♦
THE TITLE OF this chapter implies that our planet is not at the moment hospitable to Europe. It also suggests, obliquely, that we, the Europeans, experience the lack of such hospitality as a problem—that is, as a deviation from what could be legitimately expected, an abnormality that needs to be put right again. And I say “again” since, presumably, we used to be made to feel at home on the planet. Wherever and whenever we went, we would have expected hospitality to be extended to us and our daring pursuits as our birthright; and we would have assumed that the homey feeling would continue as part of the natural order of things. This “hospitality” came to us so naturally that it hardly ever occurred to us to view it as a “problem” calling for special attention. As Martin Heidegger would have put it, it remained in the gray and misty area of zuhanden—and so long as things worked as they were expected to, there was no occasion to move it into the sphere of vorhanden—into the focus of attention, into the universe of “troubles” and “tasks.”1
In 1784, Immanuel Kant shared with his contemporaries a few thoughts conceived in his tranquil, off-the-beaten-track seclusion in Königsberg. They were, in his own rendering, ideas of “universal history,” considered from the point of view of “worldwide citizenship.” Kant noted that the planet we inhabit is a sphere—and he thought through the consequences of that admittedly trivial observation: that we all stay and move about on the surface of that sphere, have nowhere else to go, and hence are bound to live forever in each other’s neighborhood and company. Moving on a spherical surface, we cannot but shorten our distance on one side as we try to stretch it on the other. All efforts to lengthen a distance can only be ultimately self-defeating. And so, Kant mused, citizenship-style unification of the human species is the destination that Nature itself has chosen for us—the ultimate horizon of our universal history. Prompted and guided by reason and our interest in self-preservation, we are bound to pursue that horizon and (in the fullness of time) to reach it. Sooner or later, Kant warned, there will be no empty space left into which those of us who have found the already populated places too cramped—or too inconvenient, awkward, and uncomfortable—can venture. And so Nature commands us to view hospitality as the supreme precept, which we all in equal measure will have to embrace sooner or later—as we must seek an end and a resolution to the long chain of trials and errors, the catastrophes our errors have caused, and the ruin left in the wake of those catastrophes.
But unlike other books by the same author, this little book on the peaceful coexistence of humankind, on the imminent age of “citizenship of the world” and worldwide hospitality, gathered dust for two centuries in academic libraries. It was read only (if at all) by a few dedicated archivists of ideas, and read by them mostly as a historical curiosity, a freak product of an uncharacteristically lighthearted moment in the great philosopher’s life of exemplary self-discipline and scholarly pedantry. Only quite recently, after two centuries of exile in the footnotes and bibliographies of scholarly monographs, did it suddenly burst into the very center of contemporary historiography. These days, it would be a tall order to find a learned study of the challenges of the current stage of planetary history that does not quote Kant’s little book as a supreme authority and source of inspiration. As Jacques Derrida, for instance, observed, Kant’s time-honored insights would easily expose present buzzwords like “culture of hospitality” or “ethics of hospitality” as mere pleonasms: “L’hospitalité, c’est la culture même et ce n’est pas une éthique parmi d’autres . . . L’éthique est hospitalité.”2
Indeed, if ethics is a work of reason, as Kant wished it to be, then hospitality is—must be, or must sooner or later become—the first rule of human conduct. Strange turn of fortune for a little book? Heidegger, with his depiction of the tortuous journey from the universe of zuhanden to that of vorhanden, would have no difficulty in explaining the puzzling fatum of this particular libellae. Hospitality has been noted as a universal commandment since the moment it stopped going unnoticed because it was “always there” and became instead conspicuous through its sudden (discomforting and painful) absence.
Ryszard Kapuściński, arguably the most acute and insightful reporter and recorder of the turn-of-century state of our world, noted a most fateful, if surreptitious and subterranean, change in the mood of the planet.3 In the course of the past five centuries, Europe’s military and economic dominance tended to be topped with the belief that its unchallenged position made it both the reference point for evaluation, praise, or condemnation of all other forms of human life, past and present, and the supreme court where such assessments were authoritatively pronounced and made binding. It was enough just to be a European, says Kapuściński, to feel everywhere else like a boss and a ruler. Even a mediocre person of humble standing and low opinion in his native (but European!) country rose to the highest social position once landing in a Malaysia or a Zambia. This is no longer the case, though, as Kapuściński notes. The present time is marked by the ever more self-assured and outspoken self-awareness of peoples who, half a century ago, still genuflected to Europe and placed it on the altar of cargo cults, but who now exhibit a fastgrowing sense of their own value and an evident ambition to gain and retain an independent and weighty place in the new, increasingly polycentric and multicultural world. Once upon a time, remembers Kapuściński, everyone he met in distant lands asked him about life in Europe, but no one does it anymore: today the “natives” have their own tasks and problems awaiting their attention, and theirs alone. No one seems to wait impatiently for news from Europe. What indeed could happen in Europe that would make a difference to their lives? Things that truly matter may happen in any place; Europe is no longer the site of preference. “The European presence” is ever less visible, physically as much as spiritually.
And another profound change has taken place on the planet to make us Europeans feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and apprehensive. The wide world “out there,” at the other end of a long-distance flight from London, Paris, or Amsterdam, seldom if ever appears now to be a playground, a site for adventure—challenging and exciting but safe, with a happy ending certain and assured. Unless the flight in question is part of an all-inclusive holiday trip to a fashionable tourist resort, the places at the other end look more like a wilderness than a playground, teeming with unspoken and unspeakable dangers—the kind of “no-go,” “keep out and away” areas that the ancient Romans used to mark out on their world maps with hic sunt leones. This is quite a change, a shocking change, traumatic enough to put paid to European self-confidence, courage, and ardor.
Indeed, until quite recently (the older among us still remember those times) Europe was the center that made the rest of the planet a periphery. As Denis de Rougemont crisply put it, Europe discovered all the lands of Earth, but no one ever discovered Europe.4 Europe dominated all continents in succession but was never dominated by any, and it invented a civilization that the rest of the world tried to imitate, but the reverse process has never (thus far, at any rate) happened. I might add: European wars, and only those wars, have been world wars.
Until quite recently, one could still define Europe as de Rougemont suggested not that long ago, by its “globalizing function.” Europe was for most of the past few centuries a uniquely adventurous continent, unlike any other. Having been the first continent to enter the mode of life that it subsequently dubbed modern, Europe created locally, in Europe, problems that no one on earth had heard of before and no one had the slightest inkling how to resolve. Then Europe invented their resolution—but in a form unfit to be universalized and deployed by all those for whom the problems, originally exclusively European, would arrive later. Europe resolved the problems it produced internally (and so locally) by transforming other parts of the planet into sources of cheap energy or cheap minerals, inexpensive and docile labor, and, above all, into so many dumping grounds for its excessive and redundant products and excessive and redundant people—the products it could not use and people it could not employ. To put it in a nutshell, Europe invented a global solution to its locally produced problems—and, by doing so, forced all other humans to seek, desperately and in vain, local solutions to the globally produced problems.
All this is over now—and thus the shock and the trauma we feel, the anxiety and the wilting and fading of our confidence. It is over because global solutions to locally produced problems can be available only to a few inhabitants of the planet, and only so long as they enjoy superiority over all the rest, as the benefit of a power differential large enough to remain unchallenged (or at least not challenged effectively) and widely believed to be unchallengeable, and for that reason, one that offers an apparently credible, reliable, and reassuring prospect of a long and secure future. But Europe no longer enjoys such privilege and cannot seriously hope to recover what it lost.
Hence the abrupt loss of European self-confidence, and the sudden explosion of acute interest in a “new European identity” and in “redefining the role” of Europe in the planetary game in which the rules and the stakes have drastically changed and continue to change—and to change outside Europe’s control and with minimal, if any, European influence. Hence, also, the tide of neotribal sentiment swelling from Copenhagen to Rome and from Paris to Sofia, magnified and beefed up by deepening fears about “enemies at the gate” and “fifth columns,” and the resulting besieged-fortress spirit manifested in the fast-rising popularity of securely locked borders and firmly shut doors.
It has become common to blame all such worrying developments on Europe’s loss of economic and military domination as a result of the spectacular rise of the United States to the position of sole planetary superpower and the metropolis of the worldwide empire—and on the parallel dismantling of all Europe-centered empires and the loss of Europe’s past imperial standing as a whole.
All roads now lead to Washington, so it is widely believed and even more widely said. All loose threads are tied up there. Amid the planetary chaos, it is the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon that, among themselves, define the meaning of the new planetary order, design its shape, and manage, monitor, equip, and police its implementation. The West, as Jürgen Habermas proclaimed, is divided, with Europe assigned thus far the role of a sometimes sympathetic, some other times resentful, but most of the time lukewarm, uninvolved, and/or ignored bystander.5 More often than not, when the chances that a new worldwide order will emerge out of the present planetary chaos are pondered, thoughts focus on the intentions and actions of the United States of America, while the planet itself figures as the site of the American Empire in-the-making or, at best, as a most-favored province granted a “special relationship” with the metropole.
When the role of Europe in the emergent empire is contemplated, most efforts go into constructing and comparing various scenarios that the close though occasionally stormy European-American relations may follow: roles veering from those of an obedient courtier or witty, perspicacious, and clever court jester all the way to those of the dauphin’s sage mentor or a wise, experienced, and respected member of a brain trust or advisory board; nowhere, however, along the spectrum of scenarios is the location of the court, or the incumbency of the highest office, treated as a moot or contentious point.
But is indeed the United States the “World Empire” in the sense with which Europe endowed the concept of empire through its own past practices, and which Europe bequeathed to the planet’s residents through its own collective memory? There are many reasons to doubt that it is, and the reasons currently seem to multiply at an almost exponential rate. Quoting a recent summary by Immanuel Wallerstein, Morris Berman suggests that “Europe and Asia see [the U.S.] as much less important on the international scene, the dollar is weaker, nuclear proliferation is probably unstoppable, the U.S. military is stretched to the limit, and our [American] national and trade deficit is enormous. Our days of hegemony, and probably even leadership, would thus seem to be over.”6 In conclusion, Berman ventures so far as to insist that, rather than of the past empires in their heyday, the present plight of the “American World Empire” is reminiscent of “late-empire Rome and the subsequent slide into the Dark Ages” (as the third century A.D. was marked by almost continuous warfare, the collapse of the currency, and the spectacular rise of the military to political power, followed by the fourth century’s repressive reactions, leading to chaos and anxiety and the fifth-century collapse).
There is little if any doubt that in terms of sheer expenditure on high-tech military equipment and the stockpiles of all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, the United States has no equal, and that no single state or combination of states can realistically contemplate matching the U.S. military power in the foreseeable future. (The United States spends annually on armaments a sum equal to the joint military expenditures of the twenty-five states next in rank.) It is also true, however, that the “U.S. military is stretched to its limits,” without coming anywhere nearer to preventing new emergencies and resolving the problems lingering after unsuccessful efforts to respond adequately to the past ones. Perhaps even more important is the ever more obvious inadequacy of the American military machine for the kinds of tasks posed by the new shape of conflict, violence, and warfare.
Before sending U.S. troops to Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the “war will be won when Americans feel secure again.”7 But sending troops to Iraq pushed the mood of insecurity, in America and elsewhere, to new heights. Far from shrinking, the spaces of lawlessness, the highly effective training grounds for global terrorism, stretched to unheard-of dimensions. Five years have passed since Rumsfeld’s decision, and terrorism has been gathering force—extensively and intensively—year by year. Terrorist outrages have been recorded in Tunisia, Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Istanbul, Casablanca, Jakarta, Madrid, Sharm el-Sheikh, and London; altogether, according to the U.S. State Department, there were 651 “significant terrorist attacks” in 2004 alone—198 of those, nine times more than a year before (not counting daily attacks on U.S. troops), in Iraq, to which the troops had been sent with the explicit order to put an end to the terrorist threat. In May 2005 there were 90 suicide bombings just in Baghdad; since then, massive atrocities, in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, have gathered in frequency and force and become the daily routine. Iraq, as some observers aver, has become a grotesque advertisement for the power and efficacy of terror—and for the impotence and inefficiency of the alleged World Empire’s “war on terror.”
This is not a matter of tactical blunders committed by inept generals. Given the nature of contemporary terrorism, and above all the “negatively globalized” setting in which it operates, the very notion of the war on terrorism is all but a contradictio in adiecto.
Modern weapons, conceived and developed in the era of territorial invasions and conquests, are singularly unfit to locate, strike, and destroy the extraterritorial, endemically elusive, and eminently mobile targets, tiny squads or just single men or women traveling lightly, armed with weapons that are easy to hide. While difficult to pick out when on their way to commit another atrocity, such would-be “targets” perish on the site of the outrage or disappear from it as rapidly and inconspicuously as they arrived, leaving behind few if any traces.
To deploy Paul Virilio’s apt terms, we have now passed (an event only belatedly noted and grudgingly admitted by the military) from the times of “siege warfare” to those of “wars of movement.”8 Given the nature of the modern weapons at the disposal of the military, its responses to terrorist acts must appear awkward, clumsy, and fuzzy, spilling over a much wider area than the one affected by the terrorist outrage, and causing yet more numerous “collateral casualties,” greater volumes of “collateral damage,” and so also more terror, disruption, and destabilization than the terrorists could possibly produce on their own—as well as provoking a further leap in the volume of accumulated grievance, hatred, and pent-up fury and stretching yet further the ranks of potential recruits to the terrorist cause. We may surmise that this circumstance is an integral part of the terrorists’ design and the principal source of their strength, which exceeds many times the power of their numbers and arms.
Unlike their declared enemies, the terrorists need not feel constrained by the limits of the forces they themselves muster and directly command. When working out their strategic designs and tactical plans, they may include among their assets the probable reactions of the “enemy,” as these are certain to magnify considerably the intended impact of their own atrocities. If the declared (immediate) purpose of the terrorists is to spread terror among the enemy population, then the target population’s army and police forces, with the whole-hearted cooperation of the mass media, will certainly see to it that this purpose is achieved far beyond the degree to which the terrorists themselves would be capable of carrying out. And if the terrorists’ long-term intention is to destroy human freedoms in liberal democracies and to “close” open societies, they may count again on the immense capacities commanded by the governments of the “enemy countries.” As journalist Ted Koppel pointed out in his trenchant analysis of the impact in the United States of global terrorism, the present American administration uses the images of the terrorist iniquity
to justify a new worldview, within which even associating with someone who belongs to an organization on the United States’ terrorist list justifies persecution here at home. This practice falls into the category of what Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty calls “preventive prosecution” . . . Faced with the possible convergence between terrorism and a weapon of mass destruction, the argument goes, the technicality of waiting for a crime to be committed before it can be punished must give way to preemption.9
As a result, Americans “are advised to adjust to the notion of warrantless wiretaps at home, unaccountable C.I.A. prisons overseas and the rendition of suspects to nations that feature prominently on the State Department list of human rights abuses.” Koppel warns that “even liberties voluntarily forfeited are not easily retrieved. All the more so for those that are removed surreptitiously.” Indeed, a few packets of explosives and a few desperadoes eager to sacrifice their lives “for the cause” can go a long way—much, much further than the terrorists themselves could dream of going with the resources they themselves can procure, command, and administer.
Terrorist forces hardly budge under the answering military blows. On the contrary, it is precisely from the clumsiness and the extravagant and wasteful prodigality of their adversary’s efforts that they draw, replenish, and magnify their own strength. A dozen or so ready-to-kill Islamic plotters proved to be enough to create the atmosphere of a besieged fortress in large, affluent, and resourceful countries and to raise waves of “generalized insecurity.”
Insecure people tend to seek feverishly to unload their gathering anxiety on a fit target, and to restore their lost self-confidence by easing the frightening and humiliating helplessness they feel. The besieged fortresses that multiethnic and multicultural cities are now becoming are shared by the terrorists and their victims. Each side adds to the fear, passion, fervor and obduracy of the other. Each side confirms the worst fears of the other and adds substance to its prejudices and hatreds. Between themselves, locked in a sort of the liquid-modern rendition of the danse macabre, the two sides won’t allow the phantom of siege ever to rest.
In all parts of the planet, the soil for the seeds of terrorism is well prepared, and the traveling “masterminds” of terrorist outrages can reasonably hope to find some fertile plots wherever they stop. They don’t even need to design, build, and maintain a tight structure of command. There are no terrorist armies, only terrorist swarms, synchronized rather than coordinated, with little or no supervision and only ad hoc platoon commanders or corporals. More often than not, for a “task group” to be born apparently ab nihilo, it will suffice to set a properly spectacular example, which will then be obligingly and promptly disseminated and hammered into millions of homes by the constantly spectacle-hungry TV networks and through all the information highways on which messages can be sent moving. In the bizarre “war against terrorism” there are no front lines—only separate, widely dispersed, and eminently mobile battlefields; no regular troops, only civilians turned soldier for a day and soldiers on indefinite civilian leave. Terrorist “armies” are all home armies, needing no barracks, no rallies, and no parade grounds.
If there is a World Empire, it is confronted with a kind of adversary that can’t be caught in the nets it has or is able to weave or acquire. That empire may be armed to the teeth, but its teeth are much better fit for gnawing than for biting. By military means (and most certainly by military means alone) the war on terrorism can’t be won. Its continuation may only further expose the “soft underbelly” of the seemingly invincible superpower, with disastrous consequences for planetary cohabitation, not to mention the prospect of planetary peace of the kind dreamt of, more than two centuries ago, by Immanuel Kant.
The fact that the military might of the United States is stretched “to its limits” is also a principal reason, arguably the principal reason, that the economic resources of the metropolis are being stretched to the limit—those very resources that could conceivably be deployed in assuring genuine victory over global terrorism. It is the economic resources that could be used to cut terrorism off at its roots, through arresting and possibly reversing the current polarization of standards of living and life prospects, that most effective fertilizer in the terrorist-growing plantations.
Nowadays, America is perhaps deeper in debt than any other country in history. Paul Krugman, who points out that “last year America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets,” asks: “How did Americans manage to live so far beyond their means?” and answers: “By running up debts to Japan, China and Middle Eastern oil producers.”10 America is addicted to (and dependent on) imported money, as it is addicted to and dependent on imported oil. A budget deficit of 300 billion dollars was recently hailed by the White House because it was a few billion less than the previous year’s deficit. Imported money that sooner or later will need to be repaid is spent not on financing potentially profitable investments but on sustaining the consumer boom, and so the “feel-good factor” in the electorate, and on financing growing federal deficits—which are in turn regularly exacerbated (despite cuts in social provisions) by continuing tax cuts for the rich. Krugman calculates that “the dollar will eventually have to fall by 30 percent or more” and “both American consumers and the U.S. government will have to start living within their means”—and awakening from their current superpower or World Empire version of the American dream.
All that does not augur well for the prospects that the aspiring World Empire will acquit itself in the task of settlement-and-peace enforcement, which the empires of the past could neglect or fail in only at the cost of their decline and demise. It seems that the United States entered the stage of undivided world domination while already dangerously close to the exhaustion of its expansive potential. Pax Americana may stretch territorially well beyond the boundaries of Pax Romana, yet its life expectancy is hardly measured in centuries. Like everything else in our “negatively globalized,” liquid-modern world, the disassembling and self-destructive mechanisms built into every empire on record work faster now and need much less time to run their full cycle.
Starting the calculation of Europe’s tasks and missions from the axiom of America’s monopoly on world power and world policing is therefore patently and conspicuously wrong: the present challenge to Europe does not derive from the fact that “since we play at best a second fiddle, we can’t, and won’t be allowed, to do much to make a difference to the state of the planet.” It would be equally wrong, and very dangerous, to exculpate ourselves for not trying to make such a difference by invoking that false axiom, and thereby to placate our collective conscience so that the state of not-trying might continue until it is too late to try. The real challenge to Europe derives from the fast-accumulating evidence that the sole superpower of the planet fails abominably to lead the planet toward peaceful coexistence and away from imminent disaster. Indeed, there are ample reasons to suppose that this superpower may become a prime cause of disaster’s not being averted.
At all levels of human cohabitation, power holders tend to deploy power for rendering the habitat more congenial and supportive for the kind of power they hold; in other words, to create an environment in which the particular resource that is the main source of the power holders’ strength is assured the decisive, clinching role in crisis management and conflict resolution. The American superpower is no exception. Its strongest asset being military might, it naturally tends to redefine all planetary problems—whether economic in nature, social, or political—as problems of military threat and military confrontation, as problems amenable solely to military solutions and calling for no solutions other than military solutions. Reversing the memorable formula of Clausewitz, the United States views and treats politics as continuation of war by other means. As George Soros recently remarked, “the Cheney clique of American supremacists believe that international relations are relations of power, not law. In their view, international law merely ratifies what power has wrought, and they define power in terms of military might.” And then: “A fearful giant striking about wildly is a good definition of a bully.”11
As a result, poverty, inequality, deprivation, and all other urgent social problems yearning for global attention and remedy fall as collateral victims of endless and prospectless military expeditions. As successive armed interventions exacerbate the misery of a growing number of the world’s deprived populations, and as they further intensify the peoples’ already deep and bitter resentment of the callousness and arrogance with which their needs and ambitions are treated by the high and mighty of the planet, conflicts and antagonisms multiply, the chances for peaceful cohabitation become ever more remote, and the one-sided perception of the world as the site of armed confrontations between incompatible interests becomes a self-fulfilling vision.
Si vis pacem, para bellum is a contagious attitude particularly prone to globalization; it prompts the worldwide armament chase and threatens to turn every unsatisfied need for vindication and every case of suffering into a casus belli. To secure its domination while counting and relying on its sole undisputed advantage—military superiority—America needs to remake the rest of the world in its own image and so render it, so to speak, “hospitable” to its own preferred policies: to make the planet a place where economic, social, and political problems are tackled (and hoped to be resolved) with military means and military actions, while all other means and types of action are devalued and disabled. It is from here that the true challenge to Europe has arisen.
Europe can’t seriously contemplate matching the American military might, and so resisting the push toward militarization of the planet by playing the American game; neither can it hope to recover its past industrial domination, irretrievably lost in our increasingly polycentric world, now subjected in its entirety to the processes of economic modernization. It can, however, try—and should try—to make the planet hospitable to other values and other modes of existence than those represented and promoted by the American military superpower, to the values and modes that Europe, more than any other part of the world, is predisposed to offer the world, which more than anything else needs to design, to enter, and to follow the road leading to Kant’s allgemeine Vereinigung der Menschheit and perpetual peace.
Having admitted that “it is nonsense to suppose that Europe will rival the economy, military and technological might” of the United States and the emergent powerhouses (particularly those in Asia), George Steiner insists that Europe’s assignment “is one of the spirit and the intellect.” Writes Steiner: “The genius of Europe is what William Blake would have called ‘the holiness of the minute particular.’ It is that of linguistic, cultural, social diversity, of a prodigal mosaic which often makes a trivial distance, twenty kilometres apart, a division between worlds . . . Europe will indeed perish if it does not fight for its languages, local traditions and social autonomies. If it forgets that ‘God lies in the detail.’”12
Similar thoughts can be found in the literary legacy of Hans-Georg Gadamer.13 It is its variety, its richness bordering on profligacy, that Gadamer places at the top of the list of Europe’s unique merits; he sees the profusion of differences as the foremost among the treasures that Europe has preserved and can offer to the world. “To live with the Other, live as the Other’s Other, is the fundamental human task—on the most lowly and the most elevated levels alike . . . Hence perhaps the particular advantage of Europe, which could and had to learn the art of living with others.” In Europe, as nowhere else, the Other has been and is always close, in sight, and at a hand’s stretch; metaphorically or even literally, the Other is a next-door neighbor—and Europeans can but negotiate the terms of that neighborliness, despite the alterity and the differences that set them apart. The European setting, marked by “the multilingualism, the close neighborhood of the Other, and equal value accorded to the Other in a space tightly constrained,” could be seen as a school from which the rest of the world may well carry away crucial knowledge and skills that make the difference between survival and demise. To acquire and share the art of learning from one another is, in Gadamer’s view, “the task of Europe.” I would add: it is Europe’s mission, or more precisely, Europe’s fate waiting to be recast into destiny.
The importance of this task—and the importance of Europe’s determination to undertake it—is impossible to exaggerate, as “the decisive condition [for] solving vital problems of [the] modern world,” writes Gadamer, a truly sine qua non condition, is the friendship and “buoyant solidarity” that alone can secure “an orderly structure” of human cohabitation. In confronting the task, we need to look back for inspiration to our shared European heritage: for the ancient Greeks, the concept of “friend,” Gadamer reminds us, “articulated the totality of social life.”14 Friends tend to be mutually tolerant and sympathetic. Friends are able to be friendly with each other however they differ, and to be helpful to each other despite or rather because of their differences—and to be friendly and helpful without renouncing their uniqueness, while never allowing that uniqueness to set them apart from and against each other.
More recently, Lionel Jospin invested his hopes for a new importance for Europe in the world in its “nuanced approach to current realities.”15 Europe has learned, he said, the hard way, and at an enormous price paid in the currency of human suffering, “how to get past historical antagonisms and peacefully resolve conflicts” and how to bring together “a vast array of cultures” and to live with the prospect of permanent cultural diversity, no longer seen as only a temporary irritant. Let’s note that these are precisely the sorts of lessons that the rest of the world most badly needs.
When seen against the background of the conflict-ridden planet, Europe looks like a laboratory where the tools necessary for Kant’s universal unification of humanity keep being designed, and a workshop in which they keep being “tested in action,” though for the time being in the performance of less ambitious, smaller-scale jobs. The tools that are currently being put to the test in Europe serve above all the delicate operation (for some less sanguine observers, too delicate to have anything more than a sporting chance of success) of separating the bases of political legitimacy, of democratic procedure and the willingness to engage in a community-style sharing of assets, from the principle of national and territorial sovereignty with which they have been for most of modern history inextricably linked.
The budding European federation is now facing the task of repeating, on a grander (and therefore potentially planetary) scale, the feat accomplished by the nation-states of early modernity: the rejoining of power and politics, once closely interlinked, but which have since navigated (or drifted) in opposite directions. The road to implementing that task is as rocky now as it was then, at the start of the modern era and its nation- and state-building stage. As then, it is strewn with snares and encumbered with incalculable risks. Worst of all, this road is unmapped, and each successive step seems like a leap into the unknown.
Many observers doubt the wisdom of the endeavor and rate low the chances of its success. The skeptics don’t believe in the viability of a “postnational” democracy, or any democratic political entity above the level of the nation, insisting that allegiance to civic and political norms would not replace ethnocultural ties and that citizenship is unworkable on a purely “civilizational” (legal-political) basis without the assistance of “Eros” (the emotional dimension).16 They assume that the ethnocultural ties and Eros are uniquely and inextricably linked to the kind of the past- and destiny-sharing sentiment that went down in history under the name of “nationalism,” and believe that communal solidarity can set down roots and grow only inside this connection and cannot be rebuilt or established anew in any other way. The possibility that the nationalistic legitimation of state power was but a historically confined episode and but one of many alternative forms of the politics-power reunion, or that the modern blend of statehood and nationhood bore more symptoms of a marriage of convenience than of the verdict of providence or historical inevitability—or that the marriage itself was not a foregone conclusion and when arranged proved to be as stormy as most divorce proceedings tend to be—are thereby dismissed by the simple expedient of begging the question.
Jürgen Habermas, arguably the most consistent and authoritative spokesman for the opposition to that kind of skepticism, points out, however, that “a democratic order does not inherently need to be mentally rooted in ‘the nation’ as a pre-political community of shared destiny. The strength of the democratic constitutional state lies precisely in its ability to close the holes of social integration through the political participation of its citizens.”17
This is evidently convincing—but the argument may be pushed yet further. The nation, as any promoter of any “national idea” would eagerly admit, is as vulnerable and frail without a sovereign state to protect it (indeed, to assure its continuing identity) as the state would be without a nation to legitimize its demands for obedience and discipline. Modern nations and modern states are twin products of the same historical constellation. One might “precede” the other only in the short run, and will try to make that short run as short as possible—filling it with efforts to replace priority with simultaneity, and inserting the equals sign between the ostensibly autonomous partners. The French state was “preceded” by Savoyards and Bretons, not Frenchmen; the German state by Bavarians and Prussians, not Germans. Savoyards and Bretons would have hardly turned into Frenchmen, or Bavarians and Prussians into Germans, had not their reincarnation been “power assisted” by, respectively, the French and the German states.
For all practical intents and purposes, modern nations and modern states alike emerged in the course of two simultaneous and closely intertwined processes of nation- and state-building—anything but cloudless processes, and anything but processes guaranteed, a priori, to succeed. To say that a political framework cannot be established without a viable ethnocultural organism already in place is neither more nor less convincing than to say that no ethnocultural organism is likely to become and remain viable without a working and workable political framework. A chicken-and-egg dilemma if there ever was one.
Habermas’s comprehensive and grinding analysis points in a very similar direction: “Precisely the artificial conditions in which national consciousness arose argue against the defeatist assumption that a form of civic solidarity among strangers can only be generated within the confines of the nation. If this form of collective identity was due to a highly abstractive leap from the local and dynastic to national and then to democratic consciousness, why shouldn’t this learning process be able to continue?”18
Shared nationhood is not a necessary condition of the state legitimacy, if the state is a genuinely democratic body: “The citizens of a democratic legal state understand themselves as the authors of the law, which compels them to obedience as its addressees.”19
We may say that nationalism fills the legitimation void left (or not filled in the first place) by the democratic participation of the citizens. It is in the absence of such participation that the invocation to the nationalist sentiments and the efforts to beef them up are the state’s sole recourse. The state must invoke the shared national destiny, building its authority on the willingness of its subjects to die for their country, if and only if the rulers of the country need its residents solely for their readiness to sacrifice their lives, while not needing, or even shunning, their contributions to the daily running of the country.
At the moment, however, Europe seems to be looking for answers to the new and unfamiliar problems in inward-facing policies rather outward-looking ones—centripetal rather than centrifugal, implosive rather than expansive—like retrenchment, falling back upon itself, building fences topped with X-ray machines and closed-circuit television cameras, putting more officials inside the immigration booths and more border guards outside, tightening the nets of immigration and naturalization law, keeping refugees in closely guarded and isolated camps or turning them back before they have a chance to claim refugee or asylum-seeker status—in short, sealing its own doors while doing little, if anything, to repair the situation that prompted their closure. (Let’s recall that the funds that the European Union transferred most willingly and with no haggling to the Eastern and Central European countries applying for accession were those earmarked for the fortification of their eastern borders.)
Casting the victims of the rampant globalization of the financial and commodity markets as, first and foremost, a security threat, rather than as people needing aid and entitled to compensation for their damaged lives, has its uses. First, it puts paid to the ethical compunctions: no failing of moral duty eats at the soul when one is dealing with enemies who “hate our values” and cannot stand the sight of men and women living in freedom and democracy. Second, it allows us to divert funds that could be used “unprofitably” on the narrowing of disparities and defusing of animosities to the profitable task of beefing up the weapons industry, arms sales, and stockholders’ gains, and thus improving the statistics on home employment and raising the home feel-good gradient. Last but not least, it builds up the flagging consumerist economy by retargeting diffuse security fears on the urge to buy the little private fortresses on wheels (like the notoriously unsafe, gas-guzzling, and pricey Hummers and sport-utility vehicles), and by imposing lucrative “brand rights” or “intellectual rights” on the excuse that the government must prevent profits from illegal trade and pirating from being diverted to terrorist cells.
It also allows the governments to shake off the more irritating constraints of popular, democratic control by recasting political and economic choices as military necessities. America, as always, takes the lead—but it is closely watched and eagerly followed by a large number of European governments. As William J. Bennett recently stated in a book aptly titled Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, “The threats we face today are both external and internal: external in that there are groups and states that want to attack the United States: internal in that there are those who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate the agenda of ‘blame America first.’ Both threats stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice.”20 Bennett’s credo is an ideological gloss on a practice already in full swing—like the USA Patriot Act, which is aimed explicitly at people engaged in the kinds of political action protected by the American Constitution, legalizing clandestine surveillance, searches without warrants, and other invasions of privacy, as well as incarceration without charge and trials before military courts.
Admittedly, there are reasons for Europe to be increasingly inward-looking. The world no longer looks inviting. It appears to be a hostile world, a treacherous, vengeance-breathing world, a world that needs to be made safe for us, the tourists. This is a world of the imminent “war of civilizations”; a world in which any and all steps taken are fraught with risks, just as much as not taking them promptly would be. The tourists who dare to take such risks must look out and stay constantly on the alert; most crucially, they should stick to the safe havens, the marked and protected paths cut out from the wilderness for their exclusive use. Whoever forgets those precepts does so at her or his own peril—and must be ready to bear the consequences.
In an insecure world, security is the name of the game. Security is the main purpose of the game and its paramount stake. It is a value that in practice, if not in theory, dwarfs and elbows out all other values—including the values dearest to “us” while hated most by “them,” and for that reason declared the prime cause of “their” wish to harm “us.” In a world as insecure as ours, personal freedom of word and action, right to privacy, access to truth—all those things we used to associate with democracy and in whose name we still go to war—need to be trimmed or suspended. Or this at least is what the official version, confirmed by official practice, maintains.
The truth is, nevertheless, that we cannot effectively defend our freedoms here at home while fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world and attending solely to our affairs here at home.
There are valid reasons to suppose that on a globalized planet, where the plight of everyone everywhere determines the plight of all the others, while also being determined by them, one can no longer live in freedom and democracy “separately”—in isolation, in one country, or in a few selected countries only. The fate of freedom and democracy in each land is decided and settled on the global stage; and only on that stage can it be defended with a realistic chance of lasting success. It is no longer in the power of any state acting alone, however resourceful, heavily armed, resolute, and uncompromising, to defend chosen values at home while turning its back on the dreams and yearnings of those outside its borders. But turning our backs is precisely what we, the Europeans, seem to be doing, when we keep our riches and multiply them at the expense of the poor outside.
A few examples will suffice. While forty years ago the income of the richest 5 percent of the world population was 30 times higher than the income of the poorest 5 percent, fifteen years ago it was 60 times higher, and by 2002 it had reached the factor of 114.
As pointed out by Jacques Attali in La voie humaine,21 half of the world’s trade and more than half of global investments benefit just twenty-two countries that accommodate a mere 14 percent of the world population, whereas the forty-nine poorest countries, inhabited by 11 percent of the world population, receive among them but one-half of 1 percent of the global product—an amount just about equal to the combined income of the three wealthiest men on the planet. Ninety percent of the total wealth of the planet remains in the hands of just 1 percent of the planet’s inhabitants.
Tanzania earns 2.2 billion dollars a year, which it divides among 25 million inhabitants. The Goldman Sachs Bank earns 2.6 billion dollars a year, which is then divided among 161 stockholders.
Europe and the United States spend 17 billion dollars each year on animal food while, according to experts, there is a 19-billion-dollar shortfall in the funding needed to save the world population from hunger. Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the Guardian, as trade ministers prepared for their 2003 meeting in Mexico, that the average European subsidy per cow “matches the 2 dollars per day poverty level on which billions of people barely subsist”—whereas America’s 4 billion dollars in cotton subsidies paid to 25,000 well-off farmers “bring misery to 10 million African farmers and more than offset the U.S.’s miserly aid to some of the affected countries.”22 One occasionally hears Europe and America accusing each other publicly of “unfair agricultural practices.” But, Stiglitz observes, “neither side seems to be willing to make major concessions”—whereas nothing short of a major concession would convince others to stop looking at the unashamed display of “brute economic power by the U.S. and Europe” as anything but an effort to defend the privileges of the privileged, to protect the wealth of the wealthy and to serve their interests—which, in their opinion, boil down to more wealth and yet more wealth.
If they are to be lifted and refocused at a level higher than the nation-state, the essential features of human solidarity (like the sentiments of mutual belonging and of shared responsibility for the common future, or the willingness to care for one another’s well-being and to find amicable and durable solutions to sporadically inflamed conflicts), need support from an institutional framework of opinion building and will formation. The European Union aims (and moves, however slowly and haltingly) toward a rudimentary or embryonic form of such an institutional framework, although the most obtrusive obstacles it encounters on its way are the existing nation-states, which are reluctant to part with whatever is left of their once fully-fledged sovereignty. The current direction is difficult to plot clearly, and predicting its future turns is even more difficult, in addition to being unwarranted, irresponsible, and unwise.
The EU’s present momentum seems to be shaped by two different (perhaps complementary, perhaps incompatible) logics—and it is impossible to decide in advance which will ultimately prevail. One is the logic of local retrenchment; the other is the logic of global responsibility and global aspiration.
The first logic is that of the quantitative expansion of the territory-and-resource basis for the Standortskonkurrenz strategy—competition between localities, or locally grounded competition; more precisely, competition between territorial states. Even if no attempts had ever been made by the founders of the European Common Market and their successors to emancipate the economy from its relatively incapacitating confinement in the Nationalökonomie frames, the “war of liberation” currently conducted by global capital, finance, and trade against “local constraints,” a war triggered and intensified not by local interests but by the global diffusion of opportunities, would have been waged anyway and gone on unabated. The role of European institutions does not consist in eroding the member states’ sovereignty and in exempting economic activity from their controlling (and constraining) interference; in short, it does not consist in facilitating, let alone initiating, the divorce procedure between power and politics. For such a purpose the services of European institutions are hardly required. The real function of European institutions consists, on the contrary, in stemming the tide: stopping the capital assets that have escaped the nation-state cages inside the continental stockade and keeping them there to prevent them from evaporating or leaking beyond the confines of the Union. If, in view of the rising might of global capital, the effective enclosure inside a single nation-state of capital, financial, commodity, and labor markets, along with the balancing of the books, becomes ever more daunting, then perhaps severally, or all together, the combined powers of the nation-states will be able to match and confront the task on more equal terms. In other words: the logic of local retrenchment is that of reconstructing, at the Union level, the legal-institutional web that no longer holds the “national economy” within the boundaries of the nation-state’s territorial sovereignty. But, as Habermas put it, “the creation of larger political unities in itself changes nothing about the mode of Standortskonkurrenz as such.”23 Viewed from the planetary perspective, the joint strategy of a continental union of states is hardly distinguishable from the single nation-states’ codes of conduct that it came to replace. It is still guided by the logic of division, separation, enclosure, and retrenchment; of seeking territorial exemptions from the general rules and trends—or, to put it bluntly, local solutions for globally generated problems.
At the same time, the logic of global responsibility (and once that responsibility is acknowledged and acted upon, also the logic of global aspiration) is aimed, at least in principle, at confronting the globally generated problems point-blank—at their own level. It stems from the assumption that a lasting and truly effective solution to planetwide problems can be found and can work only through the renegotiation and reform of the web of global interdependencies and interactions. Instead of aiming for the least local damage and most local benefits to be derived from the capricious and haphazard drifts of global economic forces, it would rather pursue a new kind of global setting, in which the itineraries of economic initiatives anywhere on the planet would not be whimsical any longer or guided haphazardly by momentary gains alone, with no attention paid to the side effects and collateral casualties and no importance attached to the social dimensions of the cost-and-effect balances. In short, that logic is aimed, to quote Habermas again, at the development of “politics that can catch up with global markets.”24
Unlike the logic of local retrenchment, which replays the perseverant tunes of raison d’état, tunes familiar since universally (or almost) dominant in the nation-state era, the logic of global responsibility and global aspiration ushers us into unknown territory and opens an era of political experimentation. It rejects, as swerving dangerously into a blind alley, the strategy of a purely local defense against planetary trends; it also abstains (by necessity, if not for reasons of conscience) from falling back to another orthodox European strategy, that of treating the planetary space as a “hinterland” (or, indeed, the Lebensraum) onto which the problems that are home-produced but unresolvable at home can be unloaded. It accepts that it would be utterly pointless to follow the first strategy with a realistic hope of even a modicum of success, whereas having lost its global dominance, and living instead in the shadow of an empire that aspires to become planetary, an empire that it can at best try to contain and mitigate, but hardly to control, Europe is not in a position to follow the second strategy either, however successful that course might have been in the past and however tempting it may still be.
And so, willy-nilly, new unexplored strategies and tactics must be sought and tried without first reliably calculating, let alone ensuring, their ultimate success. “At the global level,” Habermas warns, “coordination problems that are already difficult at the European level grow still sharper.” This is because “civic solidarity is rooted in particular collective identities,” whereas “cosmopolitan solidarity has to support itself on the moral universalism of human rights alone.” The “political culture of a world society lacks the common ethical-political dimension that would be necessary for a corresponding global community.”25
A genuine catch-22: the community that could conceivably underlie a common ethical sensibility and make political coordination feasible (thus providing the necessary condition that must be met if the supranational and supracontinental solidarity is to sprout and take root) is difficult to attain precisely because the “ethical-political dimension” is thus far missing, and it is likely to remain missing—or to fall short of what is needed—so long as the ethical-political dimension is incomplete. What Europe faces now is the prospect of developing, gradually and simultaneously, and possibly through a long process of trial and error, the objectives and the tools fit to tackle and resolve it. To make the task even more daunting, the ultimate destination of all that labor, an effective planetary policy based on a continuous polilogue rather than on the soliloquy of a single planetary government, is equally unprecedented. Only historical practice may prove (though never disprove) its feasibility—or, more correctly, render it feasible.
We feel, guess, suspect what needs to be done. But we cannot know in which shape and form it eventually will be done. We can be pretty sure, though, that the ultimate shape will not be familiar. It will be—it must be—different from all we’ve gotten used to in the past, in the era of nation building and nation-states’ self-assertion. It can hardly be otherwise, as all political institutions currently at our disposal were made to the measure of the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state; they resist stretching to the planetary, supranational scale, and the political institutions serving the self-constitution of the planetwide human community won’t be, can’t be “the same, only bigger.” If invited to a parliamentary session in London, Paris, or Washington, Aristotle could perhaps approve of its procedural rules and recognize the benefits it offers to the people whom its decisions affect, but he would be baffled when told that what he has been shown is “democracy in action.” It is not how he, who coined the term, visualized a “democratic polis.”
We may well sense that the passage from international agencies and tools of action to universal—humanitywide—institutions must be and will be a qualitative change, not merely a quantitative one. So we may ponder, worryingly, whether the currently available frames for “global politics” can accommodate the practices of the emergent global polity or indeed serve as their incubator; what about the UN, for instance—briefed at its birth to guard and defend the undivided and unassailable sovereignty of the state over its territory? The binding force of global law—can it depend on the (admittedly revocable!) agreements of sovereign members of the “international community” to obey them?
To grasp the logic of the fateful departures in seventeenth-century European thought, Reinhardt Kosseleck, the great German historian of ideas, deployed the trope of the “mountain pass.” I suggest that this is an apt and felicitous metaphor for us as much as it was for our ancestors of four centuries ago, as we struggle to anticipate the twists and turns that the twenty-first century will inevitably follow, and to give shape to the seminal departures by which it is likely to be retrospectively described and “made sense of” in the accounts penned by future historians.
Like our seventeenth-century ancestors, we are moving up a rising slope toward a mountain pass that we have never crossed before—and so we have no inkling what sort of view will open once we have reached it; we are not sure where the winding and twisted gorge will eventually lead us. One thing we can be sure of is that where we are now, at some point on a steeply rising slope, we cannot rest for long, let alone settle. And so we go on moving; we move not so much “in order to” as “because of”—we move because we can neither stop nor stand still. Only when (if) we reach the pass and survey the landscape on its other side will the time come to move “in order to”; then we will be pulled ahead by the sight of a visible destination, by the goal within our reach, rather than pushed to move by current discomforts.
For the time being, little can be said of the shape of that vexingly distant allgemeine Vereinigung der Menschengattung, except that it will (we hope) gradually acquire more visible and manageable contours; that is, it will if there are still climbers left to find out that it has and to say so. I suggested as much to Kosseleck, pointing to the current rarity of prophetic talents and the notorious deficiencies of scientific prediction. In his reply, however, Kosseleck added an argument yet more decisive: we don’t even have the concepts with which we could articulate and express our anticipations. Concepts fit to grasp realities that are not yet are formed in the practice of climbing, and not a moment before. And it is not just the concepts that keep emerging as we keep moving, but also—as Claus Offe would add—the rules of forming and accepting them; the rules of decision making cannot but be made as we go, in a sort of “reflexive loop.” On the shape of things yet to emerge on the other side of the mountain pass, prudent climbers ought to keep silent.
The climbers’ ignorance about their final destination does not mean that they should stop moving. And in the case of Europeans, known for their fondness for adventure and knack for experimentation, it is unlikely that they will stop. We will need to make many stark choices, all under the condition of severely limited knowledge (this is exactly what sets adventure apart from routine and acting on command), and the adversarial odds against us seem truly daunting—but there is also hope, rooted firmly in our acquired skills of living with difference and engagement in meaningful and mutually beneficial dialogue, skills that stay mostly hidden yet come to the surface in moments of crisis. In a conversation held in May 2003, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida called 15 February 2003 “an-other Fourth of July” but this time on an all-European scale: the day on which “a genuine shared European conscience” was born.26 On that day, millions of Europeans went into the streets of Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, London, and other capitals of Europe to manifest their unanimous condemnation of the invasion of Iraq that was about to be launched—and obliquely their shared historical memory of past sufferings and shared revulsion against such violence and atrocities committed in the name of national rivalry.
The choice we confront is between allowing our cities to turn into places of terror, “where the stranger is to be feared and distrusted,” and sustaining the legacy of mutual civility among citizens and the “solidarity of strangers,” a solidarity strengthened by the ever harder tests to which it is subjected and which it survives—now and in the future.
The logic of global responsibility and global aspiration, if adopted and given preference over the logic of local retrenchment, may help to prepare the Europeans, those eminently adventurous people notorious for their fondness for experimentation, for their next adventure, greater perhaps than all previous ones. Despite the formidable volume of adverse odds, it could once more cast Europe in the role of a global patternsetter; it may enable Europe to deploy the values it has learned to cherish and managed to preserve, and the political-ethical experience it has acquired of democratic self-government, in the awesome task of replacing the collection of territorially entrenched entities engaged in a zero-sum game of survival with a fully inclusive, planetary human community. Only when (and if) such a community is achieved, may Europe consider its mission accomplished. Only within such a community can the values enlightening Europe’s ambitions and pursuits, values that are Europe, be truly safe.
What lies ahead has been prophetically put into writing by Franz Kafka—as a premonition, a warning, and encouragement: “If you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.”27