beck real europe

8/11/2019 Beck Real Europe

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are very high. But the returns are possibly evenhigher. The left in other countries of the worldshould be patient about passing judgment onthe present policies of Lula’s government. Forthe moment, we should assume that Lula’s vi-

sion of the future of Brazil is governed by the values of the left. Whether this vision will be-come reality is a different and currently unde-

Ulrich Beck

urope has a novel and empirical reality that all its critics fundamentally skipover. The reason anti-Europeans can’t

imagine a future for Europe is that they can’timagine its present. They are trapped in thecontradictions of EU member nations’ misun-derstanding of themselves. And this false pic-

ture of Europe’s present is blocking its futuredevelopment.

Imagine for a moment what would happenif the European Union applied for membershipin the European Union. Its application wouldbe flatly rejected. Why? Because the EuropeanUnion doesn’t live up to its own criteria of de-mocracy, of Europeanness. As I have arguedin these pages (“Democracy Beyond the Na-tion-State,” Winter 1999) and elsewhere, this

paradox goes right to the heart of what’s wrongwith the European Union. It isn’t Europeanenough.

I think I can demonstrate that the eurosk-eptics have it exactly backward. The solutionto the EU’s problems is not more national re-alism. Rather, it is more Europe, more of thereality we are already experiencing—a cosmo-politan Europe. National categories of thoughthave created this impasse. National irrealismis Europe’s problem. I make my case with three

theses.

1. The European Union is not a Christian

club.As an empirical assertion this is so obvious

it’s a wonder how the debate got started. Tocall Europe a Christian club is to talk as if “Londistan” did not exist—the capital city of Islam outside the Islamic world. To say theEuropean Union is a Christian club is to el-evate unreality into a theory, the propositionsof which are radically wrong. The easiest ex-ample is the now ubiquitous idea that Europeis a great community of common descent.

Turkey is, of course, the looming questionthat has brought this long-buried discourse of origins out of hiding. People who want to keepthe Turks out have suddenly discovered thatthe roots of Europe lie in its Christian heri-tage. Those who share our continent, but donot share this Christian heritage, are seen asEurope’s Other.

But this is to take the idea of an ethnic na-tion—that you have an identity you get from

your parents, which can’t be learned or un-learned—and apply it at the level of Europe.It conceives national and cultural identities asso inherently and mutually exclusive that youcan’t have two of them in the same logicalspace.

This is not only empirically wrong, it is to-tally at odds with the idea of Europe. If identi-ties are mutually exclusive, Europe is an im-possible project. The whole idea of the EU wasbased on the idea that one could be German

and French or British and German at the sametime.Dangerous traces of this exclusivist idea

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cidable question. It is the beginning of a four- year, perhaps eight-year, journey in which many lessons will be learned before we can come toan evaluation of what Lula truly means.

José Eisenberg is professor of political science atthe Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), in Brazil.



exist even in the seemingly benign idea of cul-tural “dialogue.” The picture normally evokedby dialogue is of two separate entities, “Islam”and the “West,” each occupying its own terri-tory, who then need to reach out to the other

in order to have contact. But in fact, these en-tities already interpenetrate each other. Andwhat’s more, their internal differences are aslarge as any they have with each other. Wherecan you find room in “Islam” and the “West”for all the second- and third-generation Mus-lim immigrants who are now an integral partof every country in Europe? Or for that matterfor “Westernized” Muslims? Or for the Arabbourgeoisie? The Oriental Christians? The Is-raeli Arabs? The list of exceptions goes on un-

til it swamps the rule. The closer we look atempirical reality, the clearer it becomes thatthe presumption of cultural homogeneity isreally a denial of reality.

But it gets worse. Those who would re-in- vent the Christian West in order to build wallsaround Europe are turning the project of theEuropean Enlightenment on its head. They areturning Europe back into a religion. Indeed,they are virtually turning it into a race. Therecould be nothing more anti-Western and anti-

Enlightenment than that.The true standards for “Europeanness” lie

in the answer to the question, “What will makeEurope more European?” And the answer is amore cosmopolitan Europe, where nationalidentities become less and less exclusive andmore and more inclusive. “Europeanness”means being able to combine in one existencethings that only appear to be mutually exclu-sive in the small-mindedness of ethnic think-ing. It is, of course, perfectly possible to be aMuslim and a democrat, just as one can be asocialist and a small businessperson—or, lesspleasantly, a lover of the Bavarian landscapeand the founder of an anti-foreigner organiza-tion.

The European conception of humanity doesn’t contain any concrete definition of whatit means to be human. It can’t. It is of its es-sence that it be anti-essentialist. Strictly speak-ing, it is a-human, in the sense that one can

be a-religious. The European idea of “man” wasformed precisely by casting off all the naïveconceptions of what it meant to be human that

had been imposed on it by religion and moral-izing metaphysics.

It is no accident that Europeanness ismostly defined procedurally. Only a pragmatic-political definition can express this a-human

essence. The flipside of this substantial emp-tiness is radical tolerance and radical openness.It is this that is the secret of Europe’s success.

2. Cosmopolitan Europe is in the processof bidding farewell to postmodernity. In sim-plified form, we might say that we are pass-ing from nationalistic Europe, throughpostmodern Europe, to cosmopolitan Eu-rope.

Cosmopolitan Europe was consciously con-

ceived and launched after the Second World War as the political antithesis to a nationalis-tic Europe and the physical and moral devas-tation that had emerged from it. It was in thisspirit that Winston Churchill, standing amidthe ruins of a destroyed continent in 1946,claimed, “If Europe were once united, …therewould be no limit to the happiness, to the pros-perity and the glory which its four hundredmillion people would enjoy.” It was the charis-matic statesmen of the Western democracies—

and specifically the individuals and groupsmost identified with resistance to the Nazis—who reinvented Europe. And they consciously sought to reach past the mass graves and na-tional cemeteries back into the European his-tory of ideas.

osmopolitan Europe is thus a projectborn of resistance. It is important to re-member what this means because two

things come together in it. In the first place,resistance was not the automatic result of col-lapse. It was a reaction against the traumaticexperience of European values being perverted.Cosmopolitan Europe was born in the bitterrealization that the idea of what constitutes the“truly human” implies the subhuman. And thatwhen “truly human” becomes the basis of anation state, the result is a totalitarian regimethat seeks to exclude, to separate out, to re-model, or to annihilate all people who can’t or

don’t want to fit its ideal.This brings us to the second point: if weno longer base ourselves on some transcendent

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human substance that needs to be saved, thenwhat is it we are trying to nurture and preserve?If we are now dealing with de-centered quasi-subjects of which no one can definitively say what they are or what they ought to want to

be, then what is the inviolate essence our in-stitutions should be set up to protect? On whatgrounds can we guarantee that it won’t behauled off, tortured, and killed? The resistancethat built Europe was motivated by clear ideasof inviolable human dignity, and of the moralduty to relieve the suffering of others. The ba-sis of common humanity was the feeling of sympathy—a structurally empty feeling thatdraws its content from outside. These cosmo-politan ideals then became the foundations of

the postwar European project.Cosmopolitan Europe was founded as

something that struggles morally, politically,historically, and economically for reconcilia-tion. It was intended as a decisive break withall previous political history, and it accom-plished it. With it, 1,500 years of intra-Euro-pean warfare came definitively to a close. Thisideal of reconciliation was not so muchpreached idealistically as practiced material-istically. The first step toward the “limitless

happiness” that Churchill foresaw was a limit-less market. Reconciliation was accomplishedby being encoded into institutions, through thecreation of profane interdependence in theeconomy, in politics, in security matters, in sci-ence, and in culture. Cosmopolitanism wascreated consciously, but it was created first asa reality, not as a theory.

f we want to excavate the original con-sciousness of cosmopolitanism that lies atthe basis of the European project, it is the

collective memory of the holocaust that provides our clearest archive—as Daniel Levy andNatan Sznaider argue in Memory Unbound:The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopoli-tan Memory.* The founding set of documentsof European cosmopolitanism, written whenthe war was still warm, as it were, were thoseof the Nuremberg Trials. Here we can seeclearly how a cosmopolitan institutional logic

was the first thing the builders of Europereached for in trying to make a break with thepast.

The Nuremberg court created both legalcategories and a trial procedure that went far

beyond the sovereignty of the nation state. Itdid so for practical reasons. It was the only way to capture in legal concepts and court proce-dures the historical monstrosity that was thesystematic and state-organized exterminationof the Jews.

Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal delineates three categories of crime: crimes against peace, war crimes, andcrimes against humanity. It was in terms of these new categories that Nazi crimes were

judged and Nazi criminals tried and sentenced.Crimes against peace and war crimes both stillpresuppose the laws of a nation-state systemof which they are violations. The concept of crimes against humanity, on the other hand,suspends the nation-state presumption. It isthe embodiment of the cosmopolitanworldview in legal form. It was in many waysahead of its time. The lawyers and judges whoparticipated in the Nuremberg Tribunal wereultimately unable to come to grips with this

new category. But of the three, it is this cat-egory that has endured in the European imagi-nation. Today, even when we speak of “warcriminals,” what we really mean, as if it werenow obvious, is people who have committed“crimes against humanity.”

What was being introduced here was not anew law or a even a new legal principle butrather a new legal logic that broke with the pre-

vious nation-state logic of international law.Here is the definition in Article 6c:

“Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, ex-termination, enslavement, deportation andother inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war;or persecutions on political, racial or religiousgrounds in execution of or in connection withany crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribu-nal, whether or not in violation of domestic lawof the country where perpetrated.

The first key formulation is “before and dur-

ing the war”—This is what distinguishes crimesagainst humanity from war crimes: there may b A d th d i th t h i

I

*Published in Germany as Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter:Der Holocaust (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M.,2001).

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exist “whether or not in violation of domesticlaw of the country where perpetrated.”

These enormous breaks with nationally based legal concepts were necessary becausethe persecution of the Jews was legal accord-

ing to the laws of Nazi Germany and happenedbefore the war took place. But taken togetherthey change everything. They posit an indi-

vidual responsibility for all perpetrators that isbased outside the national legal context, in thecommunity of nations. What had been crimesagainst the state now became crimes againsthumanity. So if the state is a criminal one, theindividual who serves it must still reckon withbeing charged and sentenced for his or herdeeds before an international court of law.

Finally, the phrase “any civilian population”suspends the principle of citizenship and re-places it with the principle of cosmopolitanresponsibility. This cosmopolitan legal principleis designed to protect the civilian populationnot from the violence of other hostile states(which is the province of “war crimes”) butfrom violence committed by states against theirown citizens—or more important, against itsnoncitizens, against people deemed outside itslegal boundaries while existing inside its bor-

ders.This is not only far-reaching and provoca-

tive. It is a complete reversal of legal principles.It negates what had previously been the ulti-mate legal legitimation, the national legal code.It suspends that code. Cosmopolitan law isforced to break national law in order to comeinto force.

But now an interesting question arises thatis much harder to answer than it seems at firstsight. Who are crimes against humanity com-mitted against? Legally speaking, were thesecrimes against the Jews only? If they were com-mitted against humanity, as the name implies,does that mean everybody? Including the per-petrators?

here were those who argued at thetime of Nuremberg that the idea of crimes against humanity was a legal nul-

lity because humanity is an empty concept.

That objection should have more force today than it did at the time. If cosmopolitan Eu-rope is founded in opposition to all substan-

tial ideas of what constitutes the truly human,then what are we defending under the bannerof “human rights”?

It is at this point that cosmopolitan Europegenerates a genuinely European inner contra-

diction, legally, morally, and politically. The tra-ditions from which colonial, nationalist, andgenocidal horror originated were clearly Euro-pean. But so were the new legal standardsagainst which these acts were condemned andtried in the spotlight of world publicity. At thisformative moment in its history, Europe mobi-lized its traditions to produce something his-torically new. It took the idea of recognition of the humanity of the Other and made it thefoundation of an historically new counter-logic.

It specifically designed this logic to counter-act the ethnic perversion of the European tra-dition to which the nation-based form of Eu-ropean modernity had just shown itself so hor-ribly liable. It was an attempt to distill a Euro-pean antidote to Europe.

Understood in this sense, the memory of the Holocaust is not just a monument toEurope’s sense of the tragic. It is a memorialspecifically to the European barbarism that wasmade possible by the marriage of modernity

and the nation-state. It is a mass grave uponwhich the new Europe made an oath and chosea different path. Europe’s collective memory of the Holocaust provides the basis of the EU.It is a warning sign that when modernity de-

velops exclusively in the grooves of the nation-state, it builds the potential for a moral, politi-cal, economic, and technological catastrophewithout limit, without mercy, and without evenany consideration for its own survival.

In its elevation of pessimism to permanentdespair, postmodernity joins hands with nation-alistic Europe. Both deny the possibility of struggling against the horror of European his-tory by radicalizing the idea of Europe. Andboth ignore the attempt to make Europe moreEuropean by making it more cosmopolitan. Inthis sense, present-day European pessimismreverses the old rule: it remembers the past inorder to forget the present. And I believe that

Jürgen Habermas is completely correct in his

argument that there is a deep continuity be-tween European pessimism and postmodernity.Both have in common a critique of modernity,

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an antimodernity, that offers no alternative butthe past.

By contrast, cosmopolitan Europe is theEuropean tradition’s institutionalized internalcritique. This process is not complete; it can-

not be completed. Indeed, the sequence of en-lightenment, postmodernity, and cosmopolitanmodernity represents its beginning stages.

3. National categories of thought make thethought of Europe impossible.

The national point of view sees two waysand two ways only of reading contemporary Eu-ropean politics and integration. It sees it ei-ther as federalism, leading to a federal super-state, or as inter-governmentalism, leading to

a federation of states. Both models are empiri-cally inadequate. They fail to grasp essentialthings both about present-day Europe andabout the nations that make it up. But they are also, in a deep-structural sense, anti-Euro-pean. They deny the goal most worth attain-ing: a Europe of diversity, a Europe that helpsdiversity to flourish.

This is obvious when it comes to the ideaof a federation of states that are seen as de-fending their sovereignty against the expansion

of European power. From that perspective, Eu-ropean integration is a kind of European self-colonization. But it’s just as true in the con-ception of a federal super state. That is howEurope looks when it is filtered through theexclusive categories of national thought, whichcan only understand it in one way: as a hugeethnocultural nation-state. This makes nosense, as its opponents point out. Such a na-tion is improbable, unwanted and un-Euro-pean. But rather than faulting their concep-tion, they fault reality. It never occurs to themthat perhaps Europe isn’t properly conceivedof as a nation-state.

oth the federation of states and the fed-eral super-state describe the same zero-sum game from different angles. Either

there is one single state of Europe (federalism),in which case there are no national memberstates; or else the national member states re-

main Europe’s rulers, in which case there isno Europe (inter-governmentalism). Withinthis framework of thought, whatever Europe

gains, the individual nations lose. And this istrue whether one is for a given option or againstit.

This is what it means to say that nationalcategories of thought make the thought of Eu-

rope impossible. Caught up in the false alter-natives of the national viewpoint, we are giventhe choice between no Europe—or no Europe!The same two sides of one dead-end are asprominent as they’ve ever been in the currentdebate about the Constitution.

Methodological nationalism denies the em-pirical reality of Europe, which is that it is al-ready a unity of diversity. And it misses thatthis is already also true of the nations that makeit up.

Europe is inconceivable on the basis of national homogeneity. But European nationsthemselves no longer have this homogeneity either. People who want to preserve the oldnation-states have first to pretend that thoseold states still exist, that they are still nationalcontainers from which others are excluded.They pretend this kind of France still exists,and this kind of Germany, and this kind of Brit-ain. But they don’t. All that now exists is thenew France, the new Germany, and the new

Britain: no longer nation-states but transnation-al states that have been cosmopolitanized fromwithin.

The same is true of a cosmopolitan Europe.It is not only practically but logically impos-sible for it to be the replacement of many smallnations with one large nation. It can only beconceived of as a cosmopolitan unity. Other-wise it wouldn’t be Europe. But it can becomea transnational state, a more defined and com-plex variant of what its component nations arealready becoming.

Just as the Peace of Westphalia ended thereligious wars by separating state from religion,we might consider it the ultimate goal of theEuropean project to separate state and nation.Cosmopolitanism does not mean an abolitionof nation, any more than Westphalia meant anabolition of religion. Rather, it means the con-stitutional enshrinement of the principle of national and cultural and ethnic and religious

tolerance.Many people consider the Peace of Westphalia the foundation of the modern Eu-

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ropean state system. If that is true, then theprinciple of tolerance was Europe’s foundingprinciple, the basis of its unwritten constitu-tion. And on this argument, the essence of thepostwar European project has been to deepen

this principle of tolerance and to extend it. Thea-religious state did not abolish religion. Rather,it allowed it to flourish. It allowed there to bemore than one; it allowed true religious diver-sity. And the same is true of the a-nationalstate. The goal is not to abolish national iden-tities, but to save them from their own perver-sion, just as Westphalia saved religion from itsperversion into religious war.

The concept of a cosmopolitan Europeopens our eyes to what has already long been

here, which now needs to be affirmed andradicalized against the narrow-minded tenden-cies of the national viewpoint. A logic of in-clusive oppositions is the only way to finally attain a Europe of national diversity. The con-cept of the a-national, cosmopolitan state bothmirrors the reality of Europe and furthers therealization of its norms.

The legal realities of the EU already expressthis new kind of both/and reality that is gradu-ally replacing the old either/or of national ho-

mogeneity. National and European legal andpolitical cultures have co-existed for decadesand are continuing to evolve together. They have merged into a European legal culturewithout abolishing national political cultures.They present a domain of continuous overlapthat expresses political and social reality. Theproblem is that our ideas of the nation-statehave failed to keep up with this reality.

The creation of interdependencies in ev-ery field of politics—the politics of mutual im-brication that makes Europeanization such aubiquitous feature of our lives—is not a one-off form of cooperation that ultimately leavesthe nation-states involved untouched. Rather,Europeanization seizes and transforms nationalsovereignty in the core of its being. This iswhere the intergovernmental perspective failsto grasp reality. Nation-states have already turned into transnational states, not only so-cially, but administratively, in the heart of their

raison d’état. Europe has already changed froma nation-state system into a transnational statesystem. The point is to make it a better one,

in pragmatic and practical terms.

he question has often been asked, if thenations of Europe are so discontented,why is it that they so rarely say no to Eu-

rope? And the answer is because they followtheir own national interests. But without intend-ing it, each following its own interests pulls allof them further and further into the same co-operative system. Each nation limits its right togo off on its own because it expects the othersto combine together—and if they do not, it willbe disadvantaged. When repeated over time,these expectations of each other’s expectationscreate in each country a new national core. Eachnation now has the expectations of all the oth-

ers encoded within it.This is how European interests emerge as

a nation’s own interests. This is how the na-tional zero-sum game can be gradually replacedby a European plus-sum game. And this is hownational interests become Europeanized. They become reflexive national interests by follow-ing repeated joint strategies of self-limitation.And they follow these strategies because they work. So it is not only the social fabric thathas become thoroughly cosmopolitanized. It is

even true of the pure national interests them-selves. Nations don’t follow cosmopolitan re-alism out of altruism, but rather out of ego-ism, out of realism.

The decline of the nation-state is really adecline of the national content of the state andan opportunity to create a cosmopolitan statesystem that is better able to deal with the prob-lems that all nations face in the world today.Economic globalization, transnational terror-ism, global warming: the litany is familiar anddaunting. There is a host of problems that areclearly beyond the power of the old order of nation-states to cope. The answer to globalproblems that are gathering ominously allaround and that refuse to yield to nation-statesolutions is for politics to take a quantum leapfrom the nation-state system to the cosmopoli-tan state system. Politics needs to regain cred-ibility in order to craft real solutions.

More than anywhere else in the world, Eu-

rope shows that this step is possible. Europeteaches the modern world that the politicalevolution of states and state systems is by no

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means at an end. National realpolitik is becom-ing unreal, not only in Europe, but throughoutthe world. It is turning into a lose-lose game.Europeanization means creating a new politics.It means entering as a player into the meta-

power game, into the struggle to form the rulesof a new global order. The catchphrase for thefuture might be, Move over America—Europe

is back!Translated from the German by Michael Pollak

Ulrich Beck is professor of sociology at theUniversity of Munich and the London School of

Economics and Political Science. His latest book is Conversation with Ulrich Beck—An Introductionto his Work (forthcoming, Polity Press, 2003).

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