The heart of Europe
Beck, Ulrich
IMAGINE FOR A moment what would happen if the European Union applied for membership in the European Union. Its application would be flatly rejected. Why? Because the European Union doesn't...
...It negates what had previously been the ultimate legal legitimation, the national legal code...
...Each nation limits its right to go off on its own because it expects the others to combine together—and if they do not, it will be disadvantaged...
...In the first place, resistance was not the automatic result of collapse...
...The goal is not to abolish national identities, but to save them from their own perversion, just as Westphalia saved religion from its perversion into religious war...
...The European idea of "man" was formed precisely by casting off all the naive conceptions of what it meant to be human that had been imposed on it by religion and moralizing metaphysics...
...Europe has a novel and empirical reality that all its critics fundamentally skip over...
...Where can you find room in "Islam" and the "West" for all the second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants who are now an integral part of every country in Europe...
...If identities are mutually exclusive, Europe is an impossible project...
...If that is true, then the principle of tolerance was Europe's founding principle, the basis of its unwritten constitution...
...It is at this point that cosmopolitan Europe generates a genuinely European inner contradiction, legally, morally, and politically...
...It sees it either as federalism, leading to a federal superstate, or as inter-governmentalism, leading to a federation of states...
...And I believe that Jurgen Habermas is completely correct in his argument that there is a deep continuity between European pessimism and postmodernity...
...Or for that matter for "Westernized" Muslims...
...There is a host of problems that are clearly beyond the power of the old order of nation-states to cope...
...It is of its essence that it be anti-essentialist...
...This is not only empirically wrong, it is totally at odds with the idea of Europe...
...or else the national member states remain Europe's rulers, in which case there is no Europe (inter-governmentalism...
...Strictly speaking, it is a-human, in the sense that one can be a-religious...
...2 Cosmopolitan Europe is in the process of bidding farewell to postmodernity...
...When repeated over time, these expectations of each other's expectations create in each country a new national core...
...Or for the Arab bourgeoisie...
...Nation-states have already turned into transnational states, not only socially, but administratively, in the heart of their raison d'état...
...It is this that is the secret of Europe's success...
...This is where the intergovernmental perspective fails to grasp reality...
...It is a warning sign that when modernity develops exclusively in the grooves of the nationstate, it builds the potential for a moral, political, economic, and technological catastrophe without limit, without mercy, and without even any consideration for its own survival...
...They deny the goal most worth attaining: a Europe of diversity, a Europe that helps diversity to flourish...
...But this is to take the idea of an ethnic nation— that you have an identity you get from your parents, which can't be learned or unlearned— and apply it at the level of Europe...
...People who want to keep the Turks out have suddenly discovered that the roots of Europe lie in its Christian heritage...
...It can only be conceived of as a cosmopolitan unity...
...The concept of the a-national, cosmopolitan state both mirrors the reality of Europe and furthers the realization of its norms...
...Understood in this sense, the memory of the Holocaust is not just a monument to Europe's sense of the tragic...
...Cosmopolitan Europe is thus a project born of resistance...
...Published in Germany as Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M.,2001...
...The problem is that our ideas of the nation-state have failed to keep up with this reality...
...To say the European Union is a Christian club is to elevate unreality into a theory, the propositions of which are radically wrong...
...And it misses that this is already also true of the nations that make it up...
...Each nation now has the expectations of all the others encoded within it...
...The basis of common humanity was the feeling of sympathy—a structurally empty feeling that draws its content from outside...
...It is a complete reversal of legal principles...
...Because the European Union doesn't live up to its own criteria of democracy, of Europeanness...
...But it's just as true in the conception of a federal super state...
...or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated...
...It took the idea of recognition of the humanity of the Other and made it the foundation of an historically new counter-logic...
...Europe teaches the modern world that the political evolution of states and state systems is by no means at an end...
...There could be nothing more anti-Western and antiEnlightenment than that...
...The creation of interdependencies in every field of politics—the politics of mutual imbrication that makes Europeanization such a ubiquitous feature of our lives—is not a oneoff form of cooperation that ultimately leaves the nation-states involved untouched...
...The traditions from which colonial, nationalist, and genocidal horror originated were clearly European...
...They pretend this kind of France still exists, and this kind of Germany, and this kind of Britain...
...It was intended as a decisive break with all previous political history, and it accomplished it...
...It is even true of the pure national interests themselves...
...The same two sides of one dead-end are as prominent as they've ever been in the current debate about the Constitution...
...The solution to the EU's problems is not more national realism...
...All that now exists is the new France, the new Germany, and the new Britain: no longer nation-states but transnational states that have been cosmopolitanized from within...
...And this is true whether one is for a given option or against it...
...And they consciously sought to reach past the mass graves and national cemeteries back into the European history of ideas...
...If they were committed against humanity, as the name implies, does that mean everybody...
...The first key formulation is "before and during the war"—This is what distinguishes crimes against humanity from war crimes: there may be no war...
...And on this argument, the essence of the postwar European project has been to deepen this principle of tolerance and to extend it...
...It did so for practical reasons...
...Both models are empirically inadequate...
...Europe has already changed from a nation-state system into a transnational state system...
...Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal delineates three categories of crime: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity...
...As an empirical assertion this is so obvious it's a wonder how the debate got started...
...It was in many ways ahead of its time...
...BOTH THE federation of states and the federal super-state describe the same zero-sum game from different angles...
...But rather than faulting their conception, they fault reality...
...This ideal of reconciliation was not so much preached idealistically as practiced materialistically...
...THE QUESTION has often been asked, if the nations of Europe are so discontented, why is it that they so rarely say no to Europe...
...And both ignore the attempt to make Europe more European by making it more cosmopolitan...
...But so were the new legal standards against which these acts were condemned and tried in the spotlight of world publicity...
...They present a domain of continuous overlap that expresses political and social reality...
...Cosmopolitan Europe was born in the bitter realization that the idea of what constitutes the "truly human" implies the subhuman...
...Such a nation is improbable, unwanted and un-European...
...It was a reaction against the traumatic experience of European values being perverted...
...But in fact, these entities already interpenetrate each other...
...Rather, it is more Europe, more of the reality we are already experiencing—a cosmopolitan Europe...
...I think I can demonstrate that the Euroskeptics have it exactly backward...
...Rather, Europeanization seizes and transforms national sovereignty in the core of its being...
...Europeanness" means being able to combine in one existence things that only appear to be mutually exclusive in the small-mindedness of ethnic thinking...
...It is turning into a lose-lose game...
...The closer we look at empirical reality, the clearer it becomes that the presumption of cultural homogeneity is really a denial of reality...
...And the second is that such crimes exist "whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated...
...They have merged into a European legal culture without abolishing national political cultures...
...In its elevation of pessimism to permanent despair, postmodernity joins hands with nationalistic Europe...
...This is not only far-reaching and provocative...
...And the same is true of the a-national state...
...This process is not complete...
...The easiest example is the now ubiquitous idea that Europe is a great community of common descent...
...This cosmopolitan legal principle is designed to protect the civilian population not from the violence of other hostile states (which is the province of "war crimes") but from violence committed by states against their own citizens—or more important, against its noncitizens, against people deemed outside its legal boundaries while existing inside its borders...
...Caught up in the false alter 36 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 natives of the national viewpoint, we are given the choice between no Europe—or no Europe...
...Only a pragmaticpolitical definition can express this a-human essence...
...If cosmopolitan Europe is founded in opposition to all substantial ideas of what constitutes the truly human, then what are we defending under the banner of "human rights...
...In simplified form, we might say that we are passing from nationalistic Europe, through postmodern Europe, to cosmopolitan Europe...
...It specifically designed this logic to counteract the ethnic perversion of the European tradition to which the nation-based form of European modernity had just shown itself so horribly liable...
...Nations don't follow cosmopolitan realism out of altruism, but rather out of egoism, out of realism...
...The concept of a cosmopolitan Europe opens our eyes to what has already long been here, which now needs to be affirmed and radicalized against the narrow-minded tendencies of the national viewpoint...
...The POLITICS ABROAD a-religious state did not abolish religion...
...What was being introduced here was not a new law or a even a new legal principle but rather a new legal logic that broke with the previous nation-state logic of international law...
...The same is true of a cosmopolitan Europe...
...But now an interesting question arises that is much harder to answer than it seems at first sight...
...From that perspective, European integration is a kind of European selfcolonization...
...That is how Europe looks when it is filtered through the exclusive categories of national thought, which can only understand it in one way: as a huge ethnocultural nation-state...
...Legally speaking, were these crimes against the Jews only...
...So if the state is a criminal one, the individual who serves it must still reckon with being charged and sentenced for his or her deeds before an international court of law...
...The national point of view sees two ways and two ways only of reading contemporary European politics and integration...
...National realpolitik is becoming unreal, not only in Europe, but throughout the world...
...Either there is one single state of Europe (federalism), in which case there are no national member states...
...Crimes against peace and war crimes both still presuppose the laws of a nation-state system of which they are violations...
...Cosmopolitan Europe was founded as something that struggles morally, politically, historically, and economically for reconciliation...
...Politics needs to regain credibility in order to craft real solutions...
...The legal realities of the EU already express this new kind of both/and reality that is gradually replacing the old either/or of national homogeneity...
...It is, of course, perfectly possible to be a Muslim and a democrat, just as one can be a socialist and a small businessperson—or, less pleasantly, a lover of the Bavarian landscape and the founder of an anti-foreigner organization...
...Those who share our continent, but do not share this Christian heritage, are seen as Europe's Other...
...It was an attempt to distill a European antidote to Europe...
...Within this framework of thought, whatever Europe gains, the individual nations lose...
...But they don't...
...It never occurs to them that perhaps Europe isn't properly conceived of as a nation-state...
...These enormous breaks with nationally POLITICS ABROAD based legal concepts were necessary because the persecution of the Jews was legal according to the laws of Nazi Germany and happened before the war took place...
...it allowed true religious diversity...
...This is obvious when it comes to the idea of a federation of states that are seen as defending their sovereignty against the expansion of European power...
...Indeed, they are virtually turning it into a race...
...By contrast, cosmopolitan Europe is the European tradition's institutionalized internal DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 35 POLITICS ABROAD critique...
...The catchphrase for the future might be, Move over America—Europe is back...
...To call Europe a Christian club is to talk as if "Londistan" did not exist—the capital city of Islam outside the Islamic world...
...It means entering as a player into the metapower game, into the struggle to form the rules of a new global order...
...Cosmopolitan law is forced to break national law in order to come into force...
...It can't...
...They become reflexive national interests by following repeated joint strategies of self-limitation...
...But it gets worse...
...3 National categories of thought make the thought of Europe impossible...
...I make my case with three theses...
...But of the three, it is this category that has endured in the European imagination...
...The whole idea of the EU was based on the idea that one could be German and French or British and German at the same time...
...The European conception of humanity doesn't contain any concrete definition of what it means to be human...
...Rather, it means the constitutional enshrinement of the principle of national and cultural and ethnic and religious tolerance...
...And this false picture of Europe's present is blocking its future development...
...And they follow these strategies because they work...
...Its application would be flatly rejected...
...The point is to make it a better one, in pragmatic and practical terms...
...The true standards for "Europeanness" lie in the answer to the question, "What will make Europe more European...
...They are turning Europe back into a religion...
...His latest book is Conversation with Ulrich Beck—An Introduction to his Work (forthcoming, Polity Press, 2003...
...Both have in common a critique of modernity, an antimodernity, that offers no alternative but the past...
...If we are now dealing with de-centered quasiDISSENT / Summer 2003 n 33 POLITICS ABROAD 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 institutions should be set up to protect...
...it cannot be completed...
...People who want to preserve the old nation-states have first to pretend that those old states still exist, that they are still national containers from which others are excluded...
...The first step toward the "limitless happiness" that Churchill foresaw was a limitless market...
...It conceives national and cultural identities as so inherently and mutually exclusive that you can't have two of them in the same logical space...
...IF WE WANT to excavate the original consciousness of cosmopolitanism that lies at the basis of the European project, it is the collective memory of the holocaust that provides our clearest archive—as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue in Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory* The founding set of documents of European cosmopolitanism, written when the war was still warm, as it were, were those of the Nuremberg Trials...
...This is how European interests emerge as a nation's own interests...
...This is how the national zero-sum game can be gradually replaced by a European plus-sum game...
...What had been crimes against the state now became crimes against humanity...
...Many people consider the Peace of Westphalia the foundation of the modern European state system...
...It is important to remember what this means because two things come together in it...
...More than anywhere else in the world, Europe shows that this step is possible...
...Cosmopolitan Europe was consciously conceived and launched after the Second World War as the political antithesis to a nationalistic Europe and the physical and moral devastation that had emerged from it...
...And this is how national interests become Europeanized...
...But European nations themselves no longer have this homogeneity either...
...Rather, it allowed it to flourish...
...And the answer is a more cosmopolitan Europe, where national identities become less and less exclusive and more and more inclusive...
...Economic globalization, transnational terrorism, global warming: the litany is familiar and daunting...
...This is what it means to say that national categories of thought make the thought of Europe impossible...
...The list of exceptions goes on until it swamps the rule...
...The resistance that built Europe was motivated by clear ideas of inviolable human dignity, and of the moral duty to relieve the suffering of others...
...POLITICS ABROAD Dangerous traces of this exclusivist idea exist even in the seemingly benign idea of cultural "dialogue...
...Both deny the possibility of struggling against the horror of European history by radicalizing the idea of Europe...
...It isn't European enough...
...These cosmopolitan ideals then became the foundations of the postwar European project...
...With it, 1,500 years of intra-European warfare came definitively to a close...
...The flipside of this substantial emptiness is radical tolerance and radical openness...
...Just as the Peace of Westphalia ended the religious wars by separating state from religion, we might consider it the ultimate goal of the European project to separate state and nation...
...It was in terms of these new categories that Nazi crimes were judged and Nazi criminals tried and sentenced...
...38 n DISSENT / Summer 2003...
...Otherwise it wouldn't be Europe...
...It allowed there to be more than one...
...The answer to global DISSENT / Summer 2003 e 37 POLITICS ABROAD problems that are gathering ominously all around and that refuse to yield to nation-state solutions is for politics to take a quantum leap from the nation-state system to the cosmopolitan state system...
...At this formative moment in its history, Europe mobilized its traditions to produce something historically new...
...This brings us to the second point: if we no longer base ourselves on some transcendent human substance that needs to be saved, then what is it we are trying to nurture and preserve...
...32 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 1.The European Union is not a Christian club...
...There were those who argued at the time of Nuremberg that the idea of crimes against humanity was a legal nullity because humanity is an empty concept...
...Today, even when we speak of "war criminals," what we really mean, as if it were now obvious, is people who have committed "crimes against humanity...
...It is a memorial specifically to the European barbarism that was made possible by the marriage of modernity and the nation-state...
...The lawyers and judges who participated in the Nuremberg Tribunal were ultimately unable to come to grips with this new category...
...Cosmopolitanism was created consciously, but it was created first as a reality, not as a theory...
...Methodological nationalism denies the empirical reality of Europe, which is that it is already a unity of diversity...
...But taken together they change everything...
...It is the embodiment of the cosmopolitan worldview in legal form...
...Turkey is, of course, the looming question that has brought this long-buried discourse of origins out of hiding...
...The reason anti-Europeans can't imagine a future for Europe is that they can't imagine its present...
...It is no accident that Europeanness is mostly defined procedurally...
...That objection should have more force today than it did at the time...
...They are trapped in the contradictions of EU member nations' misunderstanding of themselves...
...Europe is inconceivable on the basis of national homogeneity...
...IMAGINE FOR A moment what would happen if the European Union applied for membership in the European Union...
...Europe's collective memory of the Holocaust provides the basis of the EU...
...National irrealism is Europe's problem...
...A logic of inclusive oppositions is the only way to finally attain a Europe of national diversity...
...The Israeli Arabs...
...It is a mass grave upon which the new Europe made an oath and chose a different path...
...Europeanization means creating a new politics...
...It is not only practically but logically impossible for it to be the replacement of many small nations with one large nation...
...It suspends that code...
...Translated from the German by Michael Pollak ULRICH BECK is professor of sociology at the University of Munich and the London School of Economics and Political Science...
...In this sense, present-day European pessimism reverses the old rule: it remembers the past in order to forget the present...
...But they are also, in a deep-structural sense, anti-European...
...They fail to grasp essential things both about present-day Europe and about the nations that make it up...
...So it is not only the social fabric that has become thoroughly cosmopolitanized...
...The concept of crimes against humanity, on the other hand, suspends the nation-state presumption...
...And that when "truly human" becomes the basis of a nation state, the result is a totalitarian regime that seeks to exclude, to separate out, to remodel, or to annihilate all people who can't or don't want to fit its ideal...
...But it can become a transnational state, a more defined and complex variant of what its component nations are already becoming...
...This makes no sense, as its opponents point out...
...Who are crimes against humanity committed against...
...Here is the definition in Article 6c: "Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war...
...RINALLY, the phrase "any civilian population" suspends the principle of citizenship and replaces it with the principle of cosmopolitan responsibility...
...34 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 The Nuremberg court created both legal categories and a trial procedure that went far beyond the sovereignty of the nation state...
...National categories of thought have created this impasse...
...On what grounds can we guarantee that it won't be hauled off, tortured, and killed...
...Indeed, the sequence of enlightenment, postmodernity, and cosmopolitan modernity represents its beginning stages...
...National and European legal and political cultures have co-existed for decades and are continuing to evolve together...
...Cosmopolitanism does not mean an abolition of nation, any more than Westphalia meant an abolition of religion...
...It was the only way to capture in legal concepts and court procedures the historical monstrosity that was the systematic and state-organized extermination of the Jews...
...The picture normally evoked by dialogue is of two separate entities, "Islam" and the "West," each occupying its own territory, who then need to reach out to the other in order to have contact...
...And what's more, their internal differences are as large as any they have with each other...
...But without intending it, each following its own interests pulls all of them further and further into the same cooperative system...
...Those who would re-invent the Christian West in order to build walls around Europe are turning the project of the European Enlightenment on its head...
...As I have argued in these pages ("Democracy Beyond the Nation-State," Winter 1999) and elsewhere, this paradox goes right to the heart of what's wrong with the European Union...
...The Oriental Christians...
...They posit an individual responsibility for all perpetrators that is based outside the national legal context, in the community of nations...
...And the answer is because they follow their own national interests...
...Reconciliation was accomplished by being encoded into institutions, through the creation of profane interdependence in the economy, in politics, in security matters, in science, and in culture...
...The decline of the nation-state is really a decline of the national content of the state and an opportunity to create a cosmopolitan state system that is better able to deal with the problems that all nations face in the world today...
...It was in this spirit that Winston Churchill, standing amid the ruins of a destroyed continent in 1946, claimed, "If Europe were once united, ...there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and the glory which its four hundred million people would enjoy" It was the charismatic statesmen of the Western democracies—and specifically the individuals and groups most identified with resistance to the Nazis—who reinvented Europe...
...Including the perpetrators...
...Here we can see clearly how a cosmopolitan institutional logic was the first thing the builders of Europe reached for in trying to make a break with the past...
Vol. 50 • July 2003 • No. 3
