocaust. But even these are made to yield gains. Self-critical controversies about this past remind us of the moral basis of politics. A heightened sensitivity to injuries to personal and bodily integrity reects itself, among other ways, in the fact that both the Council of Europe and the EU made the ban on capital punishment a condition for membership (pp. 1112. Compare therefore the barbarity of American practices, with their hundreds of prisoners on Death Row. Europe is where there is no death penalty).4 Finally there is Europe as a world-leader in supranationalism, and in encouraging an outward looking attitude. A bellicose past marked by internecine conicts and a military and spiritual mobilization against one another has once more taught a sober lesson, this time of internationalism. The successful history of the European Union may have conrmed Europeans in their belief that the domestication of state power demands a mutual limitation of sovereignty, on the global as well as the nation-state level (2005: 12). Even the acquisition of empire has had its benets, not so much perhaps at its zenith but at the point where European nations went through the humbling and highly educative experience of the loss of empire. This has allowed them the opportunity to take the perspective of the defeated, and to develop a reexive distance from themselves. From this might follow the rejection of Eurocentrism and the Kantian hope for a global domestic policy (2005: 12). Europe vs America Presented by two such distinguished intellectuals as Habermas and Derrida, neither of whom has been shy to pronounce on public affairs, this account of

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core European values must command respect, if not necessarily assent. Nor should the immediate context of the Iraq war prevent us from regarding it as a serious and deeply-thought out view, a distillation of much of what Habermas in particular has been saying over the past two decades and more.5 Moreover it is not, in many respects, a bad summary of much of what Europeans, of many nations and classes, have come to value in part at least because they feel it sets them off not just from non-Western nations but even from those, such as the Americans, who share many common Western values. It is, though, in the rst place, this attempt to construct a European identity as against America that must be questioned. Volker Heins notes the irony that, just as Western Europeans once tried to dene Europe as against an East European other, so now the place once held by different eastern others in European identity formation has . . . been taken by an imagined America (Heins, 2005: 434). European anti-Americanism is no new phenomenon, but the Iraq war, and several other seemingly arrogant and high-handed actions by the Bush administration, have given it fresh expression.6 Despite the fact that America is largely a European creation, it is argued that there has been such a divergence in experiences between the two that they can now almost be considered mirror-images of one another. It was not only Dieter Grimm, a respected jurist and current Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, who protested at this stark dichotomizing of Europe and America. Grimm even went on to claim that European values, especially political ones, were rst and permanently secured in the American constitution. It is not to be recommended, he warned, that we understand European identity as an alternative to the Atlantic attachment, as Jrgen Habermas has suggested (Grimm, 2005: 100).7 Contrasting Western and non-Western civilization is one thing and, though fraught with the usual dangers of ignoring the massive amount of borrowing and cross-fertilization between, at the least, Asia and Europe, it has a respectable pedigree in European thought and, carefully thought-out, can still be instructive.8 Contrasting European and American traditions, in the way suggested by Habermas and Derrida, seems less helpful. Whatever Americans or Europeans, in the heat of the moment, may say or think, the fact is that they share a fundamentally similar Western inheritance. The conicts and divergences, such as they are, are family conicts. They take place within a framework of largely common understandings. Can one really say that the differences between Europe and America are greater than those, say, between Western and Eastern Europe especially if one includes Russia in the latter? For Habermas and Derrida, the things that primarily distinguish Europe from America are in Gianni Vattimos concurring summary secularism and socialism. Europes current state of secularism is contrasted with a profound resurgence of religiosity in the United States, manifested in the belief that God is with us whatever America does. As for socialism, this is understood not as an achieved state but as a tendency, a principle and a goal. Europes DNA contains a gene of socialism completely unknown to the United States (Vattimo, 2005: 32).9 Dan Diner (2005: 92) reminds us of Hegels remark that America is a bourgeois

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society without a state. A profound hostility towards the state, in the American case, and a largely positive and benevolent one, in the European case, are seen as a second marker of the Europe-America divide. How secular is Europe, and how religious is America? One doesnt know if Tony Blair like George W. Bush in the White House started off his daily business with public prayers at number 10 Downing Street, though the British Parliament itself (unlike the US Congress) does so. But in any case everyone acknowledges the importance of his faith to Mr. Blair. Many of his decisions in recent years, including his unbending support of American ventures in Iraq and elsewhere, going as they do against the feelings in his own party as well as the country at large, are impossible to understand without allowing for this faith. Blair was a conviction politician as much as any religiously-inspired American president. As he famously remarked, I only know what I believe. But the greater issue has to do with the stark contrast between a religious America and a secular Europe. It was once the fashion, among sociologists at least, to spend much ingenuity and energy explaining American exceptionalism in this regard. The master trend of modernity was declared to be secularization, as analyzed by the great nineteenth-century sociologists, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. The fact that 40 per cent of Americans said that they attended church at least once a week, and that the vast majority believed in the efcacy of prayer, in heaven and hell, and sundry other traditional beliefs, seemed to demand special explanation. It contrasted with what was taken to be the typical pattern among Europeans, of low church attendance and a declining belief in traditional religion in most of its aspects. More recently the debate has shifted signicantly. The worldwide resurgence of religion, the fact that large swathes of the world have not given up on religion and show few signs of doing so, have turned the spotlight back onto Europe. It is European secularism that now seems exceptional. It is Europe that demands explanation, not America. America seems rather representative of the general trend towards the persistence and even revival of religion; why is Europe different? (Davie, 2002). In fact, as recent research and re-thinking are revealing, Europe is not so very different after all. It can be made to seem so only by a highly selective concentration on a number of countries the Scandinavian ones especially, and to some extent Britain and the Low Countries hardly core European countries, at least as Habermas and Derrida understand this. These are, in other words, mainly the historically Protestant countries, and especially those where Church Establishments or state churches still exist. A rough rule is that secularization in the sense of low participation in formal institutions of religion correlates with an Established Church. Even here though what one commonly nds is belief without belonging, the widespread persistence of fairly traditional religious beliefs without formal church membership.10 Elsewhere in Europe there is not just belief but also a considerable extent of belonging. Surveying various indices of religious identity such as church attendance, participation in religiously-informed rites of passage such a baptisms,

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weddings and burials Colin Crouch (1999) observes that the persistence of Christianity is remarkable. He shows this to be true at least where beliefs are concerned even of historically Protestant countries, but particularly true of historically Catholic countries such as Ireland, Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and especially so of certain Eastern European countries such as Poland. In Greece Orthodoxy retains its strong hold as a source of identity, as it does in Romania. In Eastern Europe Protestant Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion, as it is in many other parts of the world. Crouchs conclusion for Western Europe is unequivocal: The great majority of people in all but two European nation states and the majority in the remaining two (the Netherlands and the UK) clearly afrm some kind of religious identity as part of their sense of who they are in relation to the mass of general humanity(Crouch, 1999: 273, 278). Add the return of religion to several areas of formerly communist Eastern and south-eastern Europe, and Europe hardly sounds like a secular continent, as often claimed.11 We have been talking so far of the fate of Christianity in Europe. What of Islam, Europes second religion? With Muslims now making up between 510 per cent of many major European countries, the role of religion in Europes future is bound to be intensied, if only in response to an increasingly heightened religious consciousness among Muslims themselves. Some highly publicized events the assassination of the Dutch lm-maker Theo van Gogh by a fanatical Muslim in 2002, the headscarf affair and the riots among Muslim youth in France in 2005, the Danish cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad in 2005, the bomb attacks on the London Underground and buses in the summer of 2005 by native British Muslims suggest that the future will be one of more, not less, religious conict in Europe. The possible accession of Turkey, with the resurgence of Islam there, to the European Union will of course strengthen this possibility, despite Turkeys ofcially secular state and society. Whether this leads to a re-emphasis on Christian Europe, and a resulting clash of civilizations, remains to be seen. But whatever the outcome secularism is likely to be even more clearly under siege.12 If Europe is not as secular as frequently claimed, is America as religious as is also commonly asserted? Ever since Will Herbergs brilliant Protestant, Catholic, Jew, there has been a vigorous debate about the meaning and signicance of religion in America. For Herberg, to be religious was, quite simply, to be American, to follow the American Way of Life. As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-held religious faith and I dont care what it is (in Herberg, 1960: 84). The national valuesystem in America, for historical reasons, had enshrined religion as a fundamental aspect of national identity. All Americans, including and especially perhaps newcomers, were expected to have a religion, of whatever sort. Not to be religious was to be un-American. What one did with that religion, how exactly it might affect ones attitude and behaviour, was another matter, not perhaps to be too closely investigated. While, as many have shown, the formal separation of church and state in America by no means led to secularization in the full sense quite

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the opposite, in fact it is still important to recognize its fundamental importance in American public life. The American Constitution, a product of the secular Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, is every bit as much a sacred document in America as the scriptures of the various religions. No one questions the high degree of formal religiosity in America, in terms of church membership and active participation in religious organizations. Nor that Americans overwhelmingly subscribe to many traditional religious beliefs, such as belief in the afterlife. The difculty is knowing the extent to which this degree of formal religious commitment fundamentally affects the lives of the majority of the population of what is after all the most capitalistic, consumerist, and materialistic society in the world. We know for instance that far fewer Americans actually attend church ( 25 per cent) than say that they do (40 per cent). We also know that there is a small but increasing number of non-believers in America (Norris and Inglehart, 2006: 80). None of this gainsays the importance of religion generally in American life. But it does suggest that we should be cautious about exaggerating the difference in this respect between Europe and America. Europe is not as secular, and America is not as religious, as many Europeans and many Americans both say. What of socialism, and Europes alleged propensity for it as against Americas rooted antagonism towards it? It seems to be too quickly forgotten that it was Britains Margaret Thatcher that gave the lead to the anti-state movement in the West in the 1980s, and that Thatcherism had a vigorous following on the European continent not least in Eastern Europe, where she was venerated as a champion of individual freedom and free markets as against bureaucratic socialism. The fact that Thatcherism is often coupled with Reaganism suggests that the contrast here too between Europe and America can be overdone. Liberal, laissez-faire Thatcherism is as much part of the European inheritance, and draws on as respectable a pedigree, as socialism or social democracy. Eric Foner (1984) some years ago wrote a sparkling essay on the old Sombart question, why is there no socialism in the United States? Foner pointed out as did Mike Davis (1986) that there had in fact been quite a lot of socialism in America, especially in the period before the First World War, and it was that in part that had led both Marx and Engels to pin considerable hopes for a socialist transformation quite possibly by peaceful means on the United States. More tellingly, Foner also argued that in the most recent decades, far from a growing divide, there had been a considerable convergence of politics and ideologies in Europe and America. Partly this was owing to the spread of Thatcherite neo-liberalism and a retreat from the welfare state. But there was also the phenomenon of the decline of trade unionism, and a signicant deradicalization of Labour and Social Democratic parties as they struggled to adapt to a post-industrial economy of services and information. The future therefore looked, in Europe as much as America, increasingly American (see also Lipset and Marks, 2002). Sombarts original question, therefore, perhaps placed the emphasis in the wrong place. Not why no socialism in the USA?, but, why socialism in Europe?

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What was it that allowed socialist and social-democratic parties and movements in Europe to persist longer than in America (where they had also once been strong), to the point where for a time they were able to share power with liberals and conservatives? Socialist parties never, after all, brought in socialism in any major European country, except perhaps during some short-lived revolutions in 191819 in Central Europe (the communist countries of Eastern Europe were Soviet client states). At best they managed to inject an element of welfare in state policy and a certain degree of public ownership and control in the economy. But, in its essential form, Europe remained as capitalist as America. What was happening now, argued Foner, was that Europe was nally falling in line with what had been the dominant liberal currents all along, a pattern best exemplied by America. With the retreat of social democracy, Europe was once more showing that it was, as much as America, no more than a variant of the basic form of liberal capitalist democracy. The stress by Habermas, Derrida, Vattimo and others on Europes distinctive socialist inheritance shows once more how selective their vision of Europe is, and how much dependent on occluding important parts of the European picture. As several contributors to the debate pointed out, the core Europe dened by Habermas and Derrida is basically a Franco-German affair.13 This has particular relevance to the idea that socialism, and in general a positive attitude to the state as a constructive and enabling force, is a distinctive and central European value. What place does that allow, for instance, for the British school of political economy, and British liberalism, within the European tradition? Is Britain not part of Europe? What of Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer? Their individualism, and general distrust of the state as meddlesome and obstructive, found a wide and receptive audience on the European continent throughout the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek found inspiration in British liberal thought for elaborating a whole inuential philosophy of the state and economy which, ttingly, became in its turn an inspiration for the neo-liberal revival under Margaret Thatcher and the Thatcherites. The Roman inheritance in continental Europe, especially as it entered European systems of law, does indeed mark an important division between some European countries and America, with its tradition of Common Law. That does allow for a far greater role for the state, and the public authority generally, in several parts of Europe as compared with America.14 But by the same token it also of course marks a division between continental Europe and Britain, from whence America derived its Common Law. It has been customary in the past, it is true, for the British or at least the English to distinguish themselves from Europe, a compliment only too readily repaid by many Europeans (see Kumar, 2003). But with Britain now rmly part of the European Union that custom seems more than usually quaint. At any rate, what needs to be emphasized more is the variety of European traditions, with contributions from many different sections of Europe, including Britain. Statism and anti-statism are both part of the European inheritance. To privilege one over the other, in the interests of

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seeking to dene a core, is to abridge and truncate a complex inheritance.15 Statist or socialist Europe cannot be simply counterpoised to an anti-statist, anti-socialist, America.16 Which Europe? There is a certain complacency, a certain self-congratulatory air, about Habermass and Derridas rendition of Europe, a complacency shared by certain other contributors to the debate, such as Umberto Eco. This comes out of course particularly in the contrast with America. In this view even Europes war-torn past can become a source of European superiority. Eco notes with some satisfaction that this, together with other features of Europes turbulent past, has inured Europeans to shocks and surprises. We have all experienced war in our own land, and the state of permanent danger. I dare say that, if two airplanes had crashed into Notre Dame or Big Ben, the reaction would obviously have been one of fear, pain, indignation, but it would not have had the shocked tone and the depression syndrome counterbalanced by the instinct to take immediate, unavoidable action that gripped the Americans, who were hit for the rst time in their own land (2005: 16). Habermas and Derrida are right to say that identity is to some extent a matter of choice. In our conceptions of ourselves, we all choose the values that bolster our self-esteem. But it would be a matter of concern if we were unaware of other parts of our character, the things that perhaps we struggle to keep down but know we must acknowledge if we are to overcome them. It is all very well to distinguish between the legacy we appropriate, and the one we want to refuse (2005: 10). But unless we face fully and acknowledge the legacy we want to refuse, we will not convince anyone of the truth or reality of our self-conception. As Marx intimated, identities are not simply chosen, they are also inherited. In his powerful account of twentieth-century European history, Dark Continent, Mark Mazower suggests that, compared with liberal democracy or communism the other competing ideologies in Europe it was Fascism that was the most Eurocentric of all the ideologies. A creed which was both anti-American and anti-Bolshevik at least had the virtue of clarity. He sees Nazism as in some ways the culmination of modern European history.
A self-belief rooted in Christianity, capitalism, the Enlightenment and massive technological superiority encouraged Europeans to see themselves over a long period as a civilizational model for the globe. Their trust in Europes world mission was already evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reached its apogee in the era of imperialism. Hitler was in many ways its culminating gure and through the Nazi New Order came closer to its realization than anyone else. (Mazower, 1998: xiv, 405)17

Mazowers view of the European legacy is clearly very different from Habermass and Derridas. It emphasizes what they might see as the dark side of Europe. It is ironic though that Habermas in particular, generally seen as the heir of the great Frankfurt School of the 1930s, should be so casual or dismissive of this

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view. It was after all the frequently-stated view of his distinguished mentors Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer that the acclaimed European Enlightenment, the glory and quintessence of Europe for many, was the source of modern totalitarianism (the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity). Taking his inspiration from Max Weber rather than the Frankfurt School, Zygmunt Bauman similarly developed this conception in the direction of claiming that European modernity was the necessary basis and driving force of the Holocaust.18 And there has been a whole school of post-colonial scholars who emphasize Europes destructive legacy, its devastating impact on large parts of the world through its imperialism, nationalism and racism (see, e.g., Said, 1994; Ashcroft, et al. 1995). The darker visions of Europes history should not be taken, in their turn, as necessarily the only or even the dominant narratives. They are as one-sided as Habermass and Derridas, or any other that suppresses crucial episodes of European experience and inuence. This one-sidedness can indeed be a source of strength, in conveying with peculiar power some important aspect of the European inheritance, especially if that has been ignored or neglected in more widelydiffused accounts. Selectivity is a necessary feature of any presentation that aims to go beyond the bland and boring. To that extent no one can blame Habermas and Derrida for attempting to excavate and present what to them seem the most distinctive elements of the European contribution. That this also evidently squares with their own temperament and political sympathies is also only to be expected; the same can be said of many other attempts to dene the European tradition, even and perhaps especially those that see it as baleful. The danger comes when the necessary selectivity and suppression in these accounts distort the reality to such an extent as to provoke disbelief and rejection, rather than reasoned and constructive criticism. That is the main problem with Habermass and Derridas view of Europe. In pitching it directly and specically against America, they have emphasized aspects of European experience that not only do not separate Europe at all clearly from America but also give a seriously misleading account of Europe itself, its past and present. The result is doubly offensive, to Americans as well as many Europeans. Jan Ross accuses Habermas and Derrida of wishing to promote a Euro-nationalism akin to earlier European nationalisms and likely to prove just as destructive (2005: 69). Gerd Langguth similarly remarks that Habermass theses sound very much like an attempt to initiate the birth of a European nationalism fueled by a basic resentment of America (2005: 162). It was left to one of the American contributors to the debate, Iris Marion Young, to point to the larger danger represented by Habermass and Derridas approach. She did so by invoking a cosmopolitan perspective one that surely ought to have appealed to that celebrated Weltbrger, Jrgen Habermas. Accepting that a united and different stance from Europe might temper the arrogance of American foreign policy, she nevertheless warned that from the point of view of the rest of the world, and especially from the point of view of the states and people in the global South, the philosophers appeal may look more like a

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re-centering of Europe than the invocation of an inclusive global democracy. . . . Surely invoking a European identity inhibits tolerance within and solidarity with those far away. Echoing the fears of Ross and Langguth, Young remarked that I fear that Habermas may reinscribe the logic of the nation-state for Europe, rather than transcend it (2005: 153, 156).19 Young referred specically to the anti-war demonstrations on 15 February 2003, the very ones that had sparked Habermass and Derridas manifesto on behalf of Europe. Habermas and Derrida considered that these demonstrations may well, in hindsight, go down in history as a sign of the birth of a European public sphere (2005: 4). But as Young pointed out, anti-war demonstrations had not occurred only in London and Rome, Madrid and Barcelona, Berlin and Paris, to quote Habermass and Derridas chosen examples. On the contrary, they had been worldwide.
On the same weekend there were mass demonstrations on every other continent as well in Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, Vancouver, Toronto, Mexico City, Tegucigalpa, So Paulo, Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Istanbul, Warsaw, Moscow, and hundreds of other cities, including many in the US. According to people with whom I have spoken, the worldwide coordination of these demonstrations was planned at the third meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2003. The worldwide coordination of these demonstrations may thus signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the Southern Hemisphere. (2005: 154)

Europeans at different times, especially since the Second World War and the evident loss of European power in the world, have tended to retreat into Fortress Europe. They have set themselves up now against the Americans (the inheritors of their global power), now the Turks (continuing the anti-Christian threat previously offered by the Ottomans), now the East Europeans (as kidnapped members of the former European family who are now irremediably corrupted by their foreign sojourn). Some of them have occasionally wished to narrow the core even further, excluding especially the Anglo-Saxons with their over-close ties to America and their generally overseas rather than continental interests. And of course there has always been, ever since the eighteenth century at least, Russia, that half-European, half-Asiatic power that at various times looked likely to impose its alien character on the whole of Europe (see Kumar, 2001). Habermas and Derrida, for all their sophistication, seem to be repeating this self-defeating pattern.20 They look inwards when they should be looking outwards. They may not like what the Americans are doing, or what they think America stands for, and in this they may be joined by many Europeans. But the response to this cannot be an assertion of a narrowly-conceived European identity, least of all one conceived against a country like America that shares with Europe so much of the basic Western inheritance. This will, as many commentators have pointed out, divide rather than unite Europe, and in doing so it will weaken its voice in the world. Europe has undoubted strengths, as compared with many, perhaps most, regions of the world. Its globalizing ventures since the fteenth century, however complex and ambivalent their impact, have given it unique

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experience of other countries and other cultures. It is this experience that it needs to draw on. It is this that might truly bring forth that reexive distance from themselves that Habermas and Derrida hope that Europeans have acquired. It is this that could be Europes contribution to the cosmopolitan project that, in the spirit of Kant, both Habermas and Derrida wish to dedicate themselves to but which their attachment to the idea of a core Europe so much undermines. Notes
1 The original article by Habermas annd Derrida, together with the various responses, have been translated and published as a book, Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe? Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, edited by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey (2005). Derrida was too ill at the time he died shortly afterwards to play his part in the writing of the text of the jointly published article, but he contributed a preface in which he rmly associated himself with its views. The original group of authors included one American, Richard Rorty (whose contribution appeared in the Suddeutsche Zeitung). Later other Americans, such as Susan Sontag and Iris Marion Young, joined in the debate. 2 Habermas and Derrida (2005:8). All subsequent references in the text are to this version. All the emphases are the authors. It should be noted that this is the title of the article as it appeared in an English translation in the journal Constellations. As it appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung the title was: Unsere Erneuerung. Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas. For a different kind of commentary on this article, see Levy and Sznaider (2007). 3 See the Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, submitted to the President of the European Council in Rome, 18 July 2003, European Convention on the Future of Europe, Brussels, July 2003. The European Convention, presided over by former French president Valry Giscard dEstaing, was set up in December 2001, and the heated debates within it were publicly aired. The Preamble, setting out common European values, proved particularly contentious. An initial reference to Europes Christian heritage was withdrawn, as were references to Greco-Roman civilization and the Enlightenment. The nal form referred simply to drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, and gave special prominence to humanism as the source of the values of equality of persons, freedom, respect for reason (Preamble, p. 3). This represented a victory for the French view, especially over those of the new East European members of the European Union, who urged the need to include a reference to the Christian roots of Europe. See Bernstein (2003); Sciolino (2004). In referenda in France and the Netherlands, the Draft Constitution was rejected and, despite being endorsed by the parliaments of several other Union countries, was withdrawn by the European Commission for further consideration. 4 The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, quoted by Fernando Savater (2005: 43). 5 For an interesting discussion of Habermass views on Europe and its future, see Turner (2004). For Derrida, see Derrida (2002). And for further thoughts on Europe from the two authors, see Borradori (2003). 6 See, e.g., Hutton (2002); Scheider (2004). For the long history of one particular case of European anti-Americanism, see Roger (2005). A more recent expression, from the same country, is Todd (2003). For an attack on the anti-Americanism of his

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fellow countrymen, and of Europeans in general, see Revel (2003). In a different vein, in the form of a passionate plea for European unity against the threat of American domination of the world, see Simmel ([1915] 2005). Of course some Americans too have come to emphasize the Europe-America divide, at least in recent times. See, e.g. Kagan (2003). Nor, unlike in Kagans account, does the advantage have to be seen to lie with America: see fellow-American Jeremey Rifkins The European Dream (2005). For the recent varieties of anti-Americanism, both in America and abroad, see Hollander (1992) and Markovits (2007). A similar view was expressed by Timothy Garton Ash and Ralf Dahrendorf (2005: 143); and Gerd Langguth: A European identity based primarily on the negation of the American political model will never be feasible (2005: 163). For a spirited re-statement of the distinctiveness of the Western experience, and its contrast with the rest of the world, see Landes (1999). On the dangers of treating Europe, or the West more generally, in isolation from larger global developments, both past and present, see Chakrabarty (2000); Delanty and Rumford (2005). The usual stress in these accounts is on the interactions between Asia and Europe, but see also Thornton (1998). See Umberto Ecos remark that Europeans share a concept of welfare achieved through trade-union struggles as opposed to the homeostasis of the individualistic ethics of success (2005: 16). See Davie (1996, 2000, 2006). See also, on the secularizing effect of Established Churches, Martin (1978); Casanova (1994). For an assessment that, taking into account the former communist countries of Eastern Europe as well, Europe is nevertheless with reference to both God and science the sceptical continent, see Therborn (1995: 2728). But he notes the increasing importance of religion in Eastern European and the Balkans, as well the signicance of the increased presence of Islam in Europe. It is interesting that, as noted above, it was the new Eastern European members of the European Union who pressed most strongly for the retention of a reference to Christianity as the basis of European civilization in the Preamble to the draft European Constitution. For the growth of Protestant Pentecostalism in Eastern Europe, see Norris and Inglehart (2004). For some helpful thoughts on this, see Hunter (2002); AlSayyad and Castells (2002); Nielsen (2004); Delanty and Rumford (2005: 489). See especially the contributions by Jurgen Kaube, Jan Ross, Joachim Starbatty, Johannes Willms, Pter Esterhzy, and Adam Krzeminski, in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe. Not surprisingly, it was writers from Eastern Europe who most complained about the exclusion of Eastern Europe, but others were equally concerned at the narrowness of Habermass and Derridas concept of Europe. As Andrei Markovits commented: To be sure, the Habermas initiative conspicuously excluded intellectuals from Britain, the Scandinavian and Low Countries, and especially Eastern Europe. Indeed, even a cursory reading of the Habermas-Derrida text reveals how much its putatively European vision consists largely of advocating a Franco-German core that is to lead Europe away from its tutelage to the United States. Habermas speaks openly about an avant-garde (avantgardistisches) core Europe. Apart from the texts dismissal of other options and its disregard for East Europeans and their vedecades long experience under Communist rule, it is remarkable how Germancentered the document is, particularly given its authors bona des as a genuine Weltbrger (world citizen) (Markovits 2005: 205). In effect what many were saying

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was that Habermas and Derrida were simply echoing US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfelds attempt to drive a wedge within Europe by distinguishing between old Europe (bad) and new Europe (good) with the difference of course that Habermas and Derrida reverse the values attached to the different parts. The anti-statist tradition in America can also be exaggerated, as it often is for their separate purposes by both Europeans and Americans. The recent work by American historians on the growth of the state (central and local) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has yet to be codied in a compelling way there is nothing like A.V. Diceys great work on the subject for Britain but there is a suggestive account in Dawley (1991). Following the New Deal of the 1930s, remarks Dawley, which consolidated the work of the Progressive era (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), state capitalism and the welfare state were here to stay (1991: 413). See also McKay (1994: 2045). The complexity of that inheritance is well illustrated by the comment of the Hungarian writer Pter Esterhzy: During the time of the dictatorship we learned that the State is an enemy that must be deceived at every opportunity. And yet we also expect it to solve all our problems (2005: 75). Harold Jamess response to Habermas and Derrida was particularly scathing on this point. A Europe that thinks of itself as existing because it offers a contrast to the values of the United States will be a Europe that destroys the values on which modern society is based, and instead returns to that anti-capitalist longing (Sehnsucht) that did so much damage in the past not only of Europe, but of the world (2005: 63). Susan Sontag also reminds us that historically, the most virulent anti-American rhetoric ever heard in Europe consisting essentially in the charge that Americans are barbarians came not from the so-called left but from the extreme right. Both Hitler and Franco repeatedly inveighed against an America (and a world Jewry) engaged in polluting European civilization with its base, business values (2005: 212). Horkheimer and Adorno (2002[1944]); Bauman (1989). It should be remembered of course that Horkheimer and Adornos concept of enlightenment is wider than the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, stretching for them right back to the origins of Western rationalism in Greek thought. For a similar indictment of the European inheritance, also beginning with the Greeks, see Meier (2005). A similar perspective, and a similar critique of Europe-centred projects, informs Delanty and Rumford (2005). See also the Editors Introduction by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey (2005: esp. xxiiixxiv). To be fair to them Habermas and Derrida are aware of the danger of this, and go out of their way to stress their internationalist purposes. Taking a leading role does not mean excluding. The avantgardist core of Europe must not wall itself off into a new Small Europe. It must as it has so often be the locomotive . . . At the international level and in the framework of the UN, Europe has to throw its weight on the scales to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States (2005: 6). The problem is that the way Habermas and Detrrida structure their appeal, and the glaring omissions in their presentation of Europe, have the effect of evoking precisely the Small Europe that they are so anxious to avoid.

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Acknowledgements
This article is a much expanded version of my comments as a panellist discussing the collection Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe, at the meeting of the Conference of Europeanists, Chicago, 30 March2 April 2006. I should like to thank my fellow panelists Volker Heins, Michle Lamont, Andrei Markovits, and John Torpey for their helpful contributions. Thanks also to Daniel Levy for the invitation to participate.

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Krishan Kumar is University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA. He previously taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Among his recent publications are 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and (coedited with Gerard Delanty), The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism (Sage, 2006). Address: Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, PO Box 400766, Charlottesville, VA 229044766, USA. [email:kk2d@virginia.edu]

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