In his famous book Jenseits von Gut und Bose 1886 at the 256th paragraph, Nietzsche wrote that “Europe wants to become one”. Surely the developments in Europe, during the last half century, seem to bear out this prediction. But, if some impetus was given to the contemporary question of the unity of Europe by the events leading to the Second World War, by the need to respond to the Cold War, and the gradual growth of apparent American hegemony, nowadays Europe has to confront with a very new and different issue on the question of unity.
For the present generation, of Americans but to a great extent also of Europeans, the experiences leading up to World War II feel as distant as those of the French Revolution. This means that the strong persuasions placed on thought by virtue of the perceived need “never to let it happen again”, is in the process of eroding and, indeed, of disappearing. Within modernity Nietzsche was the thinker who most consciously used the name Europe. He did not spare his own fellow-countrymen of criticism for the hybrid foundation of Bismarck’s Reich. In tandem with Holderlin he was searching for a German Delos, the central point of the spirit. Disappointed by Bismarck, he returned to origins and paid attention to the youthful Europe just born from the Greeks, impelled from the need “to feel at home, which everywhere is the Greek world.”
Within the framework of his own philosophy and his nihilism, which is a European nihilism, Nietzsche’s question is not What is Europe?, but rather What does Europe mean? Not only for himself, culturally a 19th century nomad German and therefore also Italian, Greek, French, but for all of us Europeans. I think that even now we need to give some answer to his question What does Europe mean for us? The question is for all of us who need to examine our traditions and historical conflicts, both the outer and the inner ones. We need to ask what is at stake after the century of nihilism.
In the present contest, after the fist in the stomach of French and Dutch referenda on European Constitution, the same Nietzschean statements can be repeated “What does Europe mean for us?”, “Europe wants to become one”. They can be answered with a twofold reply: on one hand there is the apparent lack of a deeply meaningful idea of what Europe signifies, perceived as a lack of “spiritual vitality”; on the other hand there is a wide gap between the actual development of European institutional (such as the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, the Euro, the European Constitution) and European citizens.
To elaborate on the former, indeed, writers and philosophers as apparently diverse as Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida have further argued that as a self-conscious entity Europe has a particular and singular role to play in world history, and, in different way, they have proposed the overcoming of European nihilism. They have adviced to go beyond the nihilism. “The death of God”, the long-term trends of secularization in the society, the lack of trust in the future, the nationalism in its various contemporary forms can certainly be identified in part as ideological causes of the present crisis. For this it is not possible to remove God from the equation of a human culture without consequences. Furthermore nationalism remains a dangerous and problematic response to the human need for meaning, especially salient after the death of God and embodied, often with great violence, in the modern state.
Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi, and others believed that within a common institutional framework a unified Europe might slowly develop. But such a vision merely rewrites the old idea of the state on a larger level and thus furthering the “incomplete nihilism”, already visible in nationalism per se. We should remember that nihilism has many and various meanings, besides the denial of all reality, it also points to a lack of center, to a decline of common and accepted values. One can confront it by either trying to overcome it or by simply accepting the condition of crisis as ineluctable fate.
Any viable Europe would have to respond precisely to the absence of meaning not by formulating a new one (whatever that might mean), and neither by elaborating a fixed and finite set of attributes. The new good Europeans, as persons responsive to the developments of their time (the death of God and nationalism) must have a more profound understanding of freedom. In other words they need to be persons shaped by the “experience of a profound, creative, existential freedom and democracy”, without seeking to elaborate ahead of time the precise nature of their identity.
In this wider sense we may then consider, for example, a kind of continuation of the “Enlightenment Project” associated with the so-called constitutional patriotism as elaborated in the works of Jürgen Habermas.
Regarding the latter, keeping in mind the significance of political institutions in the development of the idea of Europe, we need to pay adequate attention to the degree of human life that cannot be understood without reference to ordinary everyday life. There is, often, opposition between “abstract ideas” and “persons”.
As far as institutions are concerned, half a century ago, Karl Popper wrote, in The Open Society and its Enemies, that when we speak of scientific method and its use we need to remember that besides political affairs, as trials for problem-solving, there are also institutions. Here Popper doesn't attempt to dealing with a cynic instrumentalism, because politics, not founded on fundamental human rights, and first of all civil rights, would never be entertained as theories, Popper would refuse them once. He does however tell us to make a few chances to the values of institutions and acknowledge their precariousness. Institutions that don’t solve the problems of the citizens must be judged useless and wrong. Indeed, the call is for better institutions, for more unified and working fiscal, economic and social policies.
At this moment of crisis for the European Union the remedy ought to be more federalism and more Europe for ordinary citizens. If there are true politicians, let them come forward!
Francesco Tampoia
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