Filozofskivestnik 
Filozofskivestnik 
RethINkINgtheIdea oFeuRope 
Edited by 
JelicaŠumičRiha 


Filozofskivestnik 
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Filozofskivestnik (ISSN 0353-4510)jeglasiloFilozofskega inštituta Znanstveno­raziskovalnega centra Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti. Filozofski vestnik je znanstveni časopis za filozofijo z interdisciplinarno in mednarodno usmeritvijo in je forum za diskusijo o širokem spektru vprašanj s področja sod-obnefilozofije,etike,estetike,politične,pravnefilozofije,filozofijejezika,filozo­fije zgodovine in zgodovine politične misli, epistemologije in filozofije znanosti, zgodovinefilozofijeinteoretskepsihoanalize.Odprtjezarazličnefilozofskeusme­ritve,stileinšoleterspodbujateoretskidialogmednjimi. 
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Filozofski vestnik Rethinking the Idea of Europe 
Edited by 
Jelica Šumič Riha 
XL | 2/2019 
Izdaja | Issued by 
ZRC SAZU, Filozofski inštitut Institute of Philosophy 
Založnik | Published by 
Založba ZRC 
Ljubljana 2019 
CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 
32:1(082) 
RETHINKING the idea of Europe / edited by Jelica Šumič Riha. - Ljubljana : Založba ZRC, 2019. - (Filozofski vestnik, ISSN 0353-4510 ; 2019, 2) 
ISBN 978-961-05-0251-7 
1. Šumič-Riha, Jelica COBISS.SI-ID 303285504 
Contents 
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 2 | 2019 
The Historical Trajectory of the Idea of Europe 7 Tomaž Mastnak 
Europa: The Politics of Mythology 
The Idea of Europe and its Crisis 61 Rok Benčin 
Ideas and Their Destinies: Enlightenment, Communism, Europe 
81 Aleš Bunta 
Nietzsche’s Passage from Germany to Europe: The Three ‘Deaths’ of the Higher Cultural Unity 
97 Marina Gržinić Mauhler 
The Idea of Europe 
119 Peter Klepec 
Crisis, Europe 
139 Rado Riha 
Europa als Fall der Idee 
Collective Subjectivity between Populism and Anti-Populism 151 Timothy Appleton 
Brexit and the Tautology of Being 
157 Boštjan Nedoh 
A State of Refugees? Agamben and the Future of Europe 
177 Jelica Šumič Riha 
Europe’s Borderland and the Non-Citizen Politics 
211 Tadej Troha 
Living in a Parallel Universe: From Brussels to Orbán, and On 
237 Notes on Contributors 239 Abstracts 

Kazalo 
Filozofski vestnik | Letnik XL | Številka 2 | 2019 
Zgodovinski trajektorij ideje Evrope 7 Tomaž Mastnak 
Evropa: Politika mitologije 
Ideja  Evrope in njena kriza 61 Rok Benčin 
Ideje in njihove usode: razsvetljenstvo, komunizem, Evropa 
81 Aleš Bunta 
Nietzschejev prehod od Nemčije k Evropi: tri ‘smrti’ višje kulturne enotnosti 
97 Marina Gržinić Mauhler 
Ideja Evrope 
119 Peter Klepec 
Kriza, Evropa 
139 Rado Riha 
Evropa: primer ideje 
Kolektivna subjektivnost med populizmom in anti-populizmom 151 Timothy Appleton 
Brexit in tavtologija biti? 
157 Boštjan Nedoh 
Država beguncev? Agamben in prihodnost Evrope 
177 Jelica Šumič Riha 
Evropa kot obmejno območje in politika nedržavljanov 
211 Tadej Troha
Življenje v paralelnem univerzumu: od Bruslja k Orbánu – in dalje 
237 Podatki o avtorjih 239 Povzetki 

The Historical Trajectory of the Idea of Europe 
Tomaž Mastnak* 

Europa: The Politics of Mythology1 
Once the myth of Europa is seen as the European foundational myth, the ques­tions of the origin and meaning of the myth of Europa and of the word Europa itself become questions of the origins and meaning of Europe. Those questions can thus become of central importance for our construction of what is popularly called European civilization. The way one answers the questions has implica­tions for the fabrication of Ancient Greece and for our view of the role played by that Greece in the history of Europe. Answers to those questions involve the big issues of cultural heritage and racial descent, of historical, cultural, and racial identity. The myth of Europa functions as a prism through which we see world history. But at the same time, the way one sees or wants to see world history and Europe’s place in it, and the value one may wish to attach to European civiliza­tion (whatever that might mean), motivate and determine interpretations of the myth of Europa and of the name Europa. 
The issue at stake can be put very simply: Is Europe an autonomous civiliza­tion or was it historically influenced by Egypt and the Semitic civilizations of the Near East? If the Ancient Greece is – or is to be – regarded as the “cradle of European civilization,” as the “fountain-head of European culture,” or as the spring of the “European spirit,” the nature of that Greece determines the nature of who “we,” the “Europeans,” are. Our understanding of the Ancient Greeks is our self-understanding. The very language – cradle, fountainhead, spring, ori­gin, and the like – suggests that one is at the very least inclined toward seeing European civilization as autonomous2 and Ancient Greece as independent of its non-Greek neighbours. But inclination, in this context, is often too weak a word. “Our” autonomy is an imperative and a normative judgment that requires one 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and 
Political Subject”, which is funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 2 Dawson, for example, speaks of, and attributes much value to, “the autonomy of Western 
civilisation.” Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of 
European Unity, Sheed & Ward, New York 1952, p. 4. 
* Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies 
to keep Ancient Greece clean of Semitic or Egyptian influences, and “our” Euro­pean (or Western) civilization separate from the Semitic – and, later, Islamic – worlds.3 
Literary Wars over the Rights of Europe: Anti-Semitism and Colonialism 
If the ancient Greeks are to be regarded as the ones who discovered Europe and gave it its name,4 that name has to be Greek.5 Likewise, the myth of Europa should not be connected to ancient Near Eastern myths, cults, and religions, nor seen as preserving the memory of the Egyptian or Phoenician colonization of Greece. For a number of reasons, the myth of Europa has been given a privileged – or, at least, a prominent – place in literary wars over European birthrights. It is usually understood that those wars broke out toward the end of the nineteenth century. Such an understanding was promoted about a century ago by the pro­tagonists of that conflict. 
3 See, for example, Michel Astour, Hellenosemitica: An Ethnic and Cultural Study in West Se­mitic Impact on Mycenaean Greece, E. J. Brill, Leiden 1965, “Preface”; Ruth B. Edwards, Kad-mos the Phoenician: A Study in Greek Legends and the Mycenaean Age, Adolf M. Hakkert, Amsterdam 1979, Chap. 1; Martin Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, Vol. 1 of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N. J., 1987; Patricia Springborg, Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince, Polity Press, Cambridge 1992, Pt. 1. For a most stimulating discussion of the period when the place of Islamic empire in what is – with a fateful reductionism – called European history becomes an issue, see Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J. 1993. 
4 Gonzague de Reynold, La Formation de l’Europe, Vol. 1 of idem, Qu’est-ce que l’Europe?, Librairie de l’Université, Fribourg en Suisse 1944, p. 113; Martin Ninck, Die Entdeckung von Europa durch die Griechen, Benno Schwabe, Basel 1945; Le Goff, Editor’s Preface to the book series “The Making of Europe” (English publisher Blackwell). An exception to this rule is Bruno W. W. Dombrowski, Der Name Europa auf seinem griechi­schen und altsyrischen Hintergrund: Ein Beitrag zur ostmediterraranen Kultur- und Religi­onsgeschichte in frühgriechischer Zeit, Verlag Adolf M. Hakkert, Amsterdam 1984, who first argues that the name Europa is “genuinely Greek,” but then demonstrates that the myth of Europa only partly belongs to the Greek Sagenkreis. For his argument that Europa was the name under which Anat was domesticated in the Aegean, see op. cit., Chap. 4; cf. Sarah 
P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 1992, pp. 98, 99 (if we accept as a possibility that Anat, “along with her consort Baal, in his form as a bull, are migrating to Crete as Europa and Zeus”), cf. p. 176. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
One of those at the centre of the querelle was Victor Bérard. He was renowned as the editor and translator of the Odyssey and as the author of a minute analysis and controversial interpretation of Homer’s work. He entered the stage in 1894 with the publication of his thesis on the cults of Arcadia. He began by observing that there existed, on the one hand, a profound difference that separated the Arcadian myths and cults from “other more properly Hellenic religions” and, on the other hand, a great affinity between Arcadian myths and both Oriental myths and gods, heroes, legends, rites, and the symbols of the neighbouring Boeotia. Such a state of affairs implied the question he set himself the task of an­swering in that work. Spelled out, the question read: “[F]rom where could come the similitudes between the Arcadian myths and cults, on the one hand, and, on the other, the myths of the Orient and cults of the country of Cadmus?”6 Bérard searched for answers with what were then innovative methods of comparative mythology and historical semantics. He found them in the Phoenician presence in, and Semitic influences on, Arcadia and Boeotia, that is, in inland Greece. To substantiate his argument, he collected and employed “all that was then known of Phoenician mythology.”7 
Bérard knew what he was doing was controversial, but that did not deter him. On the contrary, he prefaced his analysis proper with a few powerfully written pages in which he directly confronted those “poorly reasoned and almost un­conscious sentiments” that inhibited his contemporaries from even consider­ing a Semitic influence on early Greece.8 Chief among those sentiments were “our European chauvinism” and “our Greek fanaticism.” The first term, borrowed 
6 Victor Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens: Essai de méthode en mythologie grecque, 
9 
Thorin & Fils, Paris 1894), pp. 5–6. 7 René Dussaud, “Victor Bérard,” Syria 12 (1931), p. 393. 8 Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens, p. 7. Bernal saw those pages of Bérard as a state­
ment that “beautifully summarizes the main theme of Black Athena,” and cited them at length. See Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, pp. 378–80. Bernal’s own declared political purpose was to “lessen European cultural arrogance.” Op. cit., p. 73. For a critical view of Bernal’s politics, see Guy MacLean Rogers, “Multiculturalism and the Foundations of Western Civilization,” in: Black Athena Revisited, ed. M. R. Lefkowitz and G. MacLean Rogers, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1996. (Disconcertingly, in his introductory paragraph Rogers cites B. Lewis as a “distinguished historian.”) Cf. also Pa­tricia Maynor Bikai, “Black Athena and the Phoenicians,” Journal of Mediterranean Archa­eology 3 (1990), No. 1, p. 73. 
from a contemporary geographer,9pointed at the belief in the superiority of “our Europe” over all other parts of the world. That supremacism, dividing Europe from Asia and Africa with an abyss, made it impossible to imagine “Asiatic in­fluences in a European country.” Within that general frame of mind, there was something especially inconceivable and inadmissible. The popular Aryan the­ories actually allowed an Asian invasion into Europe, for they maintained that “our first ancestors” came from the Asian heartland. 
But for our Aryan fathers we have the indulgence of good sons; truly speaking, even if they came from Asia, they are not Asiatics: for all eternity, they were In­do-Europeans. What is, by contrast, repugnant to all our prejudices is an invasion into our Aryan Europe from Semitic Asia. It really appears as if the Phoenician coast were further away from us than the Iranian plateau. 
Whereas Phoenician conquests in Africa – and even in Spain and Sicily, to which true Europeans look down as “terres africaines” – pose no problem to European historians, Phoenician traces in Marseilles, in Praeneste, in conti­nental Greece and the Greek islands, and in Crete, do. They are downplayed as temporary landings or simple trading posts, and if one goes so far as to speak of Phoenician fortresses or possessions, they can only be coastal establishments.10 
European chauvinism becomes a “true religious fanaticism” when the stranger is met not in Gaul, Etruria, Lucania, or Thrace, but in Greece. “We can only con­ceive Greece as the country of heroes and gods. Under porticos of white marble, in front of temples with noble lines, among the multitude of immortal statues we imagine a multitude of men as divine as their gods themselves, beautiful as their statues, great as their heroes, freed from all the base necessities under which we groan, and involved in an eternal conception of poetry and beauty.” That Greece of which we dream, that “civilized Greece,” we place at the origins of history. “It seems as if that country had one day suddenly emerged from the divine sea, with its towns, its temples, its helmeted hoplites, its draped orators, its Ionians with beautiful tunics, and, on top of its mountains, assemblies of its gods.”11 
9 Marcel Dubois, “Role des articulations littorales: étude de géographie comparée,” Annales 
de géographie 1 (1892), No. 2, p. 133. 
10 Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens, pp. 7–8. 
11 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
Caricatured or not, that noble dream had a deep impact on our view of histo­ry – an impact that was more detrimental to historical research than the “cult of the Bible.”12 Just as in our geography we separate Europe from Asia, Bérard wrote, so “in our history we separate what we call Greek history from what we call ancient history.” Regardless of what Herodotus said about everything Greek coming from Phoenicia and Egypt and regardless of the indisputable evidence of Oriental influence provided by archaeology, it was sacrilegious to regard the Greeks as having “borrowed from the Semitic Orient right up to their alphabet,” to maintain the hypothesis that Greek institutions, customs, religions and ritu­als, ideas and literature, the whole of the earliest Greek civilization were inher­ited from the Orient.13 
In the 1920s, Victor Bérard wrote that, until then, for more than two centuries and a half “learned Europe” had given credence to the research that accepted – moreover, did actually no more than comment on – the belief of the ancients themselves in the Egyptian or Phoenician origins of Hellenic heroes and gods.14 He described the offensive in scholarly circles against what he considered the time-honoured view of ancient Greek history as an “anti-Semitic reaction.”15 He was on the receiving side. But it was those on the offensive who spoke of defence and rights. Bérard cited Salomon Reinach, who called for the “recovery of the rights of Europe against the pretensions of Asia.”16 The intellectual movement that saw its mission in “defending” Europe against Asia, and was often quick to 
12 Early modern scholars – Guichard, Bochart, Thomassin, and many others – were, eviden­tly, “aveuglés par leur confiance dans tous les mots de la Bible” and they launched adven­turous hypotheses, false in detail and untenable as a whole, but “il est plus discutable que leurs vues de l’ensemble et leur philosophie de l’histoire aient été moins justes que les nôtres.” They believed in the “miracle juif” alone and were not subjected to the “super­
11 
stition de la Grece.” Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens, pp. 13–14. C. Autran, “Phéni­ciens”: Essai de contribution a l’histoire antique de la Méditerranée, Paul Geuthner, Paris 1920, pp. viii-ix, on the other side of the barricades, complained about the excessive influ­ence of the Revelation and of the Biblical past “sur tout ce qui touche a l’ancien Orient […] Les livres saints, cela va sans dire, mettent l’Égypte, la Palestine, la Mésopotamie, au pre­mier plan.” 
13 Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens, pp. 9–10. 14 Victor Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Armand Colin, Paris 1927, Vol. 2: pp. 219. 15 Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Vol. 2: p. 219. 16 Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Vol. 1: p. 16; Vol. 2: p. 15. See Salomon Reinach, Le 
mirage oriental, G. Masson, Paris 1893, p. 3. Bérard dedicated the second volume of his Les Phénicines et l’Odyssée to Salomon Reinach, “archéologue des origins.” 
reduce the presumed Asian threat to Semitic influences on Europe’s historical for­mation, was not a purely academic affair. One did not really have to suspect a con­nection between the rights-minded academics concerned for Europe and some contemporary political movements on the right. Such a connection was at hand. 
Wolfgang Helbig, whom Bérard also cited, pointed at that connection very ele­gantly. “The Ancients attributed to the Phoenicians a big influence on the early Greeks,” he wrote, “and this tradition has of old been accepted by the majority of modern scholars.” Helbig admitted, referring to his Das homerische Epos aus den Denkmälern erläutert (1884), that he was one of those who had believed that the Phoenicians played an important role in the development of the civilization known from the Mycenaean monuments. Then he added: “In recent years, as a person in Moliere says, ‘we have changed all this.’ The unfortunate Phoenicians have become the object of a profound antipathy of a number of scholars, of an antipathy that one would almost be tempted to put in connection with the an-ti-Semitic movement.”17 
That connection burst into the open in the Germany of the 1930s. The path to that explosion was paved by “the so-called neo-humanists and, above all, by those representatives of the ‘third humanism’ who have contaminated Classical studies with racism and claimed the originality and purity of the Greek civi­lization as Indo-European and Nordic.” They either negated any contribution of Oriental (and Mediterranean) civilizations to Greek civilization or considered such contributions insignificant.18 Assimilating Ancient Greece to Germany, the neo-humanism thereof was compatible with Nazi power and, at its worst, eager to serve it. The assertion of the feeling of racial closeness between the German people and the Greeks was the basis for teaching the virtues that the “Nation­
17 Wolfgang Helbig, “Ein ägyptisches Grabgemälde und die mykenische Frage,” in: Sitzun­gsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und der historischen Classe der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München, 1896, Heft 4, cited in: Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Vol. 1: p. 17. 
18 Filippo Cassola, Scritti di storia antica: Istituzione e politica, Jovene Editore, Naples 1993, 
p. 389. The text was first printed as an introduction to Santo Mazzarino, Fra Oriente e Occidente: Ricerche di storia greca archaica, Rizzoli, Milan 1989. On “neo-humanism,” see Stefan Rebenich, “Alte Geschichte in Demokratie und Diktatur: Der Fall Helmut Berve,” Chiron 31 (2001). 
europa: the politics of mythology 
al-Socialist state needed.”19 Those humanists required that research in ancient history be limited to those peoples that “appear to be racially related to us and can be valued as founders of the Indo-Germanic culture of Europe.”20 Meeting that requirement meant cutting the “racially and spiritually alien peoples of the East” – that is, the Ancient Orient – out of ancient history.21 In such a frame­work, no lesser authority than Helmut Berve could celebrate the Romans for cleansing their Lebensraum of the Semites. In a lecture that this leading histo­rian of Classical antiquity of the Third Reich delivered thirteen times during the war, he praised Romans for the destruction of Carthage, a Phoenician colony, thereby becoming the saviours of the Western world: “Because Rome gained victory and eradicated Semitentumin the domain of the western Mediterranean, it saved the West and created the possibility for European culture.”22 
Bérard did not live to see historians of Classical antiquity and philologists serv­ing Hitler. But his account of the struggles in which he was a prominent protag­onist was accepted by some scholars who, in the second half of the twentieth century, kept grappling with the same or similar basic issues as he had. Michel Astour, for example, wrote that the reaction against admitting a strong “West 
19 “Echte humanistische Bildung erzieht […] wenn sie recht betrieben wird, zu den Tugen-den, die der nationalsozialistische Staat braucht.” Helmut Berve, “Antike und national-sozialistischer Staat,” Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 24 (1934), cited in Rebenich, “Alte Geschichte in Demokratie und Diktatur,” p. 472. On the “Nähegefühl rassischer Verwan­dschaft,” wrote Jaeger in Paideia, cited and contextualized in Beat Näf, “Werner Jaeggers Paideia: Entstehung, kulturpolitische Absichten und Rezeption,” in Werner Jaeger Recon­sidered: Proceedings of the Second Oldfather Conference, held on the campus of the Univer­sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 26–28, 1990, ed. W. M. Calder III, Scholars Press, Atlanta, Georgia 1992, p. 138. On Berve, cf. Luciano Canfora, Le vie del classicismo, Laterza, Bari 1989, p. 169 ff. 
13 
20 Helmut Berve, Geschichte der Hellenen und Römer (Leipzig, 1936), p. 1, cited in Rebenich, “Alte Geschichte in Demokratie und Diktatur,” p. 477. 
21 See Rebenich, “Alte Geschichte in Demokratie und Diktatur,” p. 478. Cf. William M. Calder III, “Werner Jaeger and Richard Harder: an Erklärung,” in idem, Studies in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship, Jovene, Naples 1984; Näf, “Werner Jaeggers Paideia“; Do­nald O. White, “Werner Jaeger’s ‘Third Humanism’ and the Crisis of Conservative Cultural Politics in Weimar Germany,” in Werner Jaeger Reconsidered: Proceedings of the Second Oldfather Conference, held on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 26–28, 1990. 
22 Helmut Berve, “Rom und Karthago,” cited from archival material in Bayerische Staatsbi­bliothek in Rebenich, “Alte Geschichte in Demokratie und Diktatur,” p. 484. Cf. Canfora, Le vie del classicismo, p. 211. 
Semitic element” in parts of Ancient Greece “arose in Germany in the 1890s, led by Beloch. This school, which rapidly found followers in France and Britain, soon prevailed in Greek scholarship. It categorically asserted that all reports of Phoenicians in Greece were absolutely baseless, pure fiction or mistakes.”23 Con­tributors to the Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswis­senschaft went so far, Astour continued, as to declare not only Cadmus, but even Adonis non-Semitic, and purely Greek names and figures.24 Beloch’s doctrine became and remained “absolutely dominant” well into the 1930s.25 “Almost the only Hellenist to oppose this trend was Victor Bérard, the distinguished editor and commentator of the Odyssey […] His books were completely ignored; practi­cally no historian of Greece dared to mention them in his works.”26 
A quarter of a century later, Martin Bernal wrote of the hostility with which Clas­sicists met Astour’s Hellenosemitica. Remarks on Astour came toward the close of Bernal’s volume, whose subtitle alone – The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization – “guaranteed it a swift and largely negative response from academ­ic circles in Europe and North America.”27 More than anything else, the volume is a debatable history of the mainly early-modern and modern historiographies and theories of the role and place of ancient Egypt and the Near East in what is today commonly seen as the birth of European civilization.28 Bernal called the “conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages” – i.e. that “Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the native inhabitants” – the “Ancient Model.” He described how the rise and triumph of “Hellenomania” 
23 Michel Astour, “Greek Names in the Semitic World and Semitic Names in the Greek Wor­
ld,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 23 (1964), No. 3, p. 195. 
24 Astour, “Greek Names in the Semitic World,” p. 195. 
25 Astour, Hellenosemitica, p. xiv. 
26 Astour, “Greek Names in the Semitic World,” p. 195; cf. Astour, Hellenosemitica, pp. xii-xiv. 
27 Joseph Alexander MacGillivray, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Mi­
noan Myth, Hill and Wang, New York 2000, p. 310. 
28 For a critique of Bernal’s history of historiography, see Bikai, “Black Athena and the Phoe­nicians”; James D. Muhly, “Black Athena versus Traditional Scholarship,” Journal of Medi­terranean Archaeology 3 (1990), No. 1, especially p. 86 ff.; Richard Jenkyns, “Bernal and the Nineteenth Century,” in Black Athena Revisited, ed. M. R. Lefkowitz and G. MacLean Rogers, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1996; Robert E. Norton, “The Tyranny of Germany over Greece?” in Black Athena Revisited, op. cit.; Robert Palter, “Eighteenth-cen­tury Historiography in Black Athena,” in Black Athena Revisited, op. cit.; cf. also Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Comment on Black Athena,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995), No. 1. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
brought about the decline and fall of that “Ancient Model.” It was replaced by the “Aryan Model”, which in its “broad form,” developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, “denied the truth of the Egyptian settlements and questioned those of the Phoenicians.” The “extreme” “Aryan Model,” which flourished “during the twin peaks of anti-Semitism in the 1890s and again in the 1920s and 30s,” went a step further and “denied even the Phoenician cultural influence.”29 
These accounts, or at least the aspects I have thus far mentioned, highlighted what Astour called external considerations. “The polemic against admitting any Semitic influence upon Greece was conducted with so much passion,” he wrote, “that its motivation seemed to be derived from external considerations.”30Be­sides anti-Semitism, there was another crucially important “external consid­eration” that I need to mention before turning to other aspects of the issue at hand: colonialism. The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries was “the epoch when the colonialism of the European powers was triumphant.” In light of that European triumph, it was “unbelievable that the nations so important today should have played no role in the past.” The victors of the present had to be given a correspondingly honourable place in the past.31 
These are the words of our contemporary. But already in the mid-nineteenth century, at the latest, learned men of Europe who would not let themselves be confined to ivory towers set out to prove that all durable conquests had “radi­ated” from the Occident to the Orient. Using historical analogies with the pres­ent, those public intellectuals were engaged in undoing the unintended con­sequences of the “Aryan theories.” Those considerably popular theories traced the origins of “Europe” to the Indo-European invasions from Central Asia. While such theorizing may have been instrumental in liberating Europeans from their 15 Semitic roots and influences, it made them Asiatics by birth. It tied Europe to 
29 Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, pp. 1–2. 30 Astour, “Greek Names in the Semitic World,” p. 195. 31 Guy Bunnens, L’expansion phénicienne en Méditerranée: essai d’interprétation fondé sur 
une analyse des traditions littéraires, Institut historique belge de Rome, Bruxelles, Rome 1979, cited in Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, p. 376. Bunnens speak of authors such as Reinach and Autran as having been “not always ruled by scientific objectivity alone.” 
Asia as Europe’s origin. But Europe was not to be seen as an Asian dependency, as Salomon Reinach put it,32 or as an appendix of Asia.33 
When these issues were debated in the Parisian Société d’anthropologie in the 1860s, one of the savants simply observed that, in history, the peoples of Europe had made immense conquests and founded numerous colonies in other parts of the world, whereas other peoples had conquered very little from the Europe­ans. Moreover, the latter had been momentary irruptions rather than permanent settlements.34 In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were no Euro­peans subject to a stranger, except for those who lived under the Ottoman Em­pire. On the other hand, European conquests and colonies had always been very solid. Europe may be small and Europeans not very numerous, but America, Asia, and Australia (Africa was not even mentioned) were under their rule.35 The 
32 Salomon Reinach, L’origine des Aryens: historire d’une controverse, E. Leroux, Paris 1892, pp. 32–37. According to Reinach, op. cit., p. 33, the first to protest against the theory of the “Asiatic origins of Europeans” was “un illustre géologue belge,” J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, in 1848. 
33 The image came to be quite popular in the twentieth century but goes back at least to Adelung, who, in 1809, described Europe as “eigentlich nur die westliche Fortsetzung von Asien.” Johann Christoph Adelung,Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachkunde mit dem Va-ter Unser als Sprachprobe in bey nahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten, Vossische Bu-chhandlung, Berlin 1806–17, Vol. 2: p. 3. For later expressions of the idea, see Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1968, p. xvii (Europe as “the western extension of the Asiatic land mass”); Winston S. Churchill, Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 and 1948, ed. R. S. Churchill, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1950, p. 77 (who dismissively attributed to “professional geographers” the view that Europe was “the peninsula of the Asiatic land mass”); J. G. A. Pocock, “Vous autres Européens – or Inventing Europe,” Filozofski Vestnik/Acta philosophica, 14 (2/1993), p. 146. 
34 This view is echoed in Autran, “Phéniciens,” p. vii. Autran wrote that it occasionally ha­ppened that “vieilles races indigenes du Nil ou de l’Euphrate” – either under “souverains entreprenants” or when forced by the circumstances – would become “active.” “Mais ces manifestations demeurent momentanées; ces sont de simple ‘campanes’; elles restent to-ujours d’ordre purement militaire et fiscal. Jamais elles n’aboutissent a une exploitation proprement dite des pays asssujettis.” Reinach, L’origine des Aryens, pp. 38–39, citing Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie, 1864. Some fifteen years later, the Director of the Museum in Mainz, Lindenschmit, argued in his Handbuch der deutschen Alterthumskunde that most of the invasions known from history had moved from the west toward the east, and that the Indo-Europeans had preserved, into his own time, the same expansionist power, whereas the mixing of races in their colo­nies in Persia and India had led to the loss of a taste for far away migration and conquest. Reinach, L’origine des Aryens, p. 70. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
peak of European domination over the world thus appears to have accelerated European colonialization of the past. Its complement was a retrospective decol­onization of the territories the modern Europeans called Europe, especially of Ancient Greece. A number of historians denied the existence of Egyptian and/ or Phoenician colonies in the Aegean or in continental Greece. For Berve, as we have seen, the Roman destruction of the Phoenician colony at Carthage was a European war of liberation. 
With the liberation of European colonies after World War II, ancient history, too, was in need of decolonization and began to be decolonized. “We are all living in a period of decolonization. This is true as well of ancient history,” as thought­ful and moderate a historian as Arnaldo Momigliano declared in the 1960s.36 Since the decolonization – qua de-Semitization – of Ancient Greece culminated in Nazi historiography, the decolonization in our own times, as much as it con­cerned (among many other things) ancient history, involved de-Nazification. It involved, Momigliano explained, finding a meaning of Greekness that would be of use to the world that had suffered Nazism (as well as experimented with com-munism).37 But redesigning ancient history required more than breaking the in­timate connection between the study of Greek history and Nazism. For one hun­dred and fifty years, Momigliano pointed out, Classical studies had been domi­nated by the German science of Classical antiquity [Altertumswissenschaft]. The problem lay in the illusion of the affinity between the Greeks and Germans that had generated an interpretation of Greek history through the prism of German nationalism.38If what the Nazi historians made of Ancient Greece was an excess, it was – within that historiographical interpretation – a logical one. Greek histo­ry called for a revision of its basic premises. The first and essential among those premises that Momigliano mentioned was “the separation between the Greek world and Oriental world as two opposed worlds.”39 17 
36 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca,” in idem, Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Storia e letteratura, Rome 1969, p. 43. The article was first presented to the Congresso degli Storici Italiani in Perugia, 1967. 
37 Momigliano,, “Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca,” p. 43. 38 Ibid., pp. 43, 45. 39 Ibid., p. 46. 
Literary Wars: Europa’s Semitism 
This brief survey of the “external considerations” that shaped Classical studies for much of the past two centuries has brought us back to considering the inter­nal logical structure of the “anti-Semitic reaction” in the study of Classical antiq­uity. The “external considerations” played a role in determining the framework within which the myth of Europa was discussed. Turning to “internal considera­tions,” I hope I will be able to indicate how the logic of the anti-Semitic argument impacted interpretations of the myth of Europa and how specific interpretations of the myth of Europa contributed to the articulation of that argument. 
Turning to “internal considerations” will necessarily modify the account of the intellectual struggles given, especially, by Victor Bérard and Michel Astour. But let me start with Robert Brown, an “independent scholar”40 who, however, was not impartial. Writing a couple of years before the close of the nineteenth centu­ry, he considered Bérard one of his “allies.”41Brown was an outspoken represent­ative of the “Aryo-Semitic school of Hellenic mythologies” and thought highly of the “great scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, distinguished by their immense erudition and untiring industry,” who had fully acknowledged the “Semitic influence in regions Hellenic” – as far as “their lights permitted.” But he distanced himself from their followers closer to his own times. Those great European scholars, Brown stated, had been succeeded in the last century, or century and a half, by an “inferior race, marked by an ever narrowing view, a portentous bigotry, and a philology which […] expired at length in a mere night­mare of absurdities.”42 Scholars of that distinction were joined by “a curious race of ‘Cranks,’ by no means yet extinct,” and together they produced “follies” that captured the public imagination and filled with their writings bookshelves “in almost every library.”43 It was those “follies” that provoked 
a great reaction, in which Germany took the lead. The old-fashioned notions were contemptuously abolished almost en bloc. The motto of this new school was ‘Greece for the Greeks.’ Numerous ancient errors perished forever, but, unfortu­
40 Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, p. 370. Robert Brown Jr., Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, Williams and Norgate, London 1898, p. 92. 
42 Ibid., p. 81. 43 Ibid., p. 82. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
nately, with them a certain proportion of truth was also thrown overboard. Semit­ic influence in Greece was scouted as an absurdity; and perhaps the high-water mark in this reaction was reached when ‘Kadmos’ was declared to be a pure Hel­lenic name. 
The “German Classical school,” Brown had no difficulty admitting, was “im­measurably superior to the folly which they overthrew.” Otfried Mülller was an example of “superb Classical scholarship.” But “the Classical phalanx of Otfried Müller,” just like the “Aryan” school (whose emergence Brown linked to the “British power in India,” and whose chief representative in England was Max Müller), “carried away by the splendour of their achievements, have pushed their claims too far, and have not conceded sufficient place to that great histor­ical influence, which, as the years roll, it becomes ever clearer and clearer that the Semitic East exercised upon archaic Hellas.”44 
Unlike Bérard and Astour, Brown saw the beginning, rather than the close, of the nineteenth century as the time when the contest over Semitic influences on early Greece emerged. Brown’s view is more accurate. It also corresponds to the more recent account given by the Italian historian Santo Mazzarino. In his Fra Oriente e Occidente (1947), Mazzarino argued that the historical “science” of Greek Antiquity was born out of the reaction to the “Orientalizing Romanti­cism,” that is, to the Romantic views of ancient history in general and of Greek mythology in particular.45 For the formation of that “science,” grappling with the issues regarding the relationship between the Orient and the Occident was 
19 
44 Ibid., pp. 82–83. I am not sure that, in the cited passage, Brown comes across as an eccen­tric who gives a “sense of embattlement,” as suggested by Bernal, The Fabrication of Anci­ent Greece, p. 370. As working in favour of his own position, Brown pointed at the “astoni­shing advance in our knowledge of the ancient and archaic non-Classical world, which we denote by such terms as Egyptology and Assyriology.” In addition to archaeology, Brown mentioned the anthropology that “has taken field, represented by many an acute and in­dustrious student and compiler. All honour to them, and success to their efforts!” Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, p. 84. 
45 That view was shared by Charles Autran, a historian with a different outlook, who in the early 1920s characterized “la transformation véritablement décisive” that had taken place within Classical studies in the past half a century, as a movement away from the “roman­tisme un peu facile” of earlier Classical scholars. Autran, “Phéniciens,” p. 135. 
of central importance.46 Momigliano responded to Mazzarino’s book with sharp criticism. His main objection was that Mazzarino’s own study revolved around the “Romantic problem of the relationship between Orient and Occident” which Momigliano, when he wrote his review, considered a “fantasmatic problem.” For Momigliano, that was un problema-fantasma because he believed that the issue existed no more, that it had dissolved. Debating the relationship between Orient and Occident, Momigliano argued, may have made sense at the time when the Indo-European linguistic unity was discovered and some were led to believe that it was possible to construe an Aryan civilization from which the Semites were excluded. But once we had learned to know all those civilizations from Asia Minor in which the Indo-European and non-Indo-European elements were inseparable from each other, both the myth of an Indo-European civiliza­tion and the problem of Orient-Occident were finished.47 
What Momigliano then wrote was not all too subtle, and twenty years later he came to judge Mazzarino’s work in question much more favourably: as a contri­bution to overcoming the isolation of Greece from the Orient established under the domination of German Classical studies, by then deeply discredited.48What is important for me here, however, is not so much the disagreement between Momigliano and Mazzarino as a convergence of their views. Momigliano de­scribed Friedrich Creuzer’s Die historische Kunst der Griechen (1803) as marking the “beginning of a new era of historical studies in Europe.”49 Mazzarino placed at the beginning of the formation of “scientific” historiography Otfried Müller’s critique of Creuzer’s interpretation of myths. Whereas the history of Greek art 
46 “La ‘scienza’ storica dell’antichita greca e sorta – almeno come scienza – in epoca ro­mantica; e sorta dalla problematica del rapporto fra Oriente e Occidente.” Mazzarino, Fra Oriente e Occidente, p. 7, and Chap. 1. 
47 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Santo Mazzarino, Fra Oriente e Occidente. Ricerche di storia greca arcaica. La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1947,” in Mazzarino, Fra Oriente e Occidente, pp. 398–99. For Mazzarino’s response, not published at the time, see Santo Mazzarino, “Per un ‘discor-so sul metodo,’“ especially pp. 407–9. 
48 See Momigliano, “Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca,” p. 48. Momigliano’s revised view is in agreement with Cassola’s characterization of Mazzarino’s book as containing “the last echoes of the polemics” against neo-humanist/Nazi contamination of Classical studies with racism. Cassola, Scritti di storia antica, p. 389. 
49 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography (1946),” in idem, Stu­dies on Modern Scholarship, ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell, trans. T. J. Cornell, Uni­versity of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1994, p. 1. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
was under the influence of Winckelmannian Classicism, Greek religion was studied under “Romantic and Orientalizing auspicies.” Müller’s Prolegomena (1825) and Lobeck’s Aglaophamus(1829) dealt a severe blow to such Orientaliz­ing fantasizing, fantasticherie orientalizzanti.50 
Momigliano characterized Creuzer’s mythology as an “attempt to give a scien­tific basis to the Neoplatonic interpretation of Greek mythology.”51 This was a considerably more charitable judgment than that which portrayed Creuzer as “a man of yeasty imagination who used philology to support his idea that ancient myth represented the disguised embodiment of a great symbolic system,” thus satisfying the “romantic desire to find transcendental wisdom in the East.”52 His Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (1810–12) was praised by a contempo­rary philosopher as having been written in a “true philosophical spirit”; Schell­ing greeted it with enthusiasm, Creuzer himself posed as Hegel’s colleague – but philologists were not impressed. Creuzer made the guess that that was so “pre­cisely because” philosophers were impressed.53 
Creuzer’s guessing aside, after the publication of the second edition of his Sym­bolik und Mythologie (1819–21), “the debate on the meaning of myth reached un­precedented heights.”54 One of the protagonists of that debate was Karl Otfried Müller, who first published two reviews of Creuzer’s new publication and then his Prolegomena.55 This latter work made a strong impression – and continues to impress56 – and in the Preface to the third edition of his Symbolik und Mythologe, 
50 Mazzarino, Fra Oriente e Occidente, pp. 8–9. 51 Momigliano, “Friedrich Creuzer,” p. 1. 52 Robert Ackerman,The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists, 
Garland, New York 1991, p. 23. 
21 
53 Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 3rd 
ed., Carl Wilhelm Leske, Leipzig and Darmstadt 1837–43, Vol. 1: pp. xiv-xv; cf. Momigli­
ano, “Friedrich Creuzer,” p. 1 (referring to Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der 
Mythologie). 54 Josine H. Blok, “‘Romantische Poesie, Naturphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte’: 
K. O. Müller’s Understanding of History and Myth,” in Zwischen Rationalismus und Ro­mantik: Karl Otfried Müller und die antike Kultur, ed. W. M. Calder III and R. Schlesier, Weidmann, Hildesheim 1998, p. 77. 
55 For a detailed account of this publishing history, see Blok, “‘Romantische Poesie, Na-turphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte,’” pp. 76–94. 56 Cf. Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, p. 24. Unlike other contemporary philologists’ publications, Müllers Prolegomena “still holds the interest of the reader.” 
dated 1835, Creuzer was prompted to declare that he refused to recognize Müller as the lawgiver in mythology.57Modern historians are far from unanimous when it comes to determining whether Müller was a Romantic or rationalist.58 Creuzer himself rejected Müller’s turning the interpretation of myths into an intellectual operation, Verstandesoperation. Against such rationalism, which he compared to an obstetrical procedure that kills both the mother and the baby, Creuzer be­lieved that the meaning of myths is accessible to a “quick glimpse of the spirit.” Such a gift can be given to a person, or not, but it cannot be learnt. As such, the interpretation of myths was for the chosen ones. “This is why mythology is not the call of every philologist.”59 
There were other disagreements between Creuzer and some of his contemporar­ies. There were some, Creuzer wrote, “who do not want to hear anything about the derivation of Hellenic and Italic religions from Oriental religions.” That ob­jection, Creuzer admitted, was aimed at him as well as at “many of the great­est Alterthumsforscher, some of whom were still alive.” He was willing to make some modifications of his views, but, he declared, he was not going to change his basic premise until he saw clear proof that Herodotus’s account of the ori­gins of the Greek religion was not worthy of credence. At the time of his writing, he regarded such proof as still missing. Creuzer also told his reader that it was “mainly younger German philologists” who had insisted on the separation be­tween the Greek and Oriental religions, while he had received friendly attention from “the most famous Orientalists at home and abroad, and archaeologists” who worked on Greece and Oriental countries.60 
57 “Müller [hat] schon vor zehn Jahren den Beruf in sich gefühlt, in der Mythologie als Gese­tzgeber aufzutreten.” Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, Vol. 1: p. xi. 
58 Alfred Baeumler, “Bachofen, der Mythologe der Romantik,” introduction to J. J. Bachofen, Der Mythus von Orient und Occident: Eine Metaphysik der alten Welt, ed. M. Schroeter , Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1926, pp. CXLV, CXLVI n. *, called him a “Ro-mantiker von Geblüt” and the historian and archaeologist of Romanticism. For Arnaldo Momigliano, “A Return to Eighteen-Century ‘Etrusceria’: K. O. Müller,” in Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship, p. 302, the term “Romantic” was out of the question. Bur-kert placed Müller on the side of the rational “Wissenschaft,” as opposed to Romanticism. Cited in Blok, “‘Romantische Poesie, Naturphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte,’” p. 56, who – like other contributors to the volume in which the article was published – sees Müller as “between rationalism and Romanticism.” 
59 Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, Vol. 1: pp. xi–xii. 60 Ibid., p. xiv. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
But Müller does not actually seem to have been hostile toward the Orient. In his Göttingen course on mythology, he lectured not only on Hellenes and Italians, but also on Indians, Egyptians, Near Eastern peoples, and Persians. He was ap­parently sincerely interested in Egyptian culture and art.61 He rejected “Jewish, Phoenician, Egyptian, Indian, and God knows which else” influence on Greek religion, and was congratulated for it,62 on methodological grounds. He was convinced that only the study of historical specificity could yield sound results, and conceived the history of Greece as the histories of Greek tribes and cities. “Archaic Greece was to him a complex of local and regional cultures, in which the character of the individual tribes was difficult to distinguish from the shape of the countryside in which each of them had settled.”63 This approach applied to the study of myths as well. In his first major publication, Müller rejected deal­ing with “ancient tale and ancient faith” that held that “at the root all is one and all the revelation of the divine is one and the same.”64 Some contemporaries con­sidered Creuzer and his followers at fault for blending all the mythological into a One (“Inaneindermischen alles Mythologisches in Eins).”65 Müller insisted on reconstructing the varieties of religious experience as shaped by the diverse geo­graphical settings of different tribes. That is not far from our contemporary view of pagan antiquity as “a vast, unthinkably intricate, complex of local cults.”66 Müller’s tribal dimension, however, has an uncanny tinge. Because he believed that a “sort of profound combination of tribal and local experiences had left its impression on the Greek myths,” some historians have been inclined to notice “more than a touch of ‘Blut und Boden’ mysticism in the very gentle Müller.”67 
61 Blok, “‘Romantische Poesie, Naturphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte,’“ pp. 81, 83 n. 93. 62 The citation is from a letter of Müller’s friend M. H. E. Meier, from 1821, cited in Blok, “‘Ro-mantische Poesie, Naturphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte,’“ p. 82. 
23 
63 Arnaldo Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie and the Meaning of Myth,” in idem, Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Storia e letteratura, Rome 1984, p. 272. 
64 “[…] daß in der Wurzel Alles Eins sei und alle Offenbarung des Göttlichen Eine und diesel-be.” Karl Otfried Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, Vol. 1 of idem, Geschichten helleni­scher Stämme und Städte, ed. F. W. Schneidewin, Josef Marx, Breslau 1844, p. 3. The first edition appeared in 1820. 
65 K. H. W. Völcker to Müller, 1825, cited in Blok, “‘Romantische Poesie, Naturphilosophie, Construktion der Geschichte,’“ p. 94. 66 J. L. Lightfoot, Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess: Edited with Introduction, Translation and Commentary, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003, p. 2. 67 Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena,” p. 272. 
Müller’s blood-and-soil particularism was at odds with the idea that there exist­ed a single primordial religious experience. Led by the methodological principle that all myths were local,68 Müller was as chary of Panhellenic constructions of Greek myths as of Morgenländerei, for which he reproached Herodotus.69 Ac­cessing the Greek myths – coeval with studying Greek origins70 – meant recov­ering archaic local traditions, and thus going back beyond Homer and Hesiod. Their poetry – as individual creation, levelling and unifying the multiplicity of local cults and tales – lay in the way of scientific interpretation of myths, just like pragmatic books of ancient historians who strove to transform myths into history.71The former constructed a unified Greece; the latter represented it as in debt to the Orient. 
Müller did not deny the usefulness of studying mythologies other than Greek, but his own subject in Prolegomenawas Greek myths.72 The way he tackled the subject contradicted Creuzer’s basic assumptions.73 Müller polemically main­
68 The big mistake to be found in books on myths was the view of “Aelteste Mythologie ohne Lokal,” against which Müller asserted that there was “eigentlich […] keinen Mythus ohne Lokal.” Karl Otfried Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, Vandho­eck und Ruprecht, Göttingen 1825, p. 229. 
69 Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 1. On Müller’s reservations regarding mythological Panhellenism, see Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena,” pp. 276–77. As a matter of principle, Müller’s method must be equally unsympathetic to Panhellenic and to Orien­talizing tendencies in the interpretation of Greek myths. But the method itself may have been modelled on the brothers Grimm’s picture of the German “Völkerwanderung.” See Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena,” pp. 274, 283; cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Un ‘ri­torno’ alla etruscheria settecentesca: K. O. Müller,” in idem, Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Storia e letteratura, Rome 1987, p. 47 ff. If that was the case, Müller’s method may be much less neutral than it appears to be. 
70 Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena,” p. 282, pointed out that Müller shared this view 
with Gottfried Hermann. 
71 Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, p. 97. 
72 Ibid.,pp. iv, 282. I am not sure whether Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena,” p. 280, was right to qualify Müller’s invitation to study the mythologies of other nations as “co­mically exaggerated.” Müller himself wrote on Oriental mythology. Cf., e.g. the review of Sanchuniathonis historiarum Phoeniciae libros, “Sandon und Sarnadapal,” in Karl Otfried Müller, Kleine deutsche Schriften über Religion, Kunst, Sprache und Literatur, Leben und Geschichte des Alterthums, ed. E. Müller, Josef Max und Komp., Breslau 1947–48, Vol. 1: 
p. 445 ff; Vol. 2: p. 100 ff. See also idem, “Ueber den angeblch ägyptischen Ursprung der griechischen Kunst,” op. cit., Vol. 2: p. 523 ff. For Müller’s own summary of contradictions, see Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissen­schaftlichen Mythologie, p. 334 n. 2. Cf. Momigliano, “K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena,” p. 282; 
europa: the politics of mythology 
tained that the creation of myth was not a purposeful action. The creation of myths was, rather, characterized by necessity and Unbewußtheit.74 In Müller’s view, it was untenable to suppose that incorporated in the myth was an origi­nally non-mythical doctrine, existing prior to the myth. Equally unacceptable was the corollary to that supposition: that there existed a caste of priests in pos­session of higher knowledge who “dressed” that sublime knowledge as myth to make it accessible to the lay people who, in the remote past, were not fully reasonable. Those priests, whether crafty or sublime,75 were then pictured as the agents of transmission of religious doctrine from the East to the West, ultimately from the Near East or Egypt to Greece. 
For Müller, there is no a priori understanding of myths. Precisely: There is no a priori concept of the essence and content of a myth, since such a concept is given to us only through experience. And since in our own days, Müller argued, we cannot find the myth in the process of formation, such a concept is not given to us to understand directly and of itself, but only historically. Since the myth itself is the only source of the concept of myth, yet it appears in a form that dif­fers from its content, the only bridge that leads from one to the other and thus makes possible our historical understanding of the myth, is understanding the language that the myth speaks. Finding that way to knowledge of the content is a problem. The procedure through which we can possibly solve the problem is called the interpretation of myth. We can only hope to acquire the knowledge we are searching for by analysing a “thousand individual cases.”76 
Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, pp. 24-25; Blok, “‘Romantische Poesie, Naturphilo­sophie, Construktion der Geschichte,’“ p. 77 ff.  25  
74  Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, pp. 112, 334 n. 2.  
75  Müller’s writing of a “Caste oder Sekte von Schlauköpfen oder sublimen Menschen” (Mül­ 
ler, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, p. 111) reminds me of Reinach’s  
wording in his critique of Creuzer. For Reinach, Creuzer, attributing such an important role  
to the priesthood, shared in “the error of the eighteenth century,” which was “precisely the  
exaggeration of primitive sacerdotalism, the failure to perceive that religion is anterior to  
any priesthood, and the classification of priests as clever charlatans – beneficent charla­ 
tans, according to some – who invented religion and mythologies as instruments of domi­ 
nation.” Salomon Reinach, Orpheus: A History of Religions, revised and partly rewritten by  
the author, transl. F. Simmonds, Horace Liveright, New York 1930, p. 9.  
76  Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, pp. 63–64.  

I can now turn to one of those cases – the one concerning Cadmus and Europa, which is of particular interest for my argument. True to his methodical localism, Müller made it clear that he found it completely astounding that, of all the cities of Hellas, Thebes should have been chosen for settlement by the Phoenicians, a trading people. Among the Greek cities, its location made Thebes one of the least conducive to trade.77Thebes was connected with the myth of Cadmus, and from Cadmus was derived everything Phoenician in Greece.78 But our oldest sources knew nothing of a Phoenician colony in the Boeotian Thebes. They only knew of the “Phoenician Europa.” More precisely, Homer, Hesiod, Asius, and Bacchylides called Europa “very simply” Phoenix’s daughter. The historicizing Herodotus was the first to identify Phoenix as the king of Tyre. For those earlier authors, Cadmus was not yet an Agenorid, or Europa’s brother. But the story of the abduction of Europa, Müller maintained, went back to Homeric times. For him, the abduction of the daughter of Arybas from Sidon by Phoenician sailors, as told by Homer in the Odyssey, was the archetype (Urbild) of “all similar Cre­tan abduction stories.”79 
Müller dismissed early Phoenician settlements because Homer knew nothing of either Tyre or of the Cadmeian colonies in Boeotia, nor did he mention the gold mines of Thasos or the mines and marble quarries in Thrace, all connected with Phoenicians. But even if one could accept that Phoenicians did open those mines, that would be of no value for the genealogy of Thasos as Cadmus’s broth­er and would not bring in Phoenicians of Thasos in connection with the search for Europa.80 Phoenix was a name of “wholly Hellenic origin.” One can see in the Iliad that Phoenix was a truly Hellenic hero (“ein recht eigentlich Hellenischer Held”), and the mythical story of Aethiops warns us against many misunder­standings to which descriptive names (Appellativnamen) can give rise.81 
Like Phoenix, Cadmus was a Hellenic hero. Boeotians, Müller explained, were not delving into the inner meaning of Cadmeian legends. Rather, they related to them in an outward manner, in a human, heroic way (“höchst äußerlich, men­
77 Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 111. 78 Ibid., p. 109. 79 Ibid., pp. 107–8; for Arybas’s daughter, see Odyssey XV, 424 ff. 80 Ibid., pp. 108–9. 81 Ibid., pp. 112–13. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
schlich, heroisch”).82In Boeotia, Cadmus was thus transformed from a god into a “human founder of the state,” while the “dark name Phoenix” was taken to be a designation of a people. Cadmus, however, was a “deity of Tyrrhenian Pelas­gians,” a people that were the earliest inhabitants of Thebes and were originally identical with Cadmeians.83 (Cadmus, after all, was a son of the autochthonous Ogygus, as Suda recorded.)84At the time of the Dorian invasion, centuries be­fore Homer, somewhere at the border marking the beginning of historical time, Tyrrhenian Pelasgians left Boeotia for Samothrace. They brought with them to that island their cultic practices and the myths of Cadmus or Cadmilus and Harmonia. In a ceremony of their mystery cult, Harmonia disappeared and was searched for.85 The motive has obvious parallels with the search for the abduct­ed Europa.86 More importantly, Cadmus continued to be venerated as a god.87 
As Müller explained, Boeotians received Cadmeian legends from the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, the autochthonous population of Thebes, whom they chased out of their land. He placed Cadmus firmly within an “authentic ancient Greek cult,” which should have dispelled whatever belief there had existed in Cadmus as a 
82 On the “äussere Begriff des Mythus,” see Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen 
Mythologie, p. 59 ff. 83 Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, pp. 113. 84 Ibid., p. 113 n. 3; cf. p. 211. In Boeotian tradition, Ogygus was a very early king of the area; 
some sources have Theban Ogyges as the father of both Cadmus and Phoenix. See Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, transl. A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, Blackwell, Oxford 1986, s.v. Ogygus. 
85 Cf. Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 454 = Ephoros frag. 12 = Schol. Eur. Phoen. 7: “even now they search for her [Harmonia] in the festivals”; cf. Susan Guettel Cole, Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace, E. J. Brill, Leiden 1984, p. 48. Cf. further 
27 
F. C. Movers, Die Phönizer, 2 vols. in 3 pts., Eduard Weber, Bonn, and Ferd. Dümmler, Ber­lin 1841–50, Vol. 1: pp. 516; Vol. 2.2: pp. 87–88=FGrHist 70 F 120. For a sober (relatively) recent account of the origins of the Samothracian sanctuary and mysteries, see Cole, Theoi Megaloi, pp. 5, 10: the early history “is obscure”; the identity of the Samothracian gods and the secrets of their rites is still closed to us. Cf. also Maria Rocchi, Kadmos e Harmonia: Un matrimonio problematico, “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, Rome 1989, p. 36. 
86 Cf. Otto Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, C. H. Beck, Munich 1906, Vol. 1: p. 970. See also Movers,Die Phönizer, Vol. 2.2: p. 83, who writes of the myths of the disappearing goddess and, in particular, draws parallels between the disappearance of Europa and the disappearance of Astarte/Isis. 
87 Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, pp. 146–55; cf. idem, Orcho­menos und die Minyer, pp. 453–54. 
founder of a colony and a Phoenician.88 Once that was clarified, Müller appor­tioned the blame for messing things up in the first place. With one foot in the Age of Enlightenment, and not yet as critically distanced from Creuzer as he was to become within five years, in the Prolegomenahe pointed his finger at some priests of later times who, in pursuit of their own interests, fabricated stories, and at meaning-twisting cicerones.89 But those fabrications and misinterpreta­tions were easy to clear. A much more serious problem was what became of the legend of Cadmus at the hands of Greek logographers, historians, and grammar­ians. What logographers did rested on weak and insignificant foundations and was characterized by vagueness. They wove everything together into one coarse tapestry of peoples, where Phoenix, Aegyptus, Danaus, and Cadmus – that is, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Danai, and Cadmeians – were brothers or brothers-in-law and sons of Agenor, whom they held to be essentially identical with the Agenor in Hellanicus. Hellenistic historiographers and grammarians, for their part, felt free to commit “many malicious falsifications” in their recording of Oriental names and words.90 
However, part of the confusing complexity that a modern European experienc­es when faced with Greek myths can be attributed not to mischievous ancient literati but to the creativity of the Greek mind. A good case in point is Müller’s exegesis of the Agenorid genealogy. This is a genealogy that “links Hellenen with Asatics and Lybians.” In the beginning of that family tree, as Müller draws it from a number of sources, stands Io. At the other end we meet Europa, Cadmus, Phoenix, and Cilix, as children of Agenor and Telephassa, and the descendants of Aegyptus and Danaus, sons of Belus, Agenor’s brother. Belus and Agenor were Libya’s sons, and she was the daughter of Epaphus, Io’s son with Zeus. The story of Io is a local story from Argos and is “in its basic elements [Grunbe­standtheilen] ancient Greek.”91 Cadmus, as Müller’s reader would know by now, was also a god from Ancient Greece, and it was probably only because he was connected with Europa – whom Homer knew as Phoenix’s daughter – that he was made a Phoenician colonist. But Phoenix, too, was actually ancient Greek. The problem that brought these ancient Greek traditions into contact with Asi­
88 Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 113. 89 Ibid., p. 114. 90 Ibid., Orchomenos und die Minyer, pp. 114–15. 
Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, p. 182. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
atics and Lybians – or, rather, brought the Greeks into contact with Asiatics and Africans through these traditions – lay with the middle links of the genealogy. But all that is in the middle is nothing but an outcome of inferences and analo­gies that “people” had made. And people drew those parallels, connections, and conclusions no doubt because they thought they were “clarifying.”92 In any case, they interpreted the legends in light of their own life experience. For example, Epaphus, of whom there existed no old Greek legend, was made up by Greek soldiers in Egypt. That is how they pronounced Apis in Greek. In the omnipres­ent horned goddess Isis they recognized their own horned Io: “Das ist ja unsre Io, sagte also der Grieche sogleich.” And they made Apis-pronounced-Epaphus Io’s son.93 “Everything happened on its own, through pure visual perception and application of known ideas,” that is, it was not consciously invented.94 
Müller’s assumptions about how the mind of the Greek people worked seem quite curious to me. But by making that mind work his way he was able to re-Hel­lenize old Greek myths. He untied the mythical knots with which the Greek peo­ple had tied themselves to the Asiatics and Lybians. 
Müller died unexpectedly in 1840, quite young. He had gone to Greece, worked hard among the ruins of the sanctuary at Delphi, and did not survive the heat and fatigue. He had a special predilection for his Greek sun god. Creuzer sent to print the last part of the fourth volume of the third edition of his Symbolik und Mythologie in 1843. He regretted Müller’s untimely death. In the Preface to this fascicle, however, he briefly spoke of something more uplifting: “I have the satisfaction,” he wrote, “to have finished this book at a time when the scholars have at length begun to return to the recognition of the Orient as the final source of most of the Greek and Italic religions and arts.”95 But what Creuzer observed was not really a turning of the tide. Rather, it was the persistence – throughout 29 the nineteenth century and in spite of the growing scepticism – of the view that 
92 Ibid., pp. 186–87. 
93 Whatever else their disagreements, Müller agreed with Creuzer on this point: Io “als Kuh am Nil mit Zeus den Epaphus (den Apis) zeugt.” Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, Vol. 4: p. 233. 
94 “So weit machte sich Alles von selbst, durch blosse Anschauung und die Anwendung ge­wohnter Ideen, ganz ohne das Bewusstsein der Erfindung.” Müller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, p. 184. 
95 Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, Vol. 4: pp. 477–78. 
accepted the historicity of Phoenician settlement in Greece, and the Phoenician origin of the mythical Cadmus and Europa.96 
Let me cite two examples, both German scholars and contemporaries of Müller and Creuzer. One, the Göttingen professor Karl Hoeck, wrote a three-volume study of the pre-Roman history, mythology, and religion of Crete.97 The other, Franz Karl Movers, was the author of a no less impressive history of the Phoe­nicians. 
The main aim of Hoeck’s book was “to draw historical results out of myths” (and to thereby place the myth within its proper limits).98 Since he at the same time regarded the relations of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Phrygia to Crete as of primary importance, he dealt with the myth of Europa already in the introduction to his study. And since the abduction of Europa figures in the Phoenician section of the introduction, it is clear at first sight that, for Hoeck, the myth and the heroine were considered of Phoenician origin. But the value of Hoeck’s contribution to the study of the myth of Europa lies in detail. His evaluation of the rich literary and iconographical evidence foreshadowed much later critical studies (which, ironically, often disputed the Phoenician origin of Europa). Some of those later authors either did not know Hoek’s work or did not acknowledge him. I also cannot do him justice here, but only present a basic outline of his argument. 
The older stratum of the myth of Europa – Zeus’s abduction of the heroine, which should be separated from the later additions, the search for Europa by Cadmus and other brothers99 – represented a veiled history of Phoenician ex­pansion into Crete.100 Agenor appeared as Europa’s father only with the logog­raphers, that is, in the later history of the myth, whereas in the older version Europa was Phoenix’s daughter. Since Phoenix was a king of Phoenicia – for, in 
96 Cf. Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 58. Hoeck’s work later sank into oblivion but has now been rediscovered and partly republis­hed by the Greek scholar Antonios Zoes. 
98 Karl Hoeck, Kreta: Ein Versuch zur Aufhellung der Mythologie und Geschichte, der Religion und Vewrfassung dieser Insel, von der ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Römer-Hewrrschaft, Carl Eduard Rosenbusch, Göttingen 1823–29, Vol. 1: p. VI. 
99 “Wenn irgend ein Mythus es nöthig macht, das Ursprüngliche von den spätern Zuthaten zu sondern, und die Auctoritäten wohl zu unterscheiden, so ist diess bey dem gegenwärti-gen der Fall.” Hoeck, Kreta, Vol. 1: p. 85. 
100 Hoeck, Kreta, Vol. 1: p. 83. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
myth, the name of the land is usually transferred to its first king – and, as such, represented Phoenicia, the conclusion was at hand that “Europa comes from Phoenicia.”101 The understanding of the myth of Europa as a lunar myth also pointed to a historical movement by which the Phoenician colonists brought “Phoenician lunar worship to Crete.” The newcomers peacefully joined the pop­ulation of the island and the new worship was united with the existing cult of Zeus: “this is why that god was associated in love with Europa.”102 Finally, the name Hellotis, under which Europa was said to have been known in Crete,103 was, in Hoeck’s opinion, originally Phoenician.104 The later stratum of the myth of Europa, in turn, preserved the memories of Phoenician colonial activities in the Near East, Aegean Islands, and Thrace. That was clear at first sight.105 
Movers was probably referring to Müller when he wrote of “some recent my­thologists” who held the view that the myth of Europa had been transplanted to Phoenicia by an “arbitrary combination of logographers.”106 Movers himself had little doubt about the Phoenician origins of that myth. The myth of Europa was to be found where the cult of the Sidonian goddess, Astarte, was located.107 The general opinion of the ancient world, that Europa had Phoenician origins, was more deeply rooted than the “assertion of more recent mythologists that Europa became a ‘Phoenician’ only because of a wrong explanation of ......, her father.”108 
For Movers, Phoenicians and Greeks were in touch with and influenced each other for many centuries. From the twelfth century BC onward, Greek colonists had contacts with Phoenicians in the eastern Mediterranean. From the eighth century onward, Greeks and Phoenicians rubbed shoulders on most of the Med­iterranean coasts. In Phoenicia itself, the Greek way of life “exerted an irresist­
31 
101 Ibid., Vol. 1: pp. 89–90. 102 Ibid., Vol. 1: pp. 101–2. 103 See Steph. Byz. s.v. ....... [Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnicorvm quae svpersvnt, ed. A. 
Meinecke, G. Reimer, Berlin 1849.] 104 Hoeck, Kreta, Vol. 1: p. 104. 105 Ibid., Vol. 1: p. 106. 106 Movers 1841–50, 2.2: 83. 107 Ibid., 81–82; see op. cit., 83, for the connection of the religious festival of the disappea­
rance of Europa=Astarte, celebrated in Phoenicia, with the myth of the disappearance of 
Astarte=Isis. 108 Movers, Die Phönizer, Vol. 2.2: p. 83. 
ible influence on the barbarians” even before Alexander the Great’s conquests. Movers summarized the impact that that history had on Greek religion as fol­lows: In earlier times, Eastern religious ideas were carried from Phoenicia to Greece. There, they were transformed, and as such later returned to their home­land, linking up again with the points from where they had first departed. This resulted in a singular interwovenness of the Oriental and the Hellenic, as exem­plified by the myths of Io and Europa, Cadmus and Harmonia.109 
Preller, three years Movers’s younger, was wavering. He reported two interpreta­tions of the legend of Cadmus that were influential in his times. One went back to Herodotus and considered Cadmus an immigrant from the East. Among Prel­ler’s contemporaries, Movers was an outspoken supporter of that interpretation. The other interpretation was backed by the authority of K. O. Müller. According to him, both Cadmus’s name and his gestae “can well be explained aus dem Griechischen.” Preller was not unsympathetic to Müller’s deconstruction, but he did not definitively reject the “Phoenician” version, and kept two Cadmus-es, one Greek and one Phoenician, and even the Semitic explanation of Cad­mus’s name.110 When Carl Robert some thirty years later revised Preller’s book on Greek mythology he took a firm position on the “Phoenician question.” The picture of the travelling of myths between Phoenicia and Greece became the inverse of what Movers had suggested. 
The way Robert framed the discussion of Cadmus and Europa is most telling. His opening question was: How was the autochthonous Cadmus transformed into an immigrant? The hero was originally an Autochthon, but was, in the dom­inant version of the story, made “an immigrant from the far away East,” a Phoe­nician.111 For the German mythologist, that was “merkwürdig.” But no less re­markable (or curious) seems to me his solution to the problem. First came Greek colonization of Ionia. In that enterprise, the Thebans of old had a greater share than other Greeks. In Ionia, they remained true to the memory of their ances­tor Cadmus. In that reverence, the Milesians excelled. They traced back to their mythical progenitor their considerable intellectual achievements as well. They 
109 Ibid., Vol. 1: pp. 82–83. 
110 L. Preller, Griechische Mythologie, 2nd ed., Weidemann, Berlin 1860–61, Vol. 2: pp. 22–23. The myth of Europa, too, has strong Phoenician connections. Op. cit., 116. 
111 L. Preller and Carl Robert, Griechische Mythologie, 4th ed., reprint, Wiedmann, Berlin 1894–1926, Vol. 2.1: pp. 102, 104. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
called their first historian Cadmus, and the original Cadmus was credited with the invention of the alphabet. “But since the Milesains had taken [the alpha­bet] over from the Phoenicians, Cadmus himself had to become a Phoenician.” Moreover, “they did not distinguish this Phoenician Cadmus from the Boeotian, but let him emigrate to Greece, and the myth gave as motivation for this that he had to search for his stolen sister.”112 The role she was given to play in the plot transformed Europa herself. “The Boeotian earth-goddess Europa is now used to bring Cadmus from Phoenicia to Greece, while she is also made to originate from Phoenicia.”113 
Ernst Curtius proposed yet another solution to the Phoenician problem. His ideas on this issue were first published a decade earlier than Preller’s book I discussed above, but for the sake of the clarity of my argument, I mention them here. Curtius wrote that the legend of Cadmus was the clearest expression of the memory of all that for which western Greece was indebted to the East. Wherev­er Cadmus – following the footsteps of the wandering Europa – landed in the West, he appeared as “the genius of a higher way of life [Lebensordnung].”114 He represented to western Greeks the culture that originated in the East.115 He marked the ending of the innocence and immobility of the patriarchal condi­tions in Greece.116 Such a view implied that heroic legends spoke of history117 and that the true beginnings of Greek civilization were to be found on the eastern shores of the archipelago. From there came Cadmus, Cecrops, Danaus, and Pel-ops. Those immigrants from the East were the founders of Greek history.118 
But if the legends of heroes like Cadmus carried the memory of colonization that brought the culture from the East to Greece,119 that did not mean that the Greeks were in debt to Semitic Phoenicians. The apparent contradiction is resolved if we 
33 
112 Preller/Robert, Griechische Mythologie, Vol. 2.1, pp. 104–5. 113 Ibid., p. 106. 114 Ernst Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1857–67, Vol. 
1: p. 51. 115 Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, Vol. 1: p. 74. 116 “Mit solchen Epochen, wie sie des Kadmos Ankunft darstellt, hört die Unschuld und Ruhe 
patriarchalischer Zustände auf.” Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, Vol. 1: p. 75. 117 Ibid., p. 49. 118 “Urheber aller griechischen Volksgeschichte.” Ibid., p. 128. 119 “[D]as Bewusstsein von einer aus Osten durch Colonisation übertragene Cultur.” Ibid., p. 40. 
assume that those colonists were Hellenes themselves, that they came from the East, yet from a Greek East, where they had, with that receptivity of mind that is a character trait of the Ionian stock, taken up and transformed in Hellenic ways the culture of Oriental peoples in order to transmit it to their racial brothers.120 
Cadmus is thus not only one of the “founders of all that which is authentical­ly Greek,” but a Greek himself.121 Indeed, only as such could he figure as an originator of Greek culture. Greeks were indebted to Greeks alone, those from the west to those from the east, and their culture was autonomous. What had created confusion was the fact that those Ionian Greeks used to live not only in their homeland but also settled under the Phoenicians in Phoenician colonies, in Lycia and Caria, and in the Delta of Nile. The settlers from the “other side,” those heroes who founded cities, “could thus also be called Phoenicians and Egyptians.”122 The actual Phoenicians, however, “the real Canaanites […] as a nation were held by Hellenes in contempt.”123 
Let me resume a chronological order. Robert’s revision of Preller’s Griechische Mythologie first appeared in the 1890s, when a number of other works relevant to my topic were published as well. In France, Salomon Reinach wrote, among many other things, an influential dismissal of what he called the mirage orien­tal. Victor Bérard singled out Reinach as a maître of the “anti-Semitic view of history.”124 But Reinach was not an anti-Semite. On the contrary, his attitude to­
120 “[D]ie Annahme, dass jene Colonistenm auch Hellenen waren, dass sie aus dem Morgen-lande kamen, aber aus einem griechischen Morgenlande, wo sie mit jener Empfänglichke-it des Geistes, die der Characterzug des ionischen Geschlechts ist, die Cultur der orienta­lischen Völker bei sich aufgenommen und hellenisch umgebildet hatten, um sie so ihren Stammbrüdern zu überliefern.” Ibid., pp. 40–41; on that learning process or, rather, Greek appropriation of Phoenician culture, cf. op. cit., pp. 35–36. 
121 Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, Vol. 1: p. 40. 
122 Ibid., p. 41. But the Greek settlers from the East, too, could meet hostility from the lo­cal population. Thebes was such a case. There, “ostgriechische Bildung am kräftigsten Wurzel gefasst und sich durch volkreiche Niederlassung den Eingeborenen gegenüber am schärfsten augeprägt hat. Darum trägt Kadmos mehr als die gleichartigen Heroen einen framdländischen Character; sein Geschlecht wird von den Nachbarn mit Missgunst und Feindschaft verfolgt.” Op. cit., pp. 75–76. 
123 Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, Vol. 1: p. 41. French translation, cited in Autran, “Phénici-ens,” p. 6, spoke here of “l’antipathie naturelle des Grecs pour les Sémites.” 
124 Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Vol. 2: p. 15. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
ward anti-Semitism seems to have been consistently negative.125 What about his “view of history”? Bérard, as we have seen, cited Reinach’s call for the “recovery of the rights of Europe against the pretensions of Asia.”126 Was that an ant-Semit­ic programme? It certainly had potential for anti-Semitism. But Reinach himself does not appear to have been leaning in that direction. He did not attribute the “pretensions of Asia” to the Asians. Those pretensions were, for him, a Europe­an intellectual malaise. The “recovery of the rights of Europe” was a campaign of the “critical spirit” against that intellectual malaise: an internal European in­tellectual affair. The mirage oriental was an illusion rooted within archaeology, an illusion that held that the first European civilization was formed under Ori­ental influences. That illusion, Reinach was convinced, could not be defended any longer against the development of historical science, especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century.127 
Reinach flatly rejected Aryanism. In particular, he denied that there existed a common mythology of the Aryans before their division. All that had been left of the “Indianist School” was “the memory and regret of a sterile debauch of eru­dition.”128 Closely following archaeological field work in Europe, Reinach then “absolutely negated” any influence of the Semitic or Egyptian Orient on central, northern, or western Europe either during the Neolithic or at the beginning of the Metal Ages. “But we have never intended to contest that in the posterior 
125 Let me cite some examples from Reinach’s later work: He deplored the death of Muslims and Jews at the hands of the crusaders, Reinach, Orpheus, pp. 177, 219. He condemned the persecution of the Jews by Medieval Latin Christians in England, France, Portugal, Ger­many, Italy, and Austria and, especially, the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain (op. cit., pp. 220 f., 377). In the Dreyfus affair, he stood on the side of justice (op. cit., p. 400 ff.). He certainly did not support the discrimination of Jews and pogroms against them in 
35 
Eastern Europe and the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s (op. cit., pp. 453–54). He was equally horrified by the banditry of the European conquest of America (op. cit., p. 
378) and by the Armenian genocide (op. cit., p. 451 ff.). Here, he especially deplored that the United States did not act to prevent the genocide, which was in its power, but “flatly refused to render that service to humanity” (op. cit., p. 453). 
126 Reinach, Le mirage oriental, p. 3. 127 Ibid., pp. 1–3. 128 Ibid., pp. 7–8. Not surprisingly, Reinach, here, cited “un livre admirable” by Otto Gruppe, 
who criticized Adalbert Kuhn and Max Müller’s mythology at length. See Otto Gruppe, Die griechischen Culte und Mythen in ihren Beziehung zu den orientalischen Religionen. Erster Band: Einleitung, Teubner, Leipzig 1887, pp. 79–151. Gruppe, however, admitted Semitic influences on the archaic Greece. 
period, which is that of the Phoenician maritime trade – from about the 13th century BC – Western civilization had become, to a degree, a tributary to that of the Orientals.”129 The influence of Egypt and Assyria on eastern Europe was a different question. Here, there was no room for absolute statements: “the truth ought to be searched for in nuances.” Generally speaking, “no well-informed ar­chaeologist can put in doubt the influence of Egypt, Chaldea, Phoenicia on the ancient civilizations of Greece and Italy.” Yet one had to determine the nature of that influence, and the date. 
Reinach asserted that the region in question was one where, from a remote past, European, Asiatic, and Egyptian influences met and blended their elements.130 In that area, which Reinach called the primeval Aegean – and which could be regarded as a common civilization, whose horizon were the western limits of Europe131 – there was a constant back-and-forth, receiving and giving, flux and reflux, of cultural influences.132 Reinach mocked those who imagined the for­ward movement of a civilization like the march of an army that, departing with its arms and baggage from the point where it is encamped, advances to another point either by a single route or by converging routes.133 Rejecting that militaris­tic model typical of the Aryanists, and embracing that of an unceasing exchange 
129 Reinach,Le mirage oriental, p. 34. In his later work, admitting Eastern and Egyptian influ­ences, Reinach wrote, for example, that an Egyptian form of worship spread, under Greek domination and the Roman Empire, from “Asia Minor to Gaul and Britain.” Ibid.,p. 30. “By the intermediary of the Bible and Greek science, we are the heirs of the Babylonian religion.” (Op. cit., p. 41.) There were parallels between Phoenician and Greek divinities, and the worship of the Syrian goddess spread into Greece and Italy. (Op. cit., pp. 42–46.) Greece, very rich herself in gods and heroes, “showed herself hospitable to the gods of the stranger. Egypt, Assyria, Syria, Phoenicia and Persia presented divinities to her.” (Op. cit., 
p. 95.) Cf. also Reinach’s favourable references to Fontenelle: He does not polemicize with Fontenelle’s view that the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, and mi­sunderstood what they borrowed due to their ignorance of foreign languages. The fables are “a history of the errors of the human mind,” Reinach cited Fontenelle, who continued: “It is not science to fill one’s head with all the extravagancies of the Phoenicians and the Greeks, but […] to know what led the Phoenicians and the Greeks into these extravaganci-es.” (Op. cit., p. 14.) 
130 Reinach, Le mirage oriental, p. 40. 131 Ibid., pp. 51, 54. 132 Ibid., pp. 54, 64, 73. 133 “La marche d’une civilisation ressemble bien plutôt a celle de la mer envahissant une pla­
ge au moment de flux: elle se produit par ondes successives, avec un va-et-vient continuel qui donne naissance a d’innombrable courants.” Ibid., p. 55. I find it hard to accommodate 
europa: the politics of mythology 
among civilizations, and drawing on the recent discoveries of archaeologists in Europe, Reinach was able to argue that prehistoric Europe exerted an influence on the Near Eastern civilizations. Moreover, he seems to have been inclined to accept the conclusion that the primitive Aegean civilization was of European ethnic origin (but not Aryan). Consequently, the “Oriental layer” in Greece and in the Aegean Archipelago was “comprised between two European horizons, one corresponding to the primeval Aegean (Trojan) civilization, the other to that of historic Greece.”134 Between the latter two layers there was another European stratum – the Mycenaean135 – and below it another Oriental layer, sandwiched between “the weakening of the Mycenaean civilization and the Greek renais­sance that followed the Dorian Middle Ages.” Such layering of history led Rein-ach to propose that Oriental influences occurred only at times of crisis or degen­eration of the “European current.”136 The “invasion of Oriental cults in Greece and Italy, crowned by the victory of Christianity,” was thus a symptom, not the cause, of the decline of the Ancient world.137 And the idea that the Semitic civi­lization was the mother of all civilizations was linked to Christianity: it was “as old as the Christian science in the West.”138 
Reinach’s attack on the mirage oriental thus had a time-specific secularist edge. But in his countering the belief that the first civilization of Greece was entire­ly Oriental,139 Reinach saw himself as following the pioneering efforts of K. O. Müller, a declared enemy of the Orientalist (hypo)thesis, whom he saw as “al­ways ahead of his time.”140 Reinach also saw himself as joining those of his con­temporaries for whom Schliemann’s excavations had made it possible to cease arguing about the nature of archaic Greece in abstracto.141 
this image to Bernal’s characterization of Reinach as one who favoured military analogies. 
37 
Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, p. 371. 
134 Reinach, Le mirage oriental, p. 69. 
135 On the European origin of the Mycenaean civilization, see Reinach, Le mirage oriental, pp. 40, 47–48, 53, 63, 64 ff. 
136 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 
137 Ibid., p. 70. 
138 Ibid., p. 2. 
139 Ibid., p. 40. 
140 Ibid., pp. 5, 40, 42. 
141 Ibid., p. 42. Autran, “Phéniciens,” p. 136, mentioned the reaction – based on archaeologi­cal and epigraphical documentation – “contre le verbalisme inévitable d’une formation trop exclusivement littéraire.” 
The next year, in 1894, Beloch’s very influential article on Phoenicians in the Aegean appeared. Astour, as I have mentioned, singled out Julius Beloch as the originator of the reaction against admitting Semitic influences on Ancient Greece.142 But Beloch, an outsider to the German academic system who lived and taught in Italy, was not best placed to play the role Astour attributed to him. In fact, Beloch’s views – expressed with a characteristic clarity – were not univer­sally shared either in his fatherland or in his adopted country.143 Astour admit­ted Beloch’s “unusual sharpness” but considered his arguments “very weak,”144 and his presentation of Beloch’s argument was not the fairest imaginable. 
Beloch denied that there had existed extensive Phoenician trade with Greece in the “earlier Mycenaean period,” before the eighth and seventh centuries, when it was at its height. He denied Phoenician colonization of Greece and an early chronology of Phoenician trading activity in the Mediterranean, and argued that regular Phoenician trade in the Aegean Sea was posterior to the establishment of Greek settlements on the islands and on the coast of Asia Minor.145 He was a materialist; he wanted archaeological evidence of an early Phoenician presence in Greece, and there was none.146He represented Herodotus as one who had built his history on Homeric epic and maintained that it was mistaken to regard 
142 See n. 22 in this text. 143 See Arnaldo Momigliano, “Julius Beloch,” in idem, Studies on Modern Scholarship. 144 Astour, Hellenosemitica, p. xiii. 145 Karl Julius Beloch, “Die Phoeniker am aegaeischen Meer,” Rheinisches Museum für Philo­
logie, N.S. 49 (1894), pp. 115, 132. 
146 A hundred years later, the available archaeological evidence seems to suggest that the Phoenician colonization, properly speaking, can be dated from the eighth to sixth centuri­es BC; what went before (from the twelfth to the eighth centuries) is, as a compromise so­lution, called the pre-colonial stage. Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade, transl. M. Turton, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cam­bridge 2001, p. 199. Cf. Edward Lipiński, Dieux et déesses de l’univers phénicien et punique, Studia Phoenicia XV, Uitgeverij Peeters and Department Oosterse Studies, Leuven 1995, pp. 27–28: exploration and merchant navigation from the tenth to the eighth centuries, the establishment of trading posts and then colonies from the eighth to the sixth centuries. This position was strongly supported by Muhly. See especially James D. Muhly, “Homer and the Phoenicians: The relations between Greece and the Near East in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age,” Berytus 19 (1970), p. 46. Miriam S. Balmuth, “Phoenician Chrono­logy in Sardinia: Prospecting, Trade and Settlement before 900 BC,” in Numismatique et histoire économique phéniciennes et puniques: Actes du Colloque tenu a Louvain-la-Neuve, 13-16 Mai 1987, ed. T. Hackens and Gh. Moucharte, Studia phoenicia IX, Université Catho­lique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve 1992, p. 226, has argued for a “sporadic Phoenician 
europa: the politics of mythology 
the Iliad and the Odyssey as works of a poet who had set himself the task of describing the time of the Trojan war.147 For Beloch, it was no longer possible to read Homer as a historian. 
The cornerstone of Herodotus’s narrative was his interpretation of the myths of Io and Europa, Medea and Helen. Correctly understood, those myths explained the beginnings of what for Herodotus was the history of his times. Astour wrote that “Greek myths placed at the beginning of the Heroic Age in Greece such characters as the Phoenician Cadmos in Thebes, the Phoenician Europa in Crete, the Egyptian Danaos in Argos,” that “Herodotos reported on ancient Phoenician colonies in Boeotia and on the Aegean islands,” that Thucydides wrote about Phoenician settlements in those islands – and that up to the second half of the nineteenth century most believed that there was a “historical reality behind these reports.”148 Beloch did not. Neither did he believe that historical reality was accessible through such reports. Yet he did not refrain from citing Greek religion or epics when that furthered his cause. The Homeric Olympus did not include a single Semitic god.149 In his own time, Beloch observed, Aphrodite had generally been cleansed of the “stain of Semitism [Makel des Semitismus]” that defiled her for so long. The Greek epic said nothing of Phoenician colonies in the Aegean Sea and Homer in particular had no knowledge of them.150 All such reports were of a later date – later inferences based on myths and place names – and stood condemned by the silence of the earliest sources.151 
Beloch, however, preferred to say more rather than letting silence speak. He made an effort to deconstruct the myth of Cadmus and Europa. Beloch “clung to a naturalistic interpretation of the Greek divinities and found solar cults every­where.”152 Thus it must not have been too hard to declare Phoenix “a form of 
presence on Sardinian soil” by the tenth century, and their “continuous presence” by the 
ninth century. 
147 Beloch, “Die Phoeniker am aegaeischen Meer,” p. 111. 
148 Astour, Hellenosemitica, p. xiii. 
149 The opposite was claimed, in the same year, by Bérard: “Presque tout l’Olympe grec est peut-etre d’origine sémitique.” Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens, p. 364. 
150 Beloch “Die Phoeniker am aegaeischen Meer,” pp. 126–27. 
151 Ibid., pp. 127, 131. 
152 Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship, p. 108. Cf. Karl Julius Beloch, Griechische Ge-schichte, 2nd ed., Karl J. Trübner, Strassburg, and Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and Leipzig 1912–27, Vol. 1: p. 146 ff. 
sun-god” – corresponding to the meaning of the name: the “blood-red” – and also an “authentic Hellenic god,” venerated in Crete for a really long time. He was eventually degraded into a hero and as such appeared in the Iliad: as Achil­les’s educator and Europa’s father. His native country was ......., “the blood-red morning sky.” When he was taken from the sky and placed on the earth his name was transferred to the lands in the East, first to Caria153 and then to the Syrian coast. As a result, already in Homeric epic, the Sidonians were named Phoenicians (while they, in their own language, called themselves Sidonians).154 Once the greatest part of the Greeks had ceased to be aware of Phoenix’s divine nature, the equation of the old god with the eponym of Phoenicians followed by itself. The equation was made easier because the Greeks had “precisely then acquainted themselves more closely with the ancient culture of the Orient” and were striving to link their own Gesittung with the ancient East.155 Phoenician origin was then attributed (angedichtet) to all of Phoinix’s kin, and “when later historical reflection was awoken, they came to be seen as mythical representa­tives of the Phoenician settlements.”156 
Beloch passed over Minos, “der gutgriechische Gott,” and turned to Cadmus, Phoenix’s brother.157 Most of what had been said about the Phoenician origins of Greek cities referred to Cadmus. The founding of Thebes was the most famous case in point. If the case for the Semitic origins of Cadmus were rejected, the Greekness of Greece would be saved. Beloch appears to have thought that he could make his point by simply ridiculing those of the Moderns who had “not been at a loss for a Semitic etymology” of Cadmus, an etymology that would make Cadmus the “Man from the East.” But for the Phoenicians, Beloch stated the obvious: Cadmus was not an Ostmann [easterner]. Rather, since he set off for 
153 Reference to Corinna frag. 27 = Athen. IV, 174 f. 
154 This point is substantiated with a reference to Eduard Meyer, Die Zeit der ägyptischen Gros­smacht, Pt. 1 of Vol. 2 of Geschichte des Altertums, Cotta, Stuttgart 1928, pp. 229, 324. More recently, the point was made in Muhly, “Homer and the Phoenicians,” p. 27: “The Pho­enicians, in their own inscriptions, never refer to themselves as ‘Phoenicians’, nor does anyone else in the Near East so designate them. If any designation is used it is that of ‘Sidonians’ […] Only the Greek sources refer to Phoenicia and Phoenicians.” 
155 Referring to Müller’s Orchomenos. Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 111 (not 112, as in Beloch), remarked that “gerade die Homerische Zeit der Anfang ist des Herüberkommens Phönikischer Künste und Religionsideen nach Griechenland.” 
156 Beloch, “Die Phoeniker am aegaeischen Meer,” pp. 127–28. 157 Ibid., p. 128. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
the west, he was a Westmann [westerner]. Or “should we believe that the Greeks gave him a Semitic name? Those ancient Thebans must have been learned men indeed, for they understood even the Canaanite!”158 Beloch expressed his irony openly, for he believed that the time when such philological Spilereien were tak­en seriously had passed.159 
In England, Arnold Wycombe Gomme had little tolerance for academic dallying. He counted himself in the majority of modern scholars who had “lightly put aside […] as unimportant” what he called the “Phoenician theory.” By that he meant the “theory that Cadmeans were Phoenicians.” From the fifth century BC onward, Gomme wrote, maintaining that Phoenicians had colonized parts of Greece was “a firmly established and, as far as we know, universally accepted tradition.”160For Gomme, that tradition was no longer binding. He argued his case very well, in two stages. He first published a polemic against Victor Bérard, whom he characterized as wanting to bring “the Kadmeians into his system of a Phoenician thalassocracy.”161 Gomme criticized Bérard’s use of ancient sourc­es. The literary evidence cited by Bérard, Gomme asserted, did not prove that one can see Boeotia as the land through which important international trade routes passed. The brunt of Gomme’s argument, however, was geographical. Imputing that Bérard had not visited Boeotia and only knew the country from books,162 while he himself had first-hand knowledge, Gomme concluded that the geography of Boeotia was unfavourable to trade. There was “nothing within the country itself to tempt either the inhabitants to the sea, or through-traders to the land.”163 The trade of the East that would reach Greece was shut off from Boeotia 
158 Similarly Dombrowski, Der Name Europa, p. 16, with regard to the proposed Semitic origin of the name Europa: “Warum sollten die Griechen ein semitischen Wort benutzen, wenn sie dessen Inhalt durch ein eigenes leicht ausdrücken konnten?” 
41 
159 Beloch, “Die Phoeniker am aegaeischen Meer,” pp. 128–29. 160 A. W. Gomme, “The Legend of Cadmus and the Logographi,” Journal of Hellenic Studies33 (1913), p. 53. 161 A. W. Gomme, “The Topography of Boeotia and the Theories of M. Bérard,” The Annual of the British School at Athens 18 (1911–12), p. 190. 
162 Gomme, “The Topography of Boeotia,” p. 193 n. 2. Bérard, for his part, was proud to point out in the introduction to his thesis that he walked the land he wrote about (Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens, pp. 3–5), and found Gomme insulting. Insulting enough to respond a whole fifteen years later. See Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Vol. 2: pp. 356–58 n. 1. He had not responded earlier “estimant qu’une discussion suppose, de part et d’autre, un minimum de bonne foi.” 
163 Gomme, “The Topography of Boeotia,” p. 206. 
by the island of Euboea.164 Moreover, there was the curious circumstance that, while “tradition (at least from the fifth century onwards) placed Phoenicians in Thebes, it has nothing to say of their existence in any of the coastal towns.” That, Gomme pressed his argument, was clearly strange. “For how did Phoenicians rule and trade in Thebes, unless they held also the ports and the extremities of the various isthmic routes?”165 In short, geography lends no support to seeing Boeotia as a crossroads of trading routes and Thebes as a centre of international trade, and thus to what Gomme called the Phoenician theory. 
In a complementary article, Gomme analysed the literary sources bearing on the question of the “Cadmeans as Phoenicians.” That second article has recently been characterized as “perhaps the most important contribution to the subject made by any modern scholar.” Written early in the last century, it “still remains the most thorough assessment of the early literary evidence that has been at­tempted.”166 Of direct importance for my subject is that Gomme’s examination pays a great deal of attention to the myth of Europa. Right at the beginning of the article Gomme stated that “bound up” with that question of Cadmus’s Phoe­nician origin “is that of the first connection of Cadmus with Europa.”167 In that sense, the myth of Europa is of central importance for the “Phoenician theory.” 
Gomme’s analysis of the chronological development of the story of Cadmus in the first part of his article led to the conclusion that “it is not till the fifth cen­tury [BC] that we hear of the Phoenician theory, or of the connection between Cadmus and Europa.”168 As much as one can tell from the surviving sources, that connection was made by the logographers and Herodotus. Almost all the elements of the story of Cadmus and Europa that we know from mythographers were in place with Herodotus and Hellanicus.169 But the logographers and Her­odotus did not simply transmit earlier traditions, rendering epics into prose. They systematized them, and systematized them with their own agendas, in 
164 Ibid., p. 207. 165 Ibid., p. 209. 166 Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 55. For Edward’s thorough critique of Gomme, see op. 
cit., pp. 65–75. 
167 Gomme, “The Legend of Cadmus,” p. 53. 
168 Ibid., pp. 71–72. 
169 Ibid., p. 65. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
correspondence with their own inquiries and learned theories.170 That is to say, they altered the tradition. The “Phoenician theory” was a fruit of that alteration. 
Gomme’s conclusion has a touch of ambiguity. According to the “Phoenician theory,” the gods of the Greeks “had existed thousands of years in Egypt be­fore their supposed birth in Greece,” and the Theban royal house was Semitic. That invented theory brought Greece “into touch with the old civilisations of the East, to infer extensive early borrowings of customs from Egypt from the later borrowing of beliefs by Pythagoras and the earlier Pherecydes.” Gomme denied the authority of tradition to that theory. Moreover, the theory was “probably in nearly all particulars incorrect.” But it was “fundamentally true.” It “implied that Greece was not a specially chosen nation marked off from all others.”171 
I miss the air of such liberality in Francis Vian, who “has maintained substan­tially the same opinions as Gomme with regard to the genuineness of the tradi­tion of Kadmos’s Phoenician origin, but who has put forward additional reasons for not accepting it.”172 Vian, a professor at Clermont, published an impressive study in the early 1960s in which he rejected the Semitization of Cadmus and Europa. Bernal has credited him with having elaborated “the most determinedly Aryan interpretation of the Kadmeian legend.”173 
In his study, Vian focuses on Cadmus, but dealing with the myth of Europa as well was unavoidable. From a certain point in time, Vian knew, the stories of Cadmus and Europa cannot be separated in our historical sources.174 As Cad­mus’s kin, Europa is of key importance in interpreting both the myth and the leg­
43 
170 For a detailed argument demonstrating that those logographers and Herodotus were unre­
liable authorities due to their methods and obscure reasons for their theories, see the se­
cond part of the article, Ibid., p. 223 ff. 171 Ibid., pp. 244–45. 172 Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, pp. 75–76. Edwards, op. cit., pp. 76–86, finds Vian’s ad­
ditional evidence less than convincing. 173 Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, p. 408. It may be of some interest to note that 
James Muhly, whom Bernal has depicted as a leading opponent of Astour’s Hellenosemiti-
ca and a proponent of the “Aryan model” (Bernal, op. cit., pp. 421–22), addressed a similar 
critique to Vian. 174 “On ne peut […] séparer le probleme de Cadmos de celui d’Europe.” Francis Vian, Les ori­
gines de Thebes: Cadmos et les Spartes, Klincksieck, Paris 1963, p. 56. 
end of Cadmus,175 whereas Cadmus himself is central to any attempt to establish or deny Phoenician settlements in Greece. If his Oriental origins are not proven, or at least asserted as likely, the Phoenicians in Greece are no more than a “mi­rage.”176 For Vian, Cadmus was made an Oriental, but his Semitization has never been fully accomplished.177 If Europa is both a Phoenician and Cadmus’s rela­tive, she serves as evidence of Cadmus’s Oriental background. But the kinship of Cadmus and Europa is attested to quite late, and Europa herself at first appears as geographically indeterminate. In the Iliad, she is the daughter of a Phoenix, which does not prove her Phoenician origin since one of Homer’s Phoenixes is “purely Greek.” Asius’s Phoenix, too, can be seen as belonging within the Hellenic world. His wife, with whom he had two daughters, Europa and Astyp­alaea, was herself the daughter of the Aetolian King Oineus, and Astypalaea’s son Ankaios became the king of Samos.178 It is only in the pseudo-Hesiodic Cat-alogues of Women that Europa is Phoenix’s daughter and Phoenix is an Eastern­er, the father of Phineus, whose mother Cassiepeia – also Europa’s mother – is Arabus’s daughter and a descendant of Belus.179 The Semitization of Phineus is “necessarily a corollary to the Semitization of Cadmus and Europa.”180 
Half a century before Vian’s Origines, the Semitization of Europa was rejected by René Dussaud.181 I am mentioning him not because he introduced new argu­
175 For the distinction, cf. Vian, Les origines de Thebes, p. 51. 
176 Cf. Vian, Les origines de Thebes, p. 52. Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 76 n. 68, poin­ted out that the word used by Vian has a history going back to Reinach. 
177 “Sa sémitisation est d’ailleurs toujours restée imparfaite.” Vian, Les origines de Thebes, p. 54. 
178 Ibid.,p. 56. See Asius frag. 7 Davies. See G. L. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Faber and Faber, London 1969, p. 198, for reservations regarding Asius’s ma­king Oineus an autochthonous Samian. In Apollodorus Library II,i,5, Oineus was the son of Aegyptus. See also Movers, Die Phönizer, Vol. 2.2: p. 78, for whom Asius provides evi­dence that the myth of Europa was to be found in regions where, “im hohem Althertume,” people of Lycian and Carian origin mingled with Phoenicians. “So ist denn auch der Euro-pamythos da local, wo Karier in der Vorzeit wohnten,” like in Samos. Astypalaea was the eponym of the Carian capital city at Samos. 
179 Merkelbach-West frag. 140 [Fragmenta hesiodea., ed. R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Cla­rendon, Oxford 1967]. 
180 Vian, Les origines de Thebes, p. 57. E.g., René Dussaud, Les civilisations préhelléniques dans le bassin de la Mer Égée, 2nd ed., Librairie Paul Geuthner, Paris 1914, p. 390. Dussaud later, with the evidence unearthed at Ras Shamra, accepted – moreover, was the first to note – a similarity between an Ugaritic myth and the story of Europa. See Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 60. He also shifted 
europa: the politics of mythology 
ments (he did not), but because he clearly outlined the logic of the anti-Semitic argument. Of critical importance for accepting or rejecting Semitic influences on early Greece is the legend of Cadmus. If one can maintain that Cadmus was of Semitic origin, one can also argue that, at an early stage of its history, Greece was under Semitic influence. Cadmus’s Semitism, in turn, is most often deduced from his family ties with Europa, the mythical Phoenician princess. In Dussaud’s view, Europa is the anchor that holds Cadmus tied to the Semitic world. A very radical way of cutting that tie would be to negate Europa’s Semitism. That is what Dussaud actually did. Since “Europa is not a Semitic deity,” he wrote, “the legend of Cadmus loses its principal point of support in the Semitic terrain.”182 
From at least the early nineteenth century onward, when Karl Otfried Müller spelled it out,183 the legend of Cadmus was central to the discussion about the relationship between Greece and the Near East. American archaeologist James Muhly, for example, stated that very clearly when he wrote that “[a]ny discus­sion of the relations between Greece and Phoenicia must deal with the figure of Cadmus and the introduction of the art of writing.”184 On the basis of archaeo­logical and epigraphical evidence, Muhly denied that “Cadmus the Phoenician belongs in the Mycenaean or Homeric worlds.” That, however, did not entail, Muhly added in disagreement with his older contemporary Vian, denying “the presence of oriental elements in Greek civilization.”185 
The problem for Muhly lay in problematic usages of mythology in attempts to prove early Semitic influences on Greece. In his critical opinion, “such dis­cussions usually deal only with later mythological speculations, speculations which are often forced into some modern Procrustean bed and are frequently 
45 
his position on the Cadmus legend and became inclined to see it as having a historical basis. The legend “s’explique le mieux comme celle d’un group venu du continent grec et s’infiltrant en Phénicie, y demeurant un temps, puis rentrant en Grece et y apportant les techniques nouvelles, notament l’écriture.” Dussaud, “Victor Bérard,” p. 394. The mi­grants from the East, here, are Greeks, not Semites, and Dussaud insisted on this point in his subsequent writings. See Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 60. 
182 Dussaud, Les civilisations préhelléniques, p. 390. 183 See Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 109. The work first appeared in 1820. 184 Muhly, “Homer and the Phoenicians,” p. 38. 185 That precisely was “the mistake made by Francis Vian who, in his determination to make 
everything ‘Indo-European’, has attempted to westernize even such a patently oriental character as the monster Typhon.” Muhly, “Homer and the Phoenicians,” p. 41. 
unworthy of serious consideration.”186 Muhly himself understood Cadmus as essentially a latter-day – that is, post-Mycenaean – invention: as an “artificial creation who simply personifies the eastern elements in Greek civilization.” Like Gomme long before him, Muhly argued that Cadmus played “only a minor role in Greek mythology before the fifth century BC”187 Homer mentioned Cadmus once in the Odyssey and Cadmeians several times in both the Odyssey and Iliad. But whereas “[m]ost ancient Greek authors who dealt with the problem regarded Cadmus as the one who introduced the Greeks to the art of writing” and called the letters of their alphabet “Phoenician letters,” Homer had known “nothing of Cadmus and the art of writing” and made “no reference to any Phoenician or oriental connections of Cadmus.”188 As Homer “makes it perfectly clear,” Cad­mus’s “connections with Thebes went back into the Bronze Age,” since “prior to the great war known as the Seven Against Thebes, the inhabitants of that city were known as Cadmeians.” But that association “has nothing to do” with ei­ther the introduction of the art of writing or the Europa cycle. The “Phoenician letters” and Europa were later additions “and have nothing to do with Mycenae­an or Homeric contacts with Phoenicia.”189 
Unlike Dussaud, Muhly did not engage in disputing Europa’s Semitism. He ele­gantly pushed the myth aside. For his part, Dussaud, who argued that Europa was not a “Semitic deity,” had to substantiate his claim. He did so by finding faults – “errors” and “confusion” – with those who were of the opposite opin­ion. The charge of confusion was not new. It had already been made by K. O. Müller, and Dussaud acknowledged his debt to the German scholar. According to Müller, as adopted by Dussaud, the confusion stemmed from reading the Il-aid, where the Greek hero Phoenix was cited as the father of Europa and, “on account of that,” of Cadmus. Cadmus was thus held to be Phoenician.190 The point seems to be that Cadmus had nothing to do with that Phoenix and thus with Europa. But since Europa was authoritatively – by Homer himself – called Phoenix’s daughter, she could be cleansed of her assumed Semitism by prop­
186 Muhly, “Homer and the Phoenicians,” p. 38. Of the Procrustean modernizers, Muhly sin­
gled out Astour. 
187 Ibid., p. 41. 
188 Ibid., pp. 38–40. 
189 Ibid., p. 41. 
190 He was attributed “la qualité de phénicien.” Dussaud, Les civilisations préhelléniques, p. 
391. The reference is to Müller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 112 ff. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
erly explaining who was her father. Indeed, in Dussaud’s view, the Semitizing error was rooted in the acceptance of too narrow an understanding of the term phoinix.191 The term was of Greek origin, he argued, and must have been used for the population of the Aegean before it designated the maritime peoples of the Syrian coast.192 
This assertion reminds one of Reinach’s views summarized above in this arti­cle. It is, in fact, part of the broader and often intense debates about the mean­ing and origin of the word Phoenix. Since those debates bear, however margin­ally, on our understanding of the myth of Europa, I need to mention them, even if only very briefly. 
The most common approach shared by the Aryanists, philo-Hellenes, Euro-pu­ritans, and anti-Semites taking part in the debates is their seeking to prove that Phoenix was a Greek hero and a Greek name or, at the very least, not a Semitic name.193 A complementary strategy is to loosen the definition of “Phoenicians” so as to include, at its most inclusive, the populations of all the Aegean, Crete, and Near-Eastern coastal regions.194 Whereas the Hellenization of Phoenix (and his offspring) excludes Phoenicians from Greece; the vague and inclusive defini­tion neutralizes them. Charles Autran, for example, whom Victor Bérard charac­terized as a vulgarizer of Reinach’s “anti-Semitic view of history” and dismissed his work as a gimcrack building,195 was able to admit a Phoenician presence in the Greek world without causing upset. For Bérard, the Phoenicians were “these 
191 In a footnote, Dussaud also refuted “certains repprochements onomastiques inacceptable” regarding the name Europa. That refutation was no more than a reference to A. J. Reinach’s 
47 
review of a number of books on Crete in Revue de l’histoire des religions 60 (1909), pp. 226– 247, specifically to pp. 246-47, and an indication that Gruppe’s Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte ought to be criticized on account of “une conception en partie inexacte de la mythologie phénicienne.” Dussaud, Les civilisations préhelléniques, p. 390 n. 2. 
192 Dussaud, Les civilisations préhelléniques, pp. 390–91. 193 “[N]i sémitique ni grec”: Autran, “Phéniciens,” p. 42. Cf. op. cit., p. 52 ff.; René Dussaud, “Victor Bérard. –Le nom des Phéniciens,” Syria 8 (1927). 
194 
Raymond Weill, “Phéniciens, Égéens et Hellenes dans la Méditerranée primitive,” Syria 2 (1921), p. 121, for example, described Cadmus the “Phoenician” as “créto-égéo-asianique.” Autran,“Phéniciens,” p. 14 n. 1, described the Aegean as “caro-lyco-cilicien-crétois.” Cf. Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 57. 
195 Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, Vol. 2: pp. 15, 30. 
Semites of Tyre and Sidon and Byblos.”196 For Autran, they were not Semites.197 To be precise: The Phoenicians who made an impact on the early Aegean civili­zation were not Semites, whereas the Phoenicians of the historical period, that is, the population of the Semitic Canaan on the Syrian coast (and the Semitic world in general) did not contribute in the slightest to the formation of early Greece. Even though the Greece of the archaic Mediterranean world – that is, the Greece embedded in the “broad and cosmopolitan culture of Asia prolonged into the sea” – was not “pure,” its unavoidable impurity was clear of Semitism.198 In short: “Nothing Semitic in Greece.”199 
In the first half of the twentieth century, another theory led to the same con­clusion – the theory that “Phoenician” in Greek myths usually meant “Minoan Cretan.” In this formulation, the theory was published in the first edition of theOxford Classical Dictionary in 1949.200 Forty years earlier, H. R. Hall wrote: “No doubt the whole Kadmos series of legends, connected with Thebes in Boe­otia, has nothing whatever to do with the Semites: the Kadmeian ........, the ‘Red Men’, were Aegeans, probably Cretan colonists […]. We may dismiss from history these Phoenicians at Thebes, where their position has always seemed slightly absurd.”201 
Also working toward non-Semitic conclusions was a theory that narrowed the term Phoenician, arguing that ....... originally meant Carian and was only later extended beyond Asia Minor to cover Phoenicia.202 Still another theory suggested that “Phoenicia originally meant Illyria, that Kadmos was an Illyrian 
196 Victor Bérard, Did Homer Live?, transl. B. Rhys, E. P. Dutton, New York 1931, p. 8. 
197 Autran, “Phéniciens”; Charles Autran, La Grece et l’Orient ancien, a propos d’Ephese et Claros, recherches sur les sanctuiares et les cultes de l’Ionie du Nord, par Ch. Picard, P. Ge-uthner, Paris 1824. (Extract from Babyloniaca, études de philologie assyro-babylonienne8 (1924), Nos. 3–4, p. 174, made clear that the very inclusive collective term asianique “exclut le sémitique.”) 
198 Autran, La Grece et l’Orient ancien, p. 139. 
This is how Weill, “Phéniciens, Égéens et Hellenes,” p. 121, summarized Autran. 
200 S. v. “Phoenicians.” The author of the entry was A. R. Burn. See Edwards 1979, 57. 
201 H. R. Hall, “The discoveries in Crete and their relation to the history of Egypt and Palesti­
ne,” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 31 (1909), cited in Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 56. 
202 For details and criticism, see Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, pp. 84 n. 78, 92 n. 84, 113 n. 119. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
hero and that there was an early Illyrian immigration to Boeotia.”203 The theory does not seem to have won many followers, even though the mythical presence of Cadmus in Illyria cannot be disputed and has been sufficiently discussed by scholars.204 No more popular is a more recent theory that linked Cadmus to the Pelasgian tribes that migrated from Illyria to Thebes.205 
These and such theories affect the myth of Europa and debates about the geo­graphical or, rather, ethnic origin of the heroine only indirectly. Of more direct import was Lesky’s attempt in the 1920s to explain the name of Hellenes as rooted at Dodona.206 The name of “the people who were called to become the makers of the West,” he argued, could be derived from the fragmentary knowl­edge we have of the powerful cultic center at Dodona, where one of the deities venerated was Europa.207 
The Myth of Europa and the Frontiers of Europe 
The interpretations I have discussed thus far are all primarily concerned with the question of origins. In those interpretations, the geographical and ethnic origin of Europa is an element in determining the nature of ancient Greek and modern European civilization. But the myth of Europa has implications for our understanding of history – and for our understanding of ourselves through his­tory – not only as a myth about bloodlines. Of equal importance is the myth of Europa as a myth about frontiers. 
A French historian has remarked that Europa, Cadmus, Phoenix, and Cilix were to be seen as geography translated into myths: “géographie mise an mythes.” The myths in question concerned Crete, continental Greece (Thebes), the terri­
49 
203 G. Bonfante, “The name of the Phoenicians,” Classical Philology 36 (1941), No. 1, cited in 
Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 57. 204 Cf. Vian, Les origines de Thebes, p. 132; Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 113 n. 119. In 
John Wilkes, The Illyrians, Blackwell, Oxford 1992, Bonfante is not mentioned. For Cadmus 
in Illyria, see op. cit., pp. 98–99; Marjeta Šašel Kos, “Cadmus and Harmonia in Illyria,” 
Arheološki vestnik 44 (1993). 205 M. V. Sakellariou, La migration grecque en Ionie, Centre d'études d'Asie mineure, Athens 
1958, pp. 369–75; cf. Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician, p. 57. 206 Albin Lesky, “Hellos-Hellotis,” Pt. 2–3, Wiener Studien46 (1928), pp. 115 ff., especially 126. 207 Lesky, “Hellos-Hellotis,” p. 129. 
tory or territories of which Phoenix was the eponym, and Cilicia.208 Many myths are about geography, and one can certainly learn a lot about geography, and even about “geo-political spaces,” from myths.209 But the myth of Europa is a myth about frontiers par excellence. And the frontiers in question are frontiers of a geographical space as well as of a cultural space. The myth of Europa, in its many versions and interpretations, outlines the frontiers of the Greek world and of Europe, and draws the limits of Hellenic culture or European civilization (or, rather, the limits of the Egyptian and Semitic civilizations). 
Claude Calame, an undoubtedly politically conscious Classicist,210 has proposed a structural analysis of the myth of Europa as the inversion of the myth of Io. Io, Europa’s ancestor, was transformed into a cow as Zeus’s “love affair” with her unfolded and was driven from the centre to the periphery, from Argos to Egypt. Europa’s itinerary was Io’s reversed. Now Zeus assumed the bovine form and carried Europa from the periphery toward the centre, from Phoenicia to Crete (or Boeotia). But the inversion was not complete. Europa did not regain the Pe­loponnese from which Io had been driven out. Europa stopped “at the frontier of the territory inhabited by the Greeks.” Strictly speaking, the myth of Io was about centre and periphery, while the myth of Europa was about frontiers.211 
When Europa disappeared, her father sent her brothers to search for her. They travelled to places in the “border zone” of Greece.212 Cadmus went to the ends 
208 Dussaud, Les civilisations préhelléniques, p. 391, who added that there was no reason to take these combinations more seriously than the filiations of Sem, Cham, and Japhet. 
209 See, for example, J. Ramin, Mythologie et géographie, Les Belles lettres, Paris 1979; Rein­hold Merkelbach, “Les papyrus d’Hésiode et la géographie mythologique de la Grece,” in idem, Hestia und Erigone: Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. W. Blümel, B. Kramer, J. Kramer, and 
C. E. Römer, Teubner, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1996; Claude Calame, Poétiques des mythes dans la Grece antique, Hachette, Paris 2000, p. 117 ff. 
210 His study of myth and history in Ancient Greece, he said, is, among other things, a reaction against “the epistemological colorlessness brought about by the infiltration of a neoliberal ideology into the humanities.” Claude Calame, Myth and History in Ancient Greece: The Symbolic Creation of a Colony, transl. D. W. Berman, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 
N.J. 2003, p. vii. 211 Calame, Poétiques des mythes, pp. 120–23. 212 Rocchi, Kadmos e Harmonia, p. 25, wrote of Samothrace (where, according to some ver­
sions of his search for Europa, Cadmus married Harmonia) as situated in the “zona di confine” between Asia and Europe. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
of the world.213 Having failed to find their sister, they settled at the frontiers of the domains occupied by the Greeks, in the limithrope territories of Greece.214 They “visited” or “took up their abode” – established themselves215 – in Cilicia, Phoenicia, Syria, Rhodos,216 Thasus,217 Samothrace, Thrace, Boeotia, and Illyria. Europa’s sister was the eponym of the Carian capital city at Samos, and Europa’s nephew was the king of the island of Cos.218 Europa herself was brought to Crete, where she was inseminated and gave birth to Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpe-don. The fate of her sons is connected, beyond Crete, with Miletos, Caria, and Lycia,219 as well as with the Aegean islands, of which Rhadamanthys is said to have been the lawgiver, and with Boeotia, to where he fled and where he mar­ried.220 They moved, that is, in a sort of vacant space in between Syria and Crete, on the southern border of the territories populated by the Greeks, and brought that space into subjection to the Greeks.221 
Of special importance in that rim mapped out by the myth of Europa was Crete. Landing in Crete placed Europa at the border of the Greek world. But it was for a very long time not always clear on which side of the border that was. Once the question of Greek borders began to coincide with that of the borders of Europe, the issue became even more complicated and more sensitive. For the ancient Greeks, the question may not have been as high-strung as for their modern suc­cessors, but it had been a question important enough to be given attention. Her­odotus, for example, was unsure about where the borders of Europe were but sure enough that Crete did not lay within them. He said that it was absurd to 
213 Rocchi, Kadmos e Harmonia, p. 39. 214 Calame, Poétiques des mythes, p. 123. 215 “Ils s’établissent (large usage du verbe katoikízo, combine avec ktízo).” Ibid., p. 122. 216 Cf. Diod. V, lviii. 
51 
217 Cf. Pausanias V, xxv, 12: “The Thasians, who are Phoenicians by descent, and sailed from Tyre, and from Phoenicia generally, together with Thassus, the son of Agenor, in search of Europa.” 
218 Steph. Byzant. s.v.; Apollodorus II, vii, 1; cf. Jean-Claude Carriere and Bertand Massonie, La Bibliotheque d’Apollodore: traduite, annotée et commentée, Annales litteraires de l’Université de Besançon, Besançon 1991, p. 206; Vian, Les origines de Thebes, p. 56. See Asius frag. 7 Davies; Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry, p. 198. 
219 Cf. Friedrich Prinz, Gründungsmythen und Sagenchronologie, Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhan­dlung, Munich 1979, p. 97 ff. 220 ApollodorusII, iv, 11; III,i,2 (with further references in Frazer’s notes in the Loeb Classical Library); cf. Calame, Poétiques des mythes, p. 123. 221 Calame, Poétiques des mythes, p. 123. 
suppose that Europe received its name from Europa, for “Europa was an Asiatic and never visited the country which we now call Europe, but only sailed from Phoenicia to Crete and from Crete to Lycia.”222 For Strabo, the geographical posi­tion of Crete was open to interpretation. He cited Eudoxus of Cnidos, according to whom the island lay in the Aegean Sea.223 Strabo himself described it as being washed by the Aegean and Cretan Seas from the north, but from the south by the Libyan Sea, which was the prolongation of the Egyptian Sea.224 In view of the bipartite image of the world, Crete lay thus in between Asia and Europe. This is a view one also comes across in mythical landscapes. Plato, for example, who counted the Cretans “among the Greeks,”225 represented Europa’s sons as being in charge of Europe and Asia. Rhadamanthys, as one of the “judges in the mead­ows,” judged the dead from Asia, and Aeacus “those from Europe,” while both conceded seniority to Minos.226 
As regards modern scholars, their ideas about the relation between Greece and Crete, and between these two and the East, have always been disparate. An extreme view among those who have maintained that post-Minoan Crete was not truly a part of the Greek world was held by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. He pointed out that, as modern readers of Greek sources, we can learn nothing about Crete before Ephorus and Aristotle wrote about Cretan society. Wilamow­itz-Moellendorff considered that significant for Greek history. Moreover, on the basis of Ephorus and Aristotle – and a few other isolated reports – one could not gain a picture of the early Crete. By the fifth century BC, the island had almost no contacts with the rest of the Greek world, and what eventually came to be known to the Greeks was a politically fragmented and culturally declined Crete which was held in bad repute.227 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff wrote that Crete was rediscovered in the late Classic period by an anonymous traveller, and that that rediscovery explained the sudden interest of Plato, Ephorus, and Aristotle in 
222 Herodotus Histories IV, 45. 223 Eudoxus frag. 356 Lasserre. 224 Strabo X, iv, 2. Cf. Homer Odyssey XIX, 172: “There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the 
wine-dark sea.” 
225 Plato Minos 318d. 
226 Plato Gorgias 523e-524a; cf. Claude Calame, Thésée et l’imaginaire athénien: Légende et 
culte en Grece antique, 2nd ed., Editions Payot Lausanne, Lausanne 1996, p. 215. 
227 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen, reprint of the 3rd ed., Wis-senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1973, Vol. 1: p. 131. Cf. the brief survey in H. Verbruggen, Le Zeus crétois, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1981, pp. 174–75. 
europa: the politics of mythology 
the island.228 Crete’s religious prestige in the Hellenistic period can partly be ex­plained by its isolation, but that isolation had never been absolute.229 
Hoeck was thus right to point out that Crete never played an active role in the big events of ancient Greek history,230 but his contemporary Böttiger was not wrong to write of Crete’s decisive cultural influence in the broader Greek world.231 For Creuzer, its frontier position made Crete a bridge between Greece and the East. Crete, he wrote, was most fortunately placed for establishing links with the Ori­ent, and Cretans knew how to take advantage of their good fortune. Among the first Phoenician settlements were those on Crete, and the island received Egyp­tian teaching. As a result, Crete became “one of the first spots of light to enlighten the darkness of Pelasgian Greece.”232 In the time that followed, the idea of it being a bridge has not always been appreciated. There was, for sure, no place for it in Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and his followers’ view. Today’s historians have large­ly outgrown traditional modern academic divisions and seem to be quite right – or, rather, realistic – to regard Crete as “a part of the dynamically shifting border between East and West”233 and, even more critically, between Europe and Asia. 
For centuries, however, Crete was of marginal importance for what has come to pass for European history. This should not surprise us, since for centuries Crete had been under Byzantine rule (except for an interval of about forty years, when it came under Arab occupation). When the Crusaders could not leave even their fellow Christians at peace and in the course of the Fourth Crusade sacked Con­stantinople, Crete fell into the hands of one of the marauding chieftains, who sold it to the Venetians. With the consolidation of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish 
228 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aristoteles und Athen, Weidmann, Berlin 1893, Vol. 
53 
2: pp. 25–26. 229 Verbruggen, Le Zeus crétois, pp. 174–75. 230 Hoeck, Kreta, Vol. 3: p. 40. 231 “[D]ie Mutter aller gesetzgebenden Herrscherkultur an der kleinasiatischen Küste und 
auf den griechischen Inseln.” C. A. Böttiger, Ideen zur Kunst-Mythologie. Erster Cursus: Stammbaum der Religionen des Alterthums. Einleitung zur vor-homerischen Mythologie der Griechen, In der Arnoldischen Buchhandlung, Dresden and Lepizig 1826, p. 299. 
232 Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, Vol. 4: p. 232. 
233 “Crete is not solely a fixed geographical location, but a part of the dynamically shifting border between East and West.” John C. McEnroe, “Cretan Questions: Politics and Archa­eology, 1898–1913,” in Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology, ed. Y. Hami­lakis, Oxbow Books, Oxford 2002, p. 70. 
attacks on Crete began. But the island was not conquered before Candia fell in 1669, more than two centuries after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Europeans abandoned Crete, just as they did post-Ancient Greece. They re-en­tered them on the map of Europe only when the Greeks rose against the Otto­man Empire in 1821, and the Cretans joined the rebellion. Crete consolidated its European status when the Christian Cretans, in 1896, made their final attempt to expel the Turks from the island. Then, the “Cretan question” became a Euro­pean question. The European powers were sympathetic towards the rebels but worried about the possible fallout of a total collapse of the Ottoman Empire. To keep things under control, they sent peacekeeping forces to Crete and eventual­ly installed an agreeable High Commissioner.234 
With the peacekeepers there arrived European archaeologists. The lords of peace parcelled out the island among themselves for their respective scientists, and excavations began. The British appropriated for themselves the best spot, worked most efficiently, and under the leadership of Sir Arthur Evans discov­ered the “cradle of European civilization.” Those were Evans’s own words.235 “For the first time,” he wrote, “there has come into view a primitive European civilization.” The “primitive,” here, meant very early, going back “even beyond the days of the First Dynasty of Egypt.”236 And civilization it was: its “beneficent ruler” was a “patron of the arts, founder of palaces, establisher of civilized do­minion.” That dominion was “peaceful,” but one could imagine that the “yoke of the more civilized ruler should at times have weighed heavily on subject peo­ples.” When it came to ancient Crete, even the Athenians must have looked with a “childish wonder at the mighty creations of a civilization.”237 That civilization, insular but not isolated, was able to develop “on native lines” and to “accept suggestions from the Egyptian or the Asiatic side without itself being dominated by foreign conventionalisms.”238 The Cretans “took what they wanted, nothing 
234 Brina Otto, König Minos und sein Volk: Das leben in alten Kreta, Artemis & Winkler, Dusse­ldorf 1997, pp. 31–32; McEnroe, “Cretan Questions,” pp. 61, 64. 
235 Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos: A comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos, Macmillan, London 1921–35, Vol. 1: 24. 
236 Evans, The Palace of Minos, Vol. 1: p. 1. 237 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 238 Ibid.,p. 25. For Curtius,Griechische Geschichte, Vol. 1: p. 61, Crete was an excellent exam­
ple of the creativity of the Greek spirit: “Hier hat der griechische Geist zuerst offenbart, wie er stark genug sei, sich die mannigfaltigen Anregungen der schlauen, erfinderischen Se­
europa: the politics of mythology 
more, and were neither artistically nor politically enslaved.”239 And they gave. They were in position to give even to Greece: the Mycenaean culture was es­sentially Minoan. As such, the Crete that Evans unearthed, “was at once the starting-point and the earliest stage in the highway of European civilization.”240 
His contemporaries happily agreed. Lewis Farnell, for example, his colleague at Oxford, prefixed a letter to “my dear Sir Arthur” in a Festschrift for Evans’s seventy-fifth birthday. Farnell wrote that letter to “pay homage to one who has done more than any in this University, we may say more than any in this nation, to reveal and illuminate the ancient European culture of the Mediterranean.” Speaking more directly to Evans, he said that “you have been able to reveal to us a brilliant chapter of European history undreamed of before.”241 
A century after Evans began his excavations his achievements are a little less appreciated. Among archaeologists there are some who are unmistakably criti­cal. They have challenged many aspects of Evans’s work, including some of his basic assumptions. Evans claimed that “the spade of the excavator” had un­earthed the “cradle of European civilization.” That assumption has been repeat­ed into our own days.242 But critical archaeologists today argue that Evans and his successors “created” that early Cretan civilization. They point out that the Bronze Age Knossos excavated by Evans was “widely constru(ct)ed as Europe’s first civilization.”243They maintain that the Cretan past was “produced” “through 
miten anzueignen, aber alles Empfangene selbstthätig umzugestalten und solche Formen des religiösen und staatlichen Lebens zu schaffen, die der klare Abdruck seiner eigenen Natur sind.” Cf. Vere Gordon Childe, The Dawn of European Civilization, 6th ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1957, p. 20: “Minoan civilization was not brought ready made from Asia nor from Africa, but was an original native creation wherein Sumerian and Egyptian 
55 
techniques and ideas were blended to form a novel and essentially European whole.” 
239 Evans, The Palace of Minos, Vol. 1: p. 19. 
240 Ibid.,p. 24. 
241 S. Casson, ed., Essays in Aegean Archaeology: Presented to Sir Arthur Evans in honour of his 75th birthday, Clarendon, Oxford 1927, p. iii. 
242 Olivier Reverdin, Crete and Its Treasures, Viking Press, New York 1961. A recent exhibition in the Badische Landesmuseum featured Minos’s Crete as “die erste europäische Hoch­kultur.” Im Labyrinth des Minos: Kreta – die erste europäische Hochkultur. Ausstellung des Badischen Landesmuseums, 27. 1. bis 29. 4. 2001, Biering & Brinkmann, Munich 2000. 
243 Louise Hitchcock and Paul Koudounaris, “Virtual Discourse: Arthur Evans and the Recon­struction of the Minoan Palace at Knossos,” in Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology, ed. Y. Hamilakis, Oxbow Books, Oxford 2002, p. 42. 
the lenses” of the “meta-narrative” of “Europeanism” as “fundamentally Euro­pean in nature.”244 They reason that Evans put into the same frame the worlds of Cretan antiquity “and that of his own fin-de-siecle European modernity,” thereby “fabricating an authentic past for Europe.”245 They make the point that he as­signed to Crete a “central place in the archaeologies of the West” by explaining it as “the origins of European civilisation” and as “the earliest – prior even to the civilization of the mainland Greece – manifestation of Europeanness.”246 
All this, of course, is the nature of the archaeologist’s work. One should not re­proach Evans with fabricating the ancient civilization of Crete. What has come to be seen as problematic is the nature of his fabrication: Crete as the “cradle of European civilization.” To me, this fabrication is problematic in the first place because I see “European civilization” as problematic. But Evans’s fabrication is problematic for methodological reasons that have nothing directly to do with politics.247 It is utterly anachronistic. “Europe” existed neither in the Minoan age nor in the centuries that followed. The entity we call Europe – and Evans knew as such – was some three thousand years distant from his imagined Cre­tan “priest-kings.” “Civilization” was an even later conceptual invention. It is thus a justifiable criticism to say that “[d]espite the fact that such an entity did not yet exist, the Minoans of Bronze Age Knossos have been widely constru(ct) ed as Europe’s first civilisation.”248 Archaeologists can, in fact, say whether, or to what extent, Evans falsified his data in order to construct the meaning of his 
244Yannis Hamilakis, “What Future for the ‘Minoan’ Past? Re-thinking Minoan Archaeology,” in Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology, pp. 6, 11, 16. 
245 Donald Preziosi, “Archaeology as Museology: Re-thinking the Minoan Past,” in Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology, pp. 30, 32. 
246 John Bennet, “Millennial Ambiguities,” in Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Ar­chaeology, p. 215. 
247 Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image, and Symbol, University of South Caroli­na Press, Columbia, South Carolina 1993, p. 8, in a book dedicated to the memory of Evans, put it nicely that “the methodological tools he had at his disposal were exciting but not subtle.” Marinatos added that “speculations and leaps of fantasy […] sometimes characte­rized Evans’s writings.” Op. cit., 9. 
248 Hitchcock and Koudounaris, “Virtual Discourse,” p. 42. Cf. Paul Faure, La Crete au temps de Minos: 1500 av. J. C., 3rd ed., Hachette, Paris 1997, p. 360: “S’il faut définir brievement la culture minoenne telle qu’elle nous apparaît au milieu du seconde millénaire avant Jésus-Christ, disons qu’elle nous offre l’example du premier classicisme que l’Europe ait con-nu. Cela ne signifie nullement qu’il s’agisse d’une culture européenne, car a cette époque l’expression n’avait aucun sense.” 
europa: the politics of mythology 
discovery. But regardless of what experts say, problematic intellectual methods are most often politically effective and the successful establishment of Minoan Crete a century ago can tell us a great deal about European identity politics at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 
European identity politics usually swings between mystique and myths. It is not surprising that the critical archaeologists I cited mentioned “Europeanist” myths.249 They also pointed to the “‘mythic’ quality” of the Bronze Age Cretan past and characterized Crete as inextricably linked to myth.”250 This is not an exclusively recent aperçu. Already the Roman chorographer Pomponius Mela wrote that Crete was “notorious for its many legends,” and named “the arrival of Europa” in the first place.251 But while our modern critical historians and ar­chaeologists have taken into account the mythical nature of ancient Crete, they do not seem to have taken notice of Evans’s references to the myth of Europa. 
Evans claimed he found the name for the civilization he discovered. “To this ear­ly civilization of Crete as a whole,” he wrote, “I have proposed […] to apply the name ‘Minoan.’” He was proud of his proposal and pleased that it was quickly and generally accepted “by archaeologists in this [England] and other coun­tries.”252 The term Minoan in fact “pre-dates Evans and his Knossian adventures by several decades”253 – in fact, by almost a century.254 But this is, here, more interesting than directly relevant. The point, here, is that this very name evokes the myth of Europa. The ruler of the first civilization was “the bearer of a divine title.” Minos, Evans explained, “is of divine parentage and himself the progeni­tor of divine beings. Son of Zeus by Europa, herself, perhaps, an Earth-Goddess, wedded to Pasiphae, ‘the all-illuminating,’ father of Ariadne ‘the most holy’ – 
57 
249 Hamilakis, “What Future for the ‘Minoan’ Past?”, p. 11. 
250 Bennet, “Millennial Ambiguities,” p. 217; MacGillivray, Minotaur, p. 312. See also Faure, La 
Crete au temps de Minos, who introduced his reader to ancient Cretan history through the 
myth of Europa. 251 P. Mela Description of the World II,112. 252 Evans, The Palace of Minos, Vol. 1: p. 1. 253 Hamilakis, “What Future for the ‘Minoan’ Past?”, p. 17. 254 Hoeck speaks of the “Minoische Zeit” and “Minoische Periode” in Cretan history right at 
the beginning of his work. Hoeck, Kreta, Vol. 1: pp. VI, VIII. His second volume is dedica­
ted to the “Minoische Kreta.” 
Minos, in the last two relationships at least, was coupled with alternative forms of the Mother-Goddess of pre-Hellenic Crete.”255 
This seems to be saying that in the beginning of European civilization there was a divine copulation. Aestheticized, that divine copulation has become a Euro­pean cultural symbol. When in 1900 the first season of Evans’s excavations at Knossos drew to a close and a sensational bull’s head relief was discovered, an article in the London Times was inclined to see that artefact as a representation of the bull that had brought Europa to Crete.256 
255  Evans, The Palace of Minos, Vol. 1: p. 3. Cf. op. cit., p. 9, on Minos as “the son of the daugh­ 
58  ter (Europa) of Phoenix” (Iliad XIV,321), as a “version which nearly approaches the truth if we may regard the term ........ or ‘red-men’ as having been first suggested by the ruddy  
brown race of the Cretan frescoes.” Op. cit., p. 11 n. 1, rejects the contemporary attempt by  
Sir William Ridgeway to interpret the “fabled relationship of Phoenix” as containing the  
historical truth that “Minos I passed into Crete from Palestine at the close of the fifteenth  
century BC,” and that he was one of “the tall fair-haired Achaean invaders” who (“we are  
asked to believe,” Evans interpolates) had made their way to Syria from the North across  
the Dardanelles, like the Gauls, and through Asia Minor.” Evans rendered Ridgeway’s con­ 
clusion with a good deal of irony: “Swooping down from Canaan to Crete, this ‘Achaean’  
leader with the un-Hellenic name deals a fatal blow to ‘Minoan’ civilization.” Evans seems  
to have taken a contrary stance to “We are all Greeks” already in his student years. See  
MacGillivray, Minotaur, p. 37.  
256  Times, 10 August 1900, cited in Otto, König Minos und sein Volk, p. 84.  


The Idea of Europe and its Crisis 

Rok Benčin* 

Ideas and Their Destinies: Enlightenment, Communism, Europe1 
1.Introduction: Europe as an ambivalent idea 
As the project of European integration entered a series of crises in the last dec­ade, historical and conceptual reconstructions of the idea of Europe have been consulted anew, either as the legacy of principles and values that can be referred to in the quest for solutions or to demonstrate how the current problems are manifestations of an original flaw. The idea of Europe can be seen as “a promise of peace, prosperity and freedom,” as the French President Macron recently put it,2 but this promise can be understood either as the deeper meaning behind the common market (as Macron himself would have it) or an ideological veil masking the neoliberal policies that make Europe an instrument in the hands of financial capital (as many critics have claimed).3 Europe as an idea is often pre­sented as a vault of fundamental values coming from Athens, Jerusalem, and/ or the Enlightenment, but these values can also be understood as more recent inventions deployed for dubious causes from the Crusades4 to austerity.5 
On the one hand, the progressive goals behind the idea of Europe have been reaffirmed to guide Europe as a political project in crisis out of its predicament. To use a famous phrase coined by Jürgen Habermas – who is also one of the most outspoken advocates of this position –, Europe is thus presented as an unfinished project. On the other hand, the project of Europe is subjected to a 61 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
2 Emmanuel Macron, “For European renewal”, 4 March 2019, https://www.elysee.fr/emma­
nuel-macron/2019/03/04/for-european-renewal.en. 3 See Cédric Durand (ed.), En finir avec l’Europe, La fabrique, Paris 2016. 4 See Tomaž Mastnak, Evropa: med evolucijo in evtanazijo, Studia humanitatis, Ljubljana 
1998, and id., “Abbé de Saint-Pierre: European Union and the Turk”, History of Political Thought 19 (4/1998), pp. 570–598. 5 See Costas Lapavitsas et al., Crisis in the Eurozone, Verso, London and New York 2012. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
radical critique that goes all the way to the origins of its most noble ideals of uni­versalism and cosmopolitanism and their strong entanglement with imperialist and colonialist endeavours. From this perspective, to have any hope of salvag­ing Europe and its idea, one must be prepared to declare – as Étienne Balibar, among others, has done6 – that the project is “finished” in its current form and has to be reinvented on new foundations. 
In any case, there is an ambivalence to the idea of Europe.7 Simply put, it seems either that there is always something wrong with Europe even though the idea is essentially good, or that there is something to salvage in the idea even though its origins and realisations are deeply suspect. In these terms, Europe as an idea would perhaps be better accounted for in terms of its destiny rather than its legacy – that is, if we ascribe destiny the meaning assigned to it by Freud in rela­tion to the drives: as different possible outcomes resulting from a process made unstable by internal polarities and ambivalences. I will thus attempt to analyse Europe from the perspective of its ambivalent structure as a political idea. 
What I mean here by political ideas are not the general principles of justice, liberty, equality, and the like, but more specific and historically situated con­ceptual structures that suggest a particular relation between (1) an assumption of political reason, (2) a particular outlook on history and its continuity as the medium in which reason gradually manifests itself as progress, and (3) a certain conception of emancipation in which reason is directly and fully subjectivised and which implies an evental rupture with historical continuity. This conceptu­al structure is represented by the following figure. 
REASON 
progress 
subject 
HISTORY 
EMANCIPATION event 
6 
See Étienne Balibar, Europe: crise et fin?, Le bord de l’eau, Lormont 2016. 
7 I am borrowing this characterisation from Gerard Delanty, for whom the ambivalence of the idea of Europe is revealed in the way in which, “on the one hand, an exclusivist notion of Europe has prevailed; yet, on the other the idea of Europe does appear to occupy the normative space for a universalist project of autonomy.” (Gerard Delanty, Inventing Euro­pe: Idea, Identity, Reality, Macmillan, Basingstoke 1995, p. 12.) 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
This triad, as I will try to show, remains inherently ambivalent due to the friction between the continuity of progress and the discontinuity of subjectivation. In a crisis – when it turns out that there is ultimately no subject of progress, the dif­ferent possible destinies of political ideas start to unfold: on the one hand, ideas succumb to the logic of the unfinished project that desubjectifies progress and reduces the hopes of political reason to reforming institutions and launching new narratives. On the other hand, radical critique questions the very core of the idea and the progress it is supposed to bring forward, while anticipating the emergence of an emancipatory political subject. 
I will first demonstrate this logic with regard to two other political ideas of this kind with which Europe is in a specific constellation, namely enlighten­ment as it figures in Kant’s “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” and communism as described recently by Alain Badiou in his text “The Idea of Communism”.8 Kant defined enlightenment as emancipation through the subjec­tivation of reason. Having the courage to use one’s own reason without guidance from another is in itself an act of emancipation, but also an indication of the historical course of progress that can only be achieved gradually. As it turns out, the emancipation of the immature from their guardians is not (only) an act of courage but (also) a fragile process that requires its own “enlightened” guardi­ans. While Kant struggles with the inclusion of the emancipatory event in his nar­rative of progress, Badiou attempts to come to terms with some kind of continuity of emancipatory sequences. If the political truth to which communism gave rise only exists in limited temporal sequences of subjectivation initiated by events as radical discontinuities in the course of history, what guidance can communism as an idea provide at a time when no proper political sequences seem to be active? 
While European integration is today more often than not understood in conti-63 nuity with the political principles of the Enlightenment (reason, progress, de­mocracy, cosmopolitanism, etc.), it is also a project established in opposition to communism as an alternative form of progressive internationalism. Just as Europe gains some of its legitimacy from its opposition to communism, which is now generally identified with its “dark side”, it must turn a blind eye to­
8 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, trans. by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1970, pp. 54–60. Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism”, in: C. Douzinas and 
S. Žižek (eds.), The Idea of Communism, Verso, London and New York 2010, pp. 1–14. 
wards the “dark side” of enlightened progress as exposed by many critics since Adorno and Horkheimer’sDialectic of Enlightenment.9 It is no coincidence that Habermas established his conception of modernity as an unfinished project by criticising Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of enlightenment as going too far and therefore ignoring its progressive legacy.10 Not only are enlightenment and communism two political ideas that intimately intersect with the idea of Europe, they also offer two other cases of divergent destinies of political ideas. They can therefore help us clarify the point of differentiation between various accounts and discursive uses of the idea of Europe itself. 
2. The event and the narrative: from Kant’s enlightenment to its con­temporary guardians 
Can it be said that Kant presents enlightenment as an idea? The word “idea” cer­tainly does not figure in his “Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” (December 1784), in contrast to another text that Kant published in the same journal, Berlinische Monatsschrift, just a month earlier, namely the “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (November 1784). Foucault famously argues that Kant’s answer to the question of enlightenment is signifi­cantly different from his other texts addressing the problem of history since the questions of the teleology and accomplishment of history are not directly ad­dressed. What comes forward in this particular text in a crucial way is rather the question of the present, “‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a par­ticular philosophical task.”11 In the November article, on the contrary, the idea from the title takes precisely the role of the teleological development of history: the “at first sight absurd proposition to write a history according to an idea of how world events must develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends.”12 In this context, enlightenment figures not as “the present”, but as the admitted­ly often interrupted process that leads from the beginning to the end of history, 
i.e. from the natural rational capacities of mankind to their full development in 
9 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2002. 
10 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by F. Lawrence, Polity Press, Cambridge 1987, pp. 106–130. 
11 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. by S. Lotringer, trans. by L. Hochroth and C. Porter, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles 2007, p. 105. 
12 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, p. 51. 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
“a universal cosmopolitan existence,” the world order of “a federation of peo­ples.”13 While the December text presents the Enlightenment as an actual event in the present that the philosopher commits to, the November text presents it as an idea, as “only a notion of what a philosophical mind (…) might be able to attempt” in terms of looking at the course of history “from a different angle.”14 
The idea is something that presents itself as a narrative, “a novel,” as Kant him­self is ready to admit.15 And yet we are invited to assume that what is thus pre­sented is the actual course of history as we are usually unable to see it due to the empirical history, which provides many arguments against the assumption of progress. If we want to show that such an idea is not a mere fancy, it needs to be subjected to a reality test that will show “whether experience can discover any­thing to indicate a purposeful natural process of this kind.” Kant will famously return to this question after the French Revolution, but in 1784 the test only dis­covers “a little” of this process in actual experience.16 The idea of progress thus remains a hypothesis, an attempt of the mind. Its credibility stems less from the signs one might observe in experience than from its value as a perspective on history that provides guidance, as well as comfort and motivation for action. The cosmopolitan idea does not, however, provide us with ideological goggles that would explain everything we see as a necessary step towards the common good. It rather helps us not to be discouraged by defeats of progressive ideals, since it enables us to see that despite the setbacks, “a germ of enlightenment always survived, developing further with each revolution.”17 
On the other hand, Kant opens his text on enlightenment by defining this germ itself as a revolutionary motto addressed to everyone: exiting the state of imma­turity by having the courage to use one’s own understanding without guidance from another. The problem of historical teleology is put aside for a moment, 65 as Foucault notices, in order to identify “a certain element of the present that needs to be recognised.”18 The Enlightenment is an event, something that the philosopher identifies as determining the present by issuing a call to form a col­
13 Ibid., pp. 51, 47. 14 Ibid., p. 53. 15 Ibid., pp. 51–52. 16 Ibid., p. 50. 17 Ibid., p. 52. 18 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 84. 
lective subject, an “us” to which the philosopher declares he belongs.19 That is why Foucault sees this text as an outline for “the attitude of modernity,” actively affirming “the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy.”20 In terms of the structure of the political idea outlined above, Kant therefore moves from the line of progress (between reason and history), to the line of the subject (between reason and emancipation). Sapere aude! is precisely the call to subjectivise reason, gaining the courage to use one’s own, which amounts to an exit from immaturity, i.e. emancipation. 
Despite his emphasis on the opening paragraphs of Kant’s text and the specific reading he offers,21Foucault nevertheless does not shy away from giving an ac­count of the rest of the text, which manages to “displace and, up to a point, con­tradict or call into question the whole of Kant’s analysis.”22The problem appears at the point where Kant draws our attention to the difficulty each individual has working “his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him.”23The rational natural capacity of men is here contradicted by the second nature that the guardians of the immature take great care to reproduce. But in order to be able to renounce the guardians and autonomously constitute them­selves as the subjects of their own understanding, the immature need another kind of guardian, the enlightened avant-garde that will be able to “disseminate the spirit” of enlightenment.24 Here, the problem of progress returns. As we have seen already, there is no inevitability to progress in Kant. It is an interrupted pro­cess that only advances under specific historical conditions and is put to a halt in the absence thereof. Its continuity can only be asserted from the perspective of providence, which – as merely human – “we are not capable of placing ourselves in.”25 Here, Kant argues against progress through revolution and opts instead for a long-term evolutionary vision of the public use of reason as the gentle climate 
19 Ibid., p. 85. 20 Ibid., pp. 105, 112. 21 Foucault thus also discerns and affirms a fragmentary element of Kant’s text as its specific 
“event”. 22 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 
1982–1983, trans. by G. Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2010, p. 39. 
23 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, p. 54. 
24 Ibid., p. 55. 
25 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. by M. J. Gregor, Abaris Books, New 
York 1979, p. 149. 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
in which the germ of enlightenment will eventually mature.26 The freedom of public reasoning (on the condition of obedience) was at that time guaranteed by Frederick, the enlightened monarch.27 Thus, “after having stated and demon­strated at some length that there cannot be an individual agent or individual agents of this liberation,” Foucault argues, Kant “now introduces precisely the King of Prussia,” king Frederick, as the true “agent of Aufklärung.”28 
What becomes clear here is what Jacques Ranciere will describe as “the logic of Enlightenment in which the cultivated elites have to guide the ignorant and su­perstitious lower classes in the path of progress,” a path “of infinite reproduction of inequality in the name of the promise of equality.”29 Foucault himself, having identified the difficulties of Kant’s text on enlightenment after declaring its singu­larity as the advent of philosophical modernity, seeks to nevertheless keep hold of this singularity by connecting the question of Aufklärung to something that will be able to make up for its shortcomings. The manuscript published as “What is Enlightenment?” links it to the attitude of modernity through Baudelaire, yet Foucault’s original take on the subject, the first lecture of his 1983 College de France seminar, keeps the problem in the Kantian frame by linking Aufklärung to the French Revolution as addressed by Kant in “The Conflict of Faculties” (1798). In this text, the question of progress and the question of the event are merged: there is something about the Revolution that has meanwhile taken place that answers Kant’s old question of the proof of progress given by experience: “In the 1798 text, the revolutionary enthusiasm replaces or succeeds the King of Prussia in the role he was given in the 1784 text as [an] agent of Aufklärung.”30 
While in his November 1784 text the progress of humankind remains an idea, an attempt of the mind to produce a possible narrative of which only “a little” was given in experience, the 1798 text introduces an event as the definitive sign 67 that the progress is real. As Foucault notices: “the assignment of a cause [the natural capacity or moral tendency of mankind] will never be able to determine anything except possible effects […]; but the reality of an effect can only be 
26 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, pp. 55, 59. 27 Ibid., pp. 58–59. 28 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, pp. 37–38. 
29 
Jacques Ranciere, “Communists Without Communism?”, in: C. Douzinas and S. Žižek 
(eds.), The Idea of Communism, pp. 167–168. 30 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, p. 39. 
established by the existence of an event.”31 Finally, there is an event that grounds the fiction of progress in actual experience. But what is the nature of this experi­ence? Kant first warns that “the problem of progress is not to be resolved directly through experience” since it would take an uncritical climb up to the position of providence to see all the facts as regular historical movement.32 Nevertheless, Kant continues, there must be an experience that can be seen as the undenia­ble sign of the cause of progress, a certain character of humankind.33 It is not an empirical fact that can play this role, it is an event or, more accurately, the effects of an event that can prove this moral tendency, namely, the enthusiasm of the observers of the French Revolution. Their participation in desire (“eine Theilnehmung dem Wunsche nach”) proves a certain “moral predisposition in the human race” as the cause of progress.34 Leaving aside the debates this af­fective politics has given rise to amongst thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Jean-François Lyotard, we will only keep in mind here that Kant’s emphasis on the affective effects of the Revolution allows him to separate the question of the sign of progress from the empirical consequences of the Revolution. Just as the sign Kant is looking for is not given as an empirical fact but as an event, so too are the empirical successes and failures of the Revolution irrelevant from the perspective of progress. The event in itself is enough since for Kant, as we have seen, progress is essentially an interrupted process and no delay or step back­wards can be an argument against assuming that it is real. 
Finding proof that the narrative of the idea is real, Kant reconciles the fissure be­tween progress and event that I identified between the two 1784 texts. On the one hand, event is a sign of progress, while on the other, it issues an affective call for subjectivation (participation in desire). The point where the triangle of the idea nevertheless remains incomplete, however, is the connection between progress and subjectivity: we have determined that the improvement of the human race has a cause, but it only advances in subjective sequences whose effects can be easily reversed. As there is no (human) subjectivity that can guarantee the con­tinuity of improvement, “the hope for […] progress is to be expected only on the condition of a wisdom from above (which bears the name of Providence if it is in­
31 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 88. 32 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 149. 33 Ibid., p. 151. 34 Ibid., p. 153. 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
visible to us).”35 Indeed, providence (or the enlightened State as its worldly incar­nation) can be seen from this perspective as the fantasy that provides the illusion of the continuity of progress in the absence of any subject that could guarantee it. 
* * * 
Following in the footsteps of Adorno and Horkheimer, many in the second part of the 20th century have criticised the effects of progress as the legacy of the Enlightenment – not in the vein of anti-Enlightenment reaction but in the name of its own ideals. The idea of enlightenment, however, is currently making a major comeback. In one form or another, calls for the urgency of a return to en­lightenment from different sides of the political spectrum are proliferating. The main motivation for what is still essentially a Habermasian defence of its legacy is a response to the dangers of a turn towards a “post-truth” society. Reason is thus reaffirmed as the centrist liberal democratic common sense opposing the rise of populism. 
One should nevertheless keep in mind Foucault’s reservations regarding such reaffirmations of enlightenment. His reading of Kant’s text in 1983 was already a reaction to Habermas’s critique not only of Adorno and Horkheimer’s book, but also of Foucault himself and other French theorists who were accused by the German philosopher of diverting critical theory away from reason. Foucault responds, as we have seen, with his own reaffirmation of enlightenment that goes in a different direction, while he dismisses the guardians of its legacy in the following way: “Let us leave to their pious meditations those who want to keep the heritage of the Aufklärung alive and intact. This piety, of course, is the most touching of all treasons.”36 
69 
Since Habermas, paradoxically, the reaffirmation of enlightenment has often boiled down to rejecting critical theory that goes too far and undermines reason itself.37 “Postmodernism” became the most often used tag for this kind of erratic 
35 Ibid., p. 169. 36 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 93. 37 According to Habermas, we should be careful not to take partial solutions as a part of 
the problem: we should instead carefully separate the political, scientific, and artistic 
achievements of reason that have already “been incorporated (in however distorted and 
incomplete a fashion) into institutions” that govern modern democratic societies from the 
critical theory that analyses the way reason can function as a tool of oppression and domination. A return to reason as a reaction to so-called postmodernism thus makes a return to enlightenment an attractive prospect for those on the left who want to leave postmodern deviations behind,38 but also for those on the right who reaffirm reason as the liberation of “controversial” facts and ideas from the censorship of political correctness. 
An example of the latter kind can be found in Steven Pinker’s bestseller EnlightenmentNow. In an astonishing twist to the Kantian problem of confirm­ing the idea of progress in experience, Pinker sets out to prove with extensive empirical data how humanity has indeed progressed remarkably in all aspects of social life since the 18th century. As progress becomes a fact, critics such as Adorno and Foucault can only be seen as “the prophets of doom,” spreading illusory pessimism.39 As some critics have noticed, such arguments provide a seemingly centrist platform that serves to legitimate some more controversial ideas of the radical right.40 Pinker’s heroic humanity thus reminds us of the patient Kant jokes about in his own discussion of progress, the patient “dying of improvement.”41 
It therefore seems that turning enlightenment into a legacy to be defended amounts to replacing the call for the subjectivation of reason with reason in the form of the Kantian providence in secular disguise: progress guaranteed by the parliament or simply the market. 
70  problems that still remain to be solved. (Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 113.)  
38  See Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia” and  
“Dialectical Enlightenment”, Jacobin, 11 March and 16 May 2017, www.jacobinmag.  
com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy­ 
-modernity-enlightenment and www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/radical-enlightenment­ 
-philosophy-spinoza-materialism-marxism.  
39  Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,  
Viking, New York 2018, pp. 39–40.  
40  See James A. Smith, “Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson: The Missing Link Between Neo- 
liberalism and the Radical Right”, Open Democracy, 1 November 2018, https://www.open- 
democracy.net/en/steven-pinker-jordan-peterson-neoliberalism-radical-right/.  
41  Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 169.  

ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
3.Connecting (to) the sequences: communism with(out) history? 
Just as it is widespread today to resort to the legacy of the Enlightenment, it is commonplace to simply identify the idea of communism with the dark side of communism as a political project, up to the point where its “legacy” seems irretrievable to most. Nevertheless, the idea of communism has recently gained traction in philosophical circles, particularly since the discussions surrounding Alain Badiou’s reconceptualisation in 2009. 
Badiou’s take on the idea of communism is of particular interest to us here since he describes it primarily as an “idea” with a defined structure made of different elements, but also as an “operation” that entails certain functions and process­es. For Badiou, the idea delineates a triangle (similar to the one we have laid out above) connecting “three basic elements: a truth procedure, a belonging to his­tory, and an individual subjectivation.”42 Badiou describes truth as an element of the idea as “a concrete, time-specific sequence in which a new thought and practice of collective emancipation arise, exist and eventually disappear.”43 This is consistent with the way Badiou has described truth procedures since 1989’s Being and Event: as sequences, initiated by an event, in which a (collective) subject is constituted as the agent that thinks and acts in order to transform a particular situation in line with the consequences of the event in question.44 We can immediately see how (political) truth, event and subject have been indistin­guishable elements of Badiou’s philosophical framework for decades. 
Badiou’s conception of truth thus already includes subjectivation (the third el­ement of the idea). The question that needs to be raised in this context is what do we gain by reframing truth procedures in terms of “the idea”. The answer is history (the second element), which previously had no place in Badiou’s theo-71 risation of truth. Without the inclusion of history, Badiou was happy to insist on what we could call in this context the materialism of the subject. This is opposite to what the defenders of the legacy of enlightenment strive for: there 
42 Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism”, p. 3. 43 Ibid., p. 2. 44 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. by O. Feltham, Continuum, London and New York 
2005. 
is no progress and history, there are only events (discontinuities) that initiate subjectivations of a truth in emancipatory sequences of thinking and acting. Truths may arise from singular events, but they are nonetheless universal in their emancipatory dimension. But they give no sense or narrative to history, no continuity of a progressive legacy – and this is why, Badiou reminds us, he “many times had to insist that History does not exist.”45 
There are two reasons why Badiou nevertheless upgrades the materialism of the subject with the idea of communism (which, in fairness, is also “a material­ism of the idea”46); two reasons that also seem to imply two different meanings or functions of the idea. On the one hand, the idea is an extension of the univer­sal aspect of singular truths. A truth is not only universal in its singularity; it is also eternal in its temporally limited sequence. It is thus a “projection” from a temporal point within a subjective sequence to other times within “the alleged totality of human becoming.”47 There is still nothing “real” about history for Badiou. Only the truth can be real, while history is a symbolic construction, itself a result of subjective projection. In this sense, an idea “is the imaginary operation whereby an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the polit­ical real into the symbolic narrative of a History.”48 It is thus an internal aspect of the process of subjectivation. 
Yet the projection to eternity is also what enables the “transtemporal availa­bility of truths.”49 Via the idea, truths are available outside the subjective se­quences, in the “ordinary history,” where there is no event and people are diso­riented.50 In our time, dominated by the ideology of “democratic materialism,” where no ideas are supposed to subjectivise us, the idea helps us to anticipate “the event to come.”51 This is the other sense of the idea for Badiou, one that is not strictly speaking a correlate of the subject, active within a sequence, but a 
45 Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism”, p. 6. 
46 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. by L. Burchill, Polity Press, Cam­bridge and Malden 2011, p. 56. See also Rado Riha, “Sur le matérialisme de l’Idée”, Filozof-ski vestnik, 30 (2/2009), pp. 227–245. 
47 Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism”, p. 5. 
48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 2. 50 Ibid., p. 11. 
Ibid., p. 12. 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
guiding light to human animals anticipating the possibility of subjectivation, a foot in the door that keeps open the very “possibility of possibilities”52against the ideology of “no alternative”. 
The idea as something that enables the human animal to orient itself towards the possibility of subjectivation relies on the symbolic narrative of history pro­jected from the actual subjective sequences of truths. That is how the “evental communism”53 of Badiou, which articulates eternity to the contingency of events, nevertheless establishes a historical narrative, thereby completing the triad that makes communism a political idea. The question that needs to be answered at this point is how this type of narrative compares to the narrative of progress established by the guardians of enlightenment. The usual anti-Hege­lian trope against teleology does not quite cut it since – as we have seen – this is a Kantian narrative that does not rely on an overall meaning of history that would direct progress with any kind of necessity. The progress in question is an unfinished project – it is not teleology but continuity that is at stake. 
Applying the same narrative structure of the unfinished project to the idea of communism would of course be seen as more obviously problematic for a variety of reasons, but there is also a question mark over its bare possibility – is there still a project out there that one could simply continue with? It is not simply interrupted and therefore unfinished, but must emerge (if at all) every time as a new, singular sequence. If history (as the history of the communist idea – as what makes communism an idea) nevertheless exists, it should not be a nar­rative establishing a factual and institutional continuity at the price of exclud­ing the event, it should rather be the discontinuous connection between events themselves, a “network of ephemeral sequences,” as Badiou himself phrases it.54 
73 
With a different kind of narrative also comes a different kind of guidance. The “orientation” that the idea provides should not fall into the trap of the repro­duction of inequality inherent – as emphasised by Ranciere – in the way the Enlightened guardians lead the ignorant on the path of progress. That is why, 
52 Ibid., p. 6. 
53 
Jelica Šumič Riha, “Komunizem med smrtjo in vstajenjem”, Filozofski vestnik, 30 (3/2009), 
p. 79. 54 Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism”, p. 10. 
for Ranciere, “emancipation means the communism of intelligence, enacted in the demonstration of the capacity of the ‘incapable’,” i.e. the capacity of the im­mature to learn by themselves.55 Only after taking this into account can history be articulated with the event without tipping the triangle of the idea towards the pitfalls of progress. Such moments of the verification of equality are the ultimate moments of emancipation that any “history” of communism should connect: “If something has to be reconstructed under the name of communism, it is a form of temporality singularizing the connection of those moments.”56 
4. Europe: an idea without a subject? 
While the project of European integration now provides a clear objective refer­ence to the idea of Europe, its subjectivity remains unclear. Can Europe – be­yond its critical legacy and its progressive achievements – become a name asso­ciated with an emancipatory political sequence? Badiou’s own reaffirmation of “the idea” was aimed at countering “democratic materialism”, which recognis-es only the existence of bodies and languages, but not of (emancipatory politi­cal) truths. In a similar way, the idea of Europe could be said to remain confined to only institutions and narratives. Institutions and narratives, however, do not make a subject; rather, they trace a path of progress that risks reproducing the immaturity of those who refuse to follow. Are those who refuse Europe now the only ones capable of addressing Europe in a process of political subjectivation (as reactionary or obscure as it may be57)? 
In 1999 Balibar noted that Europe appears first of all as “the name of an unre­solved political problem.”58 Twenty years later this is indeed the case as calls for more or less Europe, exiting or reforming Europe, proliferate. On the one hand, the guardians of the European legacy can be very critical towards the practices of European institutions in the face of crisis, but are ready to defend the ideals 
55 Jacques Ranciere, “Communists Without Communism?”, p. 168. 56 Ibid., p. 173. 57 I am referring here to Badiou’s categorisation of different types of subjects in Alain Badiou, 
Logics of Worlds, Being and Event 2, trans. by A. Toscano, Continuum, London and New York 2009, pp. 45–79. 
58 
Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. by J. Swenson, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford 2004, p. 2. 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
for which Europe provides a localised historical body, e.g. peace, prosperity, and freedom for Macron, or cosmopolitanism for Habermas or Ulrich Beck.59 On the other hand, critical discourses present these ideals as part of the problem in (at least) three ways: the idea of European integration itself emerged as a way to exclude the other (primarily as a response to the threat of Islam);60 European cosmopolitanism cannot be separated from its imperialism and colonialism;61 and its ideals are but an appendix to the actual project of integration, which has proven to be merely an instrument of capitalist exploitation.62 
We are thus faced again with the primary ambivalence of progress itself, the “unfinished project” and its “dark side”. The conflicting sentiments of mod­erate progressives towards Europe in the cases of Grexit and Brexit are a case in point. It is this ambivalence that is clearly demonstrated once again by Habermas, who was a starch critic of Merkel and the EU’s stance on Greece at the height of the economic crisis,63 but endorsed Macron in the aftermath of Brexit as the idea of Europe’s own King of Prussia.64 They might disagree on the solutions, but what Habermas, Merkel, and Macron share is an “enlightened” vision of Europe as an unfinished project. It is this vision, I would like to argue, that prolongs the logic of enlightenment as criticised by Ranciere. Along with the guardians of the idea, the ignorant masses that vote for the wrong options or demonstrate against the wrong things are also recreated. These are the man­ifestations of the current form of grand narratives, whose essence, according to Ranciere, is to reproduce “the difference between those who live within the 
75 
59 See Jürgen Habermas, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe”, Journal of Democracy, 14 
(4/2003), pp. 86–100. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by C. 
Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden 2007. 60 See footnote 4. 61 See Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Whither Europe? Postcolonial versus Neocolonial Cosmopoli­
tanism”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18 (2/2016), pp. 187–202. 62 See footnotes 3 and 5. 63 Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. by C. Cronin, Polity 
Press, Cambridge and Malden 2012, p. 52. 64 Jürgen Habermas, “‘How Much Will the Germans Have to Pay?’ What Macron Means for 
Europe”, Der Spiegel, 26 October 2017, https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/juer­
gen-habermas-on-the-european-vision-of-emmanuel-macron-a-1174721.html. 
time of knowledge that renders justice and those who live within the guilty time of ignorance.”65 
If we accept the position of radical critique instead of the position of the unfin­ished project, is the European idea “finished,” as some have suggested, or can it be considered as something “present” in Foucauldian terms, a banner under which the attitude of modernity can still be exercised? Or, going back to Marx, is the enlightened idea of Europe confined to remaining one of the solutions philosophers keep in their drawers while the uninitiated world awaits them with open mouth, or can it be a part of the new world discovered through the ruthless criticism of the old?66 
One of the manoeuvres that enable such a critical reappropriation of Europe is to make the critique itself a crucial part of the European legacy that one is sup­posed to resort to. An attempt at reconciling the logic of the unfinished project with a slightly more radical form of critical theory has recently been proposed by Gerard Delanty, who turns the conflict of interpretations surrounding the idea of Europe into the very content and positive legacy of this idea.67 Europe cannot be appropriated as a system of common values and turned into a grand narrative to be completed. On the other hand, however, rejections of Europe on account of its dark side fail to recognise “the critical and post-universalistic strand within European culture over the past 200 years.”68 In his 1995 book Inventing Europe, Delanty set out to “dispel the myth of Europe as a unifying and universalising project,” showing how “the European idea emerged and was 
65 Jacques Ranciere, Modern Times: Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics, Multimedialni institut, Zagreb 2017, p. 30. 
66 See Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843”, https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm. 
67 Gerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2013, pp. 300–301. Ibid., p. 290. A more radial version of this position can be found in Slavoj Žižek: “Against this ‘end of ideology’ politics, one should insist on the potential of democratic politici­zation as the true European legacy from ancient Greece onwards. Will Europe be able to invent a new model of repoliticization questioning the undisputed reign of global capi­tal? Only such a repoliticization of our predicament can break the vicious cycle of liberal globalization destined to engender the most regressive forms of fundamentalist hatred.” (Slavoj Žižek, “For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy”, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3 (1/1998), pp. 63–78.) 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
sustained more by conflict and division than by consensus and peace.”69 Tied to a more contemporary political reality, however, the idea of Europe becomes “a more contested discourse and open to new visions of political community.”70 Thus, Delanty has recently made a case in defence of Europe, hoping for the emergence of “a new narrative” that would reinvent “the cosmopolitan current in the European past in order to find a model of solidarity with which Europe can come to terms with its own cultural and political diversity.”71 
Delanty’s hopes can be said to resonate with the ones expressed by President Barroso’s famous farewell speech calling for a new narrative for Europe.72 Such a narrative, Delanty claims, would have to take into account that “there is in fact no underlying European self or constitutive subject,” which means that Europe cannot be the name of an essentialist, foundational grand narrative.73 But perhaps the lack of a subject, while welcome in its non-essentialist func­tion, is also the problem, if such new narratives cannot become part of a pro­cess of an emancipatory political subjectivation. 
If the subject of the European idea cannot be found among the institutions and narratives, then it can only be found among the people – but what is “the peo­ple”? Following Ranciere once again, “the people” do not exist; what exists are “diverse or even antagonistic figures of the people, figures constructed by priv­ileging certain modes of assembling, certain distinctive traits, certain capac­itiesorincapacities.”74Today, European institutions and narratives are fight­ing against the spectre of populism, which is another way of constructing the progressive divide between the guardians and the immature.75 Neither can the 
69 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. vii. 
77 
70 Gerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, p. 305. 71 Ibid., p. 301. 72 José Manuel Durao Barroso, “A New Narrative for Europe”, 23 April 2013, http://europa.eu/ 
rapid/press-release_SPEECH-13-357_en.htm. 73 Gerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, p. 301. 74 Jacques Ranciere, “The Populism that Is Not to Be Found”, in: Alain Badiou et al., What 
is a People?, trans. by J. Gladding, Columbia University Press, New York and Chichester 2016, p. 102. 
75 As Ranciere has stated in a recent interview, “the term ‘populist’ is something that our rulers use to say that they are in the know whereas the rest of us are imbeciles.” (Jacques Ranciere, “Europe: The Return of the People, or of Populism?”, https://www.versobooks. com/blogs/2896-europe-the-return-of-the-people-or-of-populism.) 
people as subject be found in the European cosmopolitan ideal: “Europe, the international community, the citizenry of the world, and, finally, humanity – all so many names for a whole that is equal to the sum of its elements, each having the common property of the whole.”76 The problem is that this ideal has no subject, if political subjectivation – according to Ranciere – appears precise­ly at the site where the part with no part, the part that has no place within the supposedly common whole, is at stake.77 
Is there nevertheless an affirmative figure of the people that can form the sub­jective basis of the European idea – a “we, the people of Europe” as anticipated by Balibar? For Balibar as well, there is no demos of Europe on which its dem­ocratic legitimacy could be based. Such a demos is something that can only emerge and exist within a specific process: “The demos does not exist before democracy as its condition: it emerges within it as its continuous effect. Yet democracy itself does not exist outside the course and different forms of the practices of democratisation.”78 In his response to Habermas, Balibar claims that the juridical arguments for reforming European institutions such that par­liamentary representation plays a bigger role are not sufficient to democratise Europe. Formalist representative democracy has to be supplemented by “mate­rial democratic inventions” in terms of participatory, but also conflictual mo­dalities of democracy.79 Balibar subjects the European ideals to a materialist re­versal: “democratic work requires determinate matterand not just an ethics and juridical norms” and can only “come from the specific way politics is traversed by conflicts” in specific situations.80 For Balibar, these situations are especially related to work and borders – precisely the conflictual sites that are also the breeding ground of what tends to be swept under the rug of “populism”. 
The European construction will paradoxically only regain its legitimacy ac­cording to Balibar if it is radically questioned in the processes of democrati­sation in which “Europe becomes the stake and the frame of social conflicts 
76 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by J. Rose, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London 1999, p. 125. 
77 “Wherever the part of those who have no part is inscribed, however fragile and fleeting these inscriptions may be, a sphere of appearance of the demos is created.” (Ibid., p. 88.) 
78 
Étienne Balibar, Europe: crise et fin?, p. 186. 
79 Ibid. 80 
Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p. 173. 
ideas and their destinies: enlightenment, communism, europe 
[…] that concern its very future.”81 Along these lines, we can conclude that the “destiny” of the idea of Europe will be decided less by the way we build on its legacy as an unfinished project than by the ways it will feature as a stake in “the present” of emerging political subjectivations. 
Étienne Balibar, Europe: crise et fin?, p. 115 (see also p. 201). 

Aleš Bunta* 

Nietzsche’s Passage from Germany to Europe: The Three ‘Deaths’ of the Higher Cultural Unity1 
Should we say that Nietzsche’s early philosophy was foremost addressed to the Germans? The fact that Nietzsche in his early writings so often used variations of the phrase “we, the Germans of today” in a way compels us to reply affirmative­ly: at least some sort of additional attention was clearly devoted to the German public in Nietzsche’s early texts. However, this does not imply that the early Nietzsche spoke only of topics and problems that concerned Germans alone. 
As a matter of fact, all of the predominant themes of Nietzsche’s early philoso­phy – the Greeks, the critique of historicism, and his treatises on Schopenhauer and Wagner – are in themselves universal; that is to say, each of these themes is equally addressed to everyone. But at the same time, Nietzsche indeed saw each of these universal topics as internally related to what he, at that time, consid­ered the central scope of his intellectual endeavours: namely, to envisage and propagate the ideal of “German unity in the highest sense.” 
[L]et me say expressly that it is for German unity in the highest sense that we strive, and strive more ardently than we do for political reunification, the unity of the German spirit and life after the abolition of the antithesis of form and content, of inwardness and convention.2 
We can immediately notice that Nietzsche introduced the concept of “German 81 unity in the highest sense” in very clear opposition to the, by then, already es­tablished fact of the political reunification of Germany. 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea 
and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche,Untimely Meditations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997, 
p. 82. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
In contrast to reunification, which was essentially a political event, Nietzsche saw “German unity in the highest sense” as the unique possibility of a deeper, more radical cultural metamorphosis of German society. And this cultural reinvention was closely related to each of the universal topics discussed by Nietzsche at the time: Greek civilisation, which was, according to Nietzsche, the only civilisation in history to have already reached the highest degree of cultural unity, represent­ed the model that the Germans would need to follow; Wagner’s genius was seen by Nietzsche as the driving force behind the German cultural transformation; and finally, the critique of historicism was perceived by Nietzsche as a remedy for the staunchest ‘disease’ that the Germans still needed to overcome if they were ever to reach their ultimate unity. Namely, Nietzsche was firmly convinced that the Germans in particular, more than any other nation, suffered from what he called an “overabundance of history.” To put this in the simplest possible way: German belief – that everything was driven by “historical necessity” – ultimately made the Germans forget how to act or participate in the unfolding events. Furthermore, their belief in historical necessity made the Germans blind to the essentially new perspectives introduced by the events. In fact, what made Nietzsche so critical towards objective historical thinking was his convincement that the overabundance of historicism necessarily leads to the belief that history itselfwas already over. And the Germans, who saw themselves as the inventors of historical thinking, were more prone to this notably complacent belief than any other nation. 
However, the decisive difference between the two forms of German unity lies, for Nietzsche, on the ontological level: the political reunification of Germany itself – that is, political unity without the further addition of the higher cultural unity of the German people – was, for Nietzsche, ontologically void, without “either sense, substance or goal.” In other words, despite the fact that the political re­unification resulted in the emergence of the German State, this, by itself, was for Nietzsche not sufficient to allow one to say that Germany had already attained its proper Being. 
This immediately brings us to the following observation with regard to our pri­mary question: the specific addressing of the Germans, which was clearly at work in Nietzsche’s early texts, was, first of all, of course, addressed to the name of Germany, but at the same time it was also addressed against the falsehood of the belief in its existence. The specific message that Nietzsche was trying to con­
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
vey to the Germans was that they need to become aware that political unity in itself was not enough, and that an additional step towards a higher cultural uni­ty was still needed if the true existence of Germany was ever to be achieved. In his famous article “History and Mimesis”, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe thus even claimed that the entire political dimension of Nietzsche’s early philosophycan in fact be comprised in this single sentence: “Germany does not exist.”3 
Perhaps even more importantly: the two types of German unity – the already achieved political unity and the cultural unity that was still missing – were also not seen by Nietzsche as forming any sort of continuity in the sense that polit­ical unity provided some sort of solid, necessary grounds for a higher cultural unity. Quite the contrary, Nietzsche appeared more and more convinced that the relation between the two was in fact antagonistic in nature, and that it was the success of political reunification, the emergence of the German State, that even­tually destroyed all hope of a higher cultural unity. 
There were, I think, two main reasons why Nietzsche increasingly held this be­lief. First of all, especially later on, he observed that the shear blunt political euphoria that accompanied the emergence of the German State simply brushed aside or even “swallowed up” the spiritually refined forces that were needed to attain a higher cultural unity. For instance, in the chapter of Twilight of the Idols tellingly entitled “What the Germans Are Missing” Nietzsche wrote the following: 
The Germans – they were once called the nation of thinkers: are they still thinking today at all? – The Germans are bored with the spirit now, the Germans mistrust the spirit now, politics swallows up all seriousness about really spiritual things. – Deutschland, Deutschland über alles: I’m afraid that was the end of German phi­losophy ... “Are there German philosophers? Are there German poets? Are there 83 any good German books?” I’m asked when I go abroad. I blush, but with the brav­ery that’s typical of me even in hopeless cases, I answer: “Yes: Bismarck!”4 
3 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “History and Mimesis,” in: Laurence A. Rickels (ed.), Looking 
after Nietzsche, State University of New York Press, New York 1990, p. 216. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cam­
bridge 1997, p. 43. 
Among those spiritual forces that were engulfed by the nationalist political eu­phoria there is one in particular that needs to be brought to attention – and that is, of course, the Wagnerite movement, in which Nietzsche himself was intense­ly involved. To say the least: at the time when Nietzsche still believed in the ideal of “German unity in the highest sense,” he saw the Wagnerite movement as the leading force in the forthcoming process of turning this ideal into reality. Albeit unusual, Nietzsche’s convincement – that an elite group of opera devotees was to play the decisive role in the unification of Germany – can hardly be regarded as surprising, as the ideal of cultural unity itself, in many respects, comprised reflections of what Nietzsche perceived as the “unifying genius” of Wagner’s art. As a matter of fact, this connection between Wagner and the ideal of higher uni­ty was so important to Nietzsche that the moment he saw Wagner (among other things) falling under the influence of vulgar nationalism Nietzsche felt com­pelled to declare his entire vision of German higher unity a disastrous mistake. 
The other reason why Nietzsche felt that the possibility of true German unity had eventually succumbed to Germany’s political unification was significantly different. This second line of Nietzsche’s reflections was not so much directed against the nationalist unrest that surrounded the establishment of the German State, but rather against the reinstatement of the State as such. 
In his Foreword to The Birth of Tragedy written in 1886, where he listed a number of mistakes he had made in his earliest work, Nietzsche, among other things, wrote the following: 
But there is something far worse in this book […]. That, on the basis of our latter-day German music, I began to fable about the “spirit of Teutonism,” as if it were on the point of discovering and returning to itself, – ay, at the very time that the German spirit which not so very long before had had the will to the lordship over Europe, the strength to lead and govern Europe, testamentarily and conclusively resigned and, under the pompous pretence of empire-founding [Reichs-Begründung], ef­fected its transition to mediocritisation, democracy, and “modern ideas.”5 
This passage is obviously important for a number of reasons. But the first thing we must notice is that Nietzsche here directly states that the founding of the 
5 
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, The Macmillan Company, New York 1910, p. 12. 
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
German State was nothing but a “pompous” cover-up for what he calls the 
“transition to the mediocritisation” of the German spirit. 
The passage consists of three key statements: 
1. 
Nietzsche clearly admits that there actually was a certain recent period in time when some sort of ‘passage to greatness’ opened up for the German spirit, “which not so long before had had the will to the lordship over Eu­rope, the strength to lead and govern Europe.” 

2. 
Once the decision had been made by the Germans to form their national State, to invest all their spiritual forces into the founding of the State, this period of greatness of the German spirit, effectively entered into its ending, self-destructive sequence. The decision to form the State marks the moment when this strong and potent German spirit “testamentarily and conclusively resigned and, under the pompous pretence of empire-founding [Reichs-Be­gründung], effected its transition to mediocritisation.”  

3. 
What Nietzsche reproaches himself for is that , at the time, he failed to recog­nise this. Or, to be more precise: what Nietzsche reproaches his younger self for is that he did not recognise, or at least he did not recognise well enough, that, at that point, the German spirit had already begun to undermine its own greatness. And because he failed to recognise this, he somewhat clum­sily started to fable about “the German being” (deutschen Wesen) precisely at the point when any sort of discussion on Germany had become pointless. 


What makes it so difficult to grasp the precise meaning of this passage is that Nietzsche leaves us clueless with respect to what exactly he had in mind while speaking of the recent greatness of the German spirit. Was he referring to the age of the great German philosophers who clearly put their stamp on Europeans’ way of thinking? So, was this “strength to lead and govern Europe” of the German spirit envisioned by Nietzsche as some sort of intellectual power? 
Or was he referring to the actual beginning of the political unrest, which ulti­mately led to reunification? In which case, the greatness of the German spirit must have been measured by Nietzsche against the, by now, infamous German efficiency in raising and organising themselves into an efficient military pow­er. Nietzsche certainly never ceased to appreciate this particular aspect of the German spirit, which displays “virtues more manly than any other European country can show. A lot of fortitude and self-respect, a lot of sureness in social interaction and in the reciprocity of duties, a lot of diligence, a lot of endur­ance – and an inherited restraint which needs to be goaded rather than braked. Let me add that here one still obeys without being humiliated by obedience.”6 However, if Nietzsche’s statement regarding the recent display of the strength of the German spirit were truly aimed at the German national uprising that even­tually led to reunification – then how can we reconcile this with the fact that Nietzsche saw its actual result, that is, the political reunification of Germany, as the German spirit’s testamentary failure? 
So, first of all: what does Nietzsche mean by saying that the actual reinstate­ment of the State effected the German spirit’s final transition to mediocracy? Why was he convinced that the unified State had such a detrimental effect on the spirit of the nation? The following passage from Human, All Too Human is important for two reasons: it not only provides a partial answer to this question, but its significance also lies in the fact that this passage represents the first of Nietzsche’s ‘political’ statements from the period right after he had ceased to believe in the ideal of higher German unity. The entire chapter is entitled “A Glance at the State”: 
Permission to speak! – The demagogic character and the intention to appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties: on account of this intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities and thus to paint them on the wall. This is no longer alterable, indeed it would be pointless to raise so much as a finger against it; for in this domain there apply the words of Voltaire: quand la populace se mele de raissonaire, tout est perdu! Since this has happened one has to accommodate oneself to the new conditions as one accommodates oneself when an earthquake has displaced the former boundaries and contours of the ground and altered the value of one’s property. Moreover, if the purpose of all politics is to make life as endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life; if they trust to their intellect also to discover the right means for this goal, what good is there in doubting it? They want for once to forge for themselves their own fortunes and misfortunes; and if this feeling of self-deter­mination, pride in the five or six ideas their head contains and brings forth, in 
6 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 43. 
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
fact renders their life so pleasant to them they are happy to bear the calamitous consequences of their narrowmindedness, there is little to be objected to, always presupposing that this narrowmindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live accord­ing to such a standard. For a few must first of all be allowed, now more than ever, to refrain from politics and step aside: they too are prompted to this by pleasure in self-determination; and there also may be a degree of pride attached to staying silent when too many, or even just many, are speaking.7 
The reinstatement of the State marks the moment when the political turmoil that had led to its establishment was put firmly back on the tracks of the ‘ordinary’ pursuit of modern politics. And this ordinary pursuit of modern politics was, according to Nietzsche, essentially determined by populism and demagogy – such was, as Nietzsche saw it, the direct impact of the continued process of democratisation. However, Nietzsche’s critique of populism was not directed against the “people”. On the contrary, Nietzsche was convinced that populism itself was directed against the people. Nietzsche saw populism as a destructive power that separates the people (as such) from their true (cultural, civilization­al) collective potentials. Of course, populism tries to “appeal to the masses”; however, its true target is not the ‘collective subject’ as such: the true target of populist appeal is the “small individual” within this ‘collective subject’ whose needs, welfare, and the right to self-determination are proclaimed by populism to exceed the actual importance of the collective’s higher aspirations. In a cer­tain sense, one could say that populism is, for Nietzsche, in effect a cloaked ver­sion of the “small man’s” individualism. Hence, the appeal of populism raises the “masses” to act against the true potentials of the people, and its final effect consists in the dissipation of the nation’s spirit. 
87 
Now, the political unrest that led to reunification was, of course, something entirely different: the actual national uprising displayed the will of the nation to reach a common goal. And this was still seen by Nietzsche as a sign of the strength of the German spirit. However, since pursuing this common goal led Germans to reinstate State-related politics, and thereby to the dissipation of the people’s spirit caused by the populist appeal to the “small man”, Nietzsche also 
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, p. 161. 
saw this extraordinary period of German history as a tragic involuntary suicide of the German spirit. 
* * * 
By the time he commenced writing Human, All Too Human, the ideal of “German unity in the highest sense” was dead for Nietzsche. As a matter of fact, this ideal, in a very short period of time, died in at least two separate ways: 
Firstly, the ideal of a higher unity was dead because Nietzsche no longer saw it as attainable in the historical sense. By that time, Nietzsche was already convinced that the German spirit had fallen apart completely and irreparably: First, the higher spiritual forces were either swept aside or consumed by the nationalist political euphoria; and then this political unrest itself – still seen by Nietzsche as the last signal of the strength of the German spirit – fell to the domesticating effect of the power of the State, which effected its final transition to mediocracy. Once this happened, there was no turning back. 
And secondly, the ideal of higher unity was dead, because – by the time Nietzsche began writing Human, All Too Human – his philosophy had taken a radically new course that would not allow for further sustainment of any such ideal. Nietzsche himself described this radical change of direction within his philosophy as the commencement of his critique of Idealism. And, not surpris­ingly, the first step Nietzsche took to effectuate his new approach to philosophy was to purge his own way of thinking of any remnant of idealist thought: 
Human, all-too-Human, with its two sequels, is the memorial of a crisis. It is called a book for free spirits: almost every sentence in it is the expression of a triumph – by means of it I purged myself of everything in me which was foreign to my na­ture. Idealism was foreign to me: the title of the book means: “Where ye see ide­al things I see – human, alas! all-too-human things! […] Looking into this book a little more closely, you perceive a pitiless spirit who knows all the secret hid-ing-places in which ideals are wont to skulk – where they find their dungeons, and, as it were, their last refuge. With a torch in my hand, the light of which is not by any means a flickering one, I illuminate this nether world with beams that cut like blades. It is war, but war without powder or smoke, without warlike attitudes, 
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
without pathos and contorted limbs – all these things would still be “idealism”. One error after another is quickly laid upon ice; the ideal is not refuted – it freezes.8 
So, the ideal of “German unity in the highest sense” was dead, both historically and conceptually. What remains to be seen is how these two ‘deaths’ affected each other. Can we say that it was in fact the historical ‘death’ of the ideal of German higher unity that triggered Nietzsche’s general critique of idealism? And if so – in what precise way? But we will return to the question of how these two ‘deaths’ influenced each other later on. What is currently more important is namely the following: 
Once the German spirit had died its two ‘deaths’, Nietzsche also ceased to ad­dress his philosophy to Germans. And this has to be taken quite literally: his constant use of the phrase “we, the Germans of today,” which was so typical of his early period, disappeared from his texts. 
As a matter of fact, Nietzsche appeared to have found new audiences to whom he could address his newly reinvented philosophy. First to appear were “the free spirits” to whom he dedicated Human, All Too Human. Only subsequently did there appear “the future Europeans.” However, even though “the Europeans” were not the first to succeed the Germans, Nietzsche certainly announced their arrival in a very strong voice: 
But the struggle against Plato, or, to use a clear and “popular” idiom, the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – since Christianity is Platonism for the “people” – has created a magnificent tension of spirit in Europe, the likes of which the earth has never known: with such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals. Granted, the European experiences this ten­sion as a crisis or state of need; and twice already there have been attempts, in a grand fashion, to unbend the bow, once through Jesuitism, and the second time through the democratic Enlightenment: – which, with the help of freedom of the press and circulation of newspapers, might really insure that spirit does not expe­rience itself so readily as “need”! (Germans invented gunpowder – all honors due! But they made up for it – they invented the press.) But we, who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, The Macmillan Company, New York 1911, pp. 82, 83. 
spirits – we still have it, the whole need of spirit and the whole tension of its bow! And perhaps the arrow too, the task, and – who knows? the goal ...9 
First of all, the readdressing of Nietzsche’s philosophy to “the Europeans” clear­ly marks a real and significant change. From that point on, it was in fact Europe, and not Germany, that became the focal point of Nietzsche’s philosophical investigations. This does not mean that Germany completely disappears from Nietzsche’s vocabulary; it does not. But the central point of cultural reference is no longer Germany but Europe. As a matter of fact, Germany usually appears in Nietzsche’s later texts merely as a negative counterexample to those rare de­velopments within European history that Nietzsche observed as life-affirming or culturally progressive. 
But what is Europe? Nietzsche’s answer to this question is: Europe, the con­temporary Europe, is precisely this tension that, according to Nietzsche, sprung out of the millennial silent struggle against Platonism and Christianity. We can immediately notice that by defining Europe in this way Nietzsche makes an at­tempt to grasp Europe in one single stroke, both historically and in its present state: the essential history of Europe is this silent struggle against Platonism and Christianity; Europe’s current state, on the other hand, consists in the fact that this struggle is starting to emerge out of its silenced anonymity. Furthermore, this tension that has been building up for such a long period now constitutes what Nietzsche clearly perceives as contemporary Europe’s spiritual strength. So, from this point of view, it makes sense that Nietzsche was now addressing his philosophy to “the Europeans,” that is, to the actual heirs of the millennial tension that now started to reveal Europe’s intellectual and other potentials. 
But who are “the Europeans”? It is here that things become more complicat­ed. Let us take another look at Nietzsche’s actual addressing of “the good Europeans”: 
But we, who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits – we still have it, the whole need of spirit 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, p. 4. 
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
and the whole tension of its bow! And perhaps the arrow too, the task, and – who knows? the goal ... 
What Nietzsche appears to propose here is a formula that seems to state: ‘be­ing a good European equals not being German enough’. Obviously, a number of questions can immediately arise around this equation: Are, after all, only the Germans – albeit, only the ‘deficient’ Germans – the true heirs to the potential of Europe’s millennial struggle against Christianity? Is Nietzsche, after all, still addressing the Germans? Teaching them that they would have to ‘emancipate’ themselves from being Germans – in order to regain their place at the top of the European spiritual hierarchy? 
What has to be noticed here first is that Nietzsche was not trying to make a universal statement – in reality he was speaking of one person alone, and this person he was speaking of was – Nietzsche himself: the only already existing European: 
Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the ‘free spirits’ to whom this melancholy-valiant book entitled Human All To Human is dedicated: ‘free spirits’ of this kind do not exist, did not exist – but, as I have said, I had need of them at that time if I was to keep in good spirits while surrounded by ills […].  That free spirits of this kind could one day exist, that our Europe will have such active and audacious fellows among its sons […] I should wish to be the last to doubt it. I see them already coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I shall do something to speed their coming if I describe in advance under what vicissitudes, upon what paths, I see them coming?10 
Nietzsche clearly did not “invent” the Europeans in precisely the same way as he invented the “free spirits” to comfort him in his loneliness. But at the same time, it is also very clear that the number of “good Europeans” – who already fully comprehended the task ahead that Europe’s millennial struggle bestowed upon them – amounted to one person alone, and that person was, of course, Nietzsche himself. 
This ultimately leads us to the following comparison: 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 6, 7. 
The problem of Germany consisted of the fact that Germany, according to Nietzsche, never truly commenced to exist: since the Germans had squandered their opportunity to reach a higher cultural unity, Nietzsche, from that point onwards, observed Germany merely as a place populated by Germans that was rapidly changing into a cultural and civilisational black-hole. Europe, on the other hand, clearly existed; that is to say: Europe did attain to its proper Being that, according to Nietzsche, sprung out of the millennial struggle against Platonism and Christianity, and was, at that precise moment in time, even ob­served by Nietzsche as taking the shape of a unique creative intellectual tension, such as had never existed before. However – even though Europe, in contrast to Germany, existed, and despite the fact that the Being of Europe, according to Nietzsche, was, at that precise moment, already assuming the shape of an authentic life-force that took possession of the power of those same forces that once oppressed it –, Europe too had a problem to face that can only be described as an ‘existential crisis’. Namely, even though Europe did attain to its proper Being, “the Europeans” themselves were not there quite yet. And, as a matter of fact, the only reason why Nietzsche was so confident of their forthcoming arrival consisted of the fact that he himself was there already. 
This shows very clearly that Nietzsche must have devised his addressing of “the Europeans” in order to perform an entirely different task in comparison to the scope of his earlier addressing of the Germans: 
Nietzsche’s addressing of the Germans was obviously directed at an already ex­istent, particular audience, that is, it was addressed to the German people. And while he was addressing the Germans, Nietzsche clearly attempted to confer on the Germans the content of his thoughts. In fact, he was trying to convey to them the message that they should rise up against the complacency of the belief that ‘Germany’ was already an accomplished fact. 
Nietzsche’s addressing of the Europeans consists of an entirely different logic and strategy. First of all, at the exact moment he was addressing “the Europeans” Nietzsche was not addressing an already constituted subject. No such thing as ‘the European people” existed at the time (nor probably will it ever). As a matter of fact, at that precise moment Nietzsche was, as it were, speaking to the void: “the Europeans” he was addressing were not yet there to immediately receive 
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
his message. Nietzsche was essentially sending a letter from their future to the future (in which the Europeans would appear to recover the letter). 
Hence, the primary mission of Nietzsche’s addressing of “the Europeans” was not simply to deliver a message to its proper recipient, who at that precise mo­ment did not yet even exist; the primary mission of such addressing of specifi­cally them was rather to devise this message in such a way that it could ‘create’ its own audience. The message was not sent by Nietzsche to a specific address in order to reach its proper recipient; rather, this message was sent out there in the open, in order to invoke or speed up the proper recipient’s arrival; in a certain sense, it was meant to become the proper address of its addressee. 
On one hand, Nietzsche’s task was clearly that of mobilisation; he had to con­vey a message that could accelerate the process of the metamorphosis of the already existing European individuals into properly ‘European subjects’ – to put this in a slightly Badiouian way. And, as a matter of fact, Nietzsche was firmly convinced that his philosophy was already performing this task successfully. Since the present Being of Europe, according to Nietzsche, consisted of Europe’s millennial silent struggle against Idealism bursting out into an open tension – this, for Nietzsche, meant that to become a true European, a true free spirit, amounted to the same thing as to get rid of Christian moral values. In other words, the task of invoking “Europeans” could be, according to Nietzsche, ac­complished by what he famously called “the transvaluation of values” – and one thing is certain: Nietzsche was firmly convinced that his entire philosophy, from its earliest beginnings onwards, had been almost spontaneously serving that purpose: he was convinced that his philosophy had always excelled in pro­ducing what he called “immoralists”:   
I have been told often enough, and always with an expression of great surprise, that all my writings, from the Birth of Tragedy to the most recently published Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, have something that distinguishes them and unites them together: they all of them, I have been given to understand, contain snares and nets for unwary birds and effect a persistent invitation to the overturn­ing of habitual evaluations and valued habits.11 
Ibid., p. 5. 
Thus, insofar as the ‘mobilisational aspect’ of his addressing of “the Europeans” was concerned, Nietzsche believed that it was already making progress. Certainly, this process was still far from being accomplished, but it had begun. However, this invoking of Europe’s “audacious sons” was not the only task that Nietzsche’s addressing of “the Europeans” had to perform. There was also the problem of selection. 
Namely, Nietzsche was becoming increasingly concerned about whom his thoughts in general might reach. What worried Nietzsche in this respect was not so much the fact that philosophical thoughts can easily be misapprehend­ed. Nietzsche’s concern must be perceived in the much more direct sense of his growing belief that the wrong choice of audience can directly cause the destruc­tion of the very essence of a thought – but not necessarily by means of misap­prehension. As a matter of fact, Nietzsche was more afraid of being ‘correctly’ understood by the ‘wrong’ audience, or even of being ‘correctly’ understood at the ‘wrong moment’, than he was afraid of being misapprehended. This became most apparent in his treatment of his most revered thought – the “thought of the eternal recurrence of the same,” which he deliberately surrounded with decep­tive interpretations in order to keep it safe (clearly not from misapprehension, which he deliberately tried to infuse). 
Now, why is Nietzsche’s growing concern with being understood by the ‘wrong’ audience, or at an ‘inappropriate’ time, so important in the context of our dis­cussion? 
Nietzsche was utterly convinced that the actual Death – the precise moment of its passing away – of the German spirit ultimately occurred as a result of one such wrong choice of audience. This wrong choice was, not surprisingly, made by Richard Wagner – the artist whose unique genius made the entire project of “German unity in the highest sense” attainable in the first place. So, let us first take a look at Nietzsche’s description of the German spirit’s ‘final moments’: 
This book [Human All Too Human] was begun during the first musical festival at Bayreuth; a feeling of profound strangeness towards everything that surround­ed me there, is one of its first conditions. He who has any notion of the visions which even at that time had flitted across my path, will be able to guess what I felt when one day I came to my senses in Bayreuth. It was just as if I had been dream­
nietzsche’s passage from germany to europe 
ing. Where on Earth was I? I recognized nothing that I saw; I scarcely recognized Wagner. It was in vain that I called up reminiscences. Triebschen – remote island of bliss: not a shadow of resemblance! The incomparable days devoted to laying of the first stone, the small group of the initiated who celebrated them, and who were far from lacking fingers for the handling of delicate things: not the shadow of resemblance. What had happened? – Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerite had become master of Wagner! – German art! the German master! German beer!... We who know only too well the kind of refined artists and cosmo­politanism in taste, to which alone Wagner’s art can appeal, were besides our­selves at the sight of Wagner bedecked with German virtues.  I think I know the Wagnerite, I have experienced three generations of them, from Brendel of blessed memory, who confounded Wagner with Hegel, to the idealists of the Bayreuth Gazette, who confound Wagner with themselves […]. There was not a single abor­tion that was lacking among them – no, not even the anti-Semite. – Poor Wagner! Into whose hands had he fallen! If only he had gone into a herd of swine! But among Germans! Some day, for the education of posterity, one ought really to have the genuine Bayreuthian stuffed, or better still, preserved in spirit – for it is precisely spirit that is lacking in this quarter, – with the inscription at the foot of the jar: “A sample of the spirit whereon the ‘German Empire’ was founded.”12 
So, the Wagnerite movement, and with it the entire project of the cultural unity that the movement was supposed to carry on, collapsed once “the Wagnerite had become master of Wagner.” But what precisely was Nietzsche in this pas­sage reproaching Wagner himself for?  
What Nietzsche perhaps foremost reproached Wagner for was that he had ceased relying on “the small group of the initiated […] who were far from lack­ing fingers for the handling of delicate things,” and that he, instead, began re-95 lying on the ever-growing number of Wagnerites who joined the movement for all the wrong reasons – predominantly because of Wagner’s growing fame and popularity in Germany. 
Nietzsche was in fact convinced, from the beginning on, that this “small group of the initiated” was the key to the success of the entire colossal enterprise that was supposed to bring the Germans to a higher cultural unity: 
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, pp. 84, 85. 
[W]hile he [Wagner ] quietly pushed ahead with his greatest work, completing one score after another, something occurred that made him stop and take notice: friends arrived, announcing to him an underground movement of many hearts – it was by no means the “common people” that moved here and announced itself, but perhaps the kernel and first life-giving source of a true human society to be realized in a distant future.13 
So, this small “underground movement” that reached out to Wagner during the period when he was still largely unrecognised as an artist was, according to Nietzsche, not merely a group of admirers of Wagner’s music, who truly and deeply appreciated Wagner’s art. This “underground movement” that ap­proached Wagner with a message for him constituted the “kernel” of the future culturally transformed Germany – it represented the “first life-giving source of a true human society to be realized in a distant future.” 
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Nietzsche so firmly believed that – once Wagner ceased to relate to this nucleus of the future Germany, in order to start addressing the existing Germans, the German petit-bourgeois society – the true scope of Wagnerism had already dissipated. By becoming a ‘German’ himself, that is, by becoming a revered member of this existingGerman society, Wagner severed the vein that connected him to the Germany of the future. 
And thusly we can also at least start comprehending Nietzsche’s growing con­cern with ‘being understood’ by the ‘wrong’ crowd, or, prematurely. Nietzsche was determined not to repeat Wagner’s mistake, which ultimately consisted of addressing the essential message to the wrong audience. 
Therefore, once it was his turn to address “the Europeans”, Nietzsche was not only faced with the problem of how to accelerate their arrival; quite paradoxical­ly, he was also confronted with the apparently opposite problem of how to slow down time. Nietzsche needed to buy time, so that his enciphered message could reach those few individuals that could comprehend the task ahead of them well enough, to slowly re-emerge as the new “first life-giving source of a true human society to be realized in a distant future.” 
Friedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. 304. 
Marina Gržinić Mauhler* 

The idea of Europe 
Introduction 
Today, the EU as Fortress Europe is a regime that is producing an accelerat­ed, legally sanctioned system of restrictions, discriminations, and economic dispossessions, a space of intensified racialization that has at its core racism. Racialization refers to a process by which certain groups of people are singled out for unique treatment on the basis of real or imagined physical characteris­tics. Mostly it targets the activities of those termed (ethnic) minorities. It trans­forms societies into racialized societies. This process is today going so far that we have a process of racialization being imputed, without any “race” preroga­tives but serving as a measure of class discrimination, subjugation, and finally dispossession.1 
The EU is providing the grounds for not only a state of exception but for a racial state, giving a free hand to detention, segregation, and discrimination under the veil of the protection of nation state citizens and even the protection of refugees from “themselves,” from their “drive” to try to illegally enter Fortress Europe and therefore probably finding themselves in a potentially deadly situation. The EU established a special agency, i.e. Frontex,which for years effectuated border surveillance in the Schengen border zones. The Schengen Area operates very much like a single state for international travel purposes, with external border 97 controls for travellers entering and exiting the Area, with common visas and no internal border controls. In 2013 the EU established Eurosur,which is Frontex’s new European Union border protection agency, which uses high technology 
1 A large portion of these thoughts was formed in a research process that lasted several years and was intensified within a research project at the Institute of Philosophy, ZRC SAZU. This article is a result of the research project J6-8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject”, which is funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. Cf. Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life, Lexington Books, Lanham, UK 2014. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
to coordinate activities on the EU’s external borders. Supposedly, Eurosur was established to prevent incidents on the Schengen border and to stop refugees even before they try to smuggle themselves into the EU. One of the reasons for establishing Eurosur was that the EU was facing harsh criticism due to the ex­treme number of dead refugees found in its territory. In one case, off the coast of Lampedusa in Italy, 350 refugees from Africa drowned in a single day on 12 October 2013. 
These processes of invigorated border control, the expulsion of refugees, etc., are judicially, economically, and, last but not least, discursively and representa­tionally (as different semio-technological regimes), ratified, legislated, and nor-mativized. Today it is of central significance to draw a genealogy of racism that parallels capitalism’s historical transformation and historicization. 
Racism passed from institutionalized to structural,to now be identified as social racism. To talk about social racism means “to talk about an all-pervasive racism; its violence legitimized by the state itself.”2 In the proposed genealogy of racism we identify processes of racialization that pass from institutional mechanisms of ordering individuals within a given community toward structures that expand the institutionalization of racism to structural mechanisms of racialization. Contemporary social racism is an all-pervasive racism that fully impregnates the neoliberal social body and is approved by the respective nation state’s gov­ernment. It is socially (approved) and internalized to such a micro level that the structures of violence produced by social racism are said to be a type of (micro) fascism. Making reference to Étienne Balibar’s repeated reactions  on raising racism already in 1988 before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it is possible to claim that social racism constitutes the essential form of “European apartheid.”3 
This brings us close to a more specific point: the Cold War. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that Cold War discourses and particularly the theory oftotalitarianism (as the Cold War’s primary ideology), born immediatelyafter World War II, dis­placed the imperial and colonial genealogies of theNazi Holocaust, as a form 
2 A statement by Nasim Lomani, an Afghan refugee who works in an immigrant social cen­ter run by volunteers in Athens, Steki Metanaston. 
3 
Cf. Étienne Balibar, “Y a-t-il un ‘neo-racisme’?” [Is there a “néo-racism”?], in: Étienne Bali-bar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), Race, nation, classes: Les identities ambiguës [Race, Nation, Classes: Ambiguous Identities], La Découverte, Paris 1988. 
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of industrialized killing, outside the context ofWestern history and theory.4 So the period of decolonization or, to be more precise, the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s, were filtered through the Cold War discourses on totalitarianism, allowing for a disavowal of colonial violence and its undisturbed continuity. This allowed a shift toward an opposition between democracy and fascism that was soon replaced by totalitarianism. Singh cites William Peitz’s essay “The Post-Colonialism of Cold War Discourse,”5 which states that “what happened in the debate on the Cold War and totalitarianism helped to frame a profoundly dishonest historical conversation.”6 
Singh writes that the theory of totalitarianism “enacted a displacement of fas­cism outside the main historical currents of Western moral, political, and intel­lectual life.”7 The result was that Nazism, first identified as being part of “the family of Western imperialisms and as the exemplary modern instance of ration­alized, technology-driven state terror,”8 was transferred elsewhere. 
Actually, the anti-colonial movements after WWII in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere were harshly opposed by the West’s “democratic” former colonial and fascist states.9 This was going on under the shield of Cold War discourse with the rhet­oric of opposing anti-colonial movements being derivative of Marxism and Communism. There existed numerous unfinished decolonization struggles that were, at the time of the Cold War, brutally suppressed, suspended, etc., by the First Capitalist World in the name of fighting communism. Today it is clear that due to the coexistence of two divisions at the same time in Europe, the newly obsolete West/East divide and the newly reactivated Occident/Orient division, we are witnessing a shift in the process of subjugation by re-westernized global capitalism, a shift from communism toward Islamic extremism. Aimé Césaire, in his book Discourse on Colonialism,10clearly elaborated “that Hitler applied to 99 
4 Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War,” Social Text, Durham, 27 (3/2009), pp. 67–70. 5 Cf. William Peitz, “The Post-Colonialism of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text, Durham, 
(19–20/1988). Quoted in Singh, op. cit., p. 68. 6 Peitz quoted in Singh, op. cit., p. 67. 7 Singh, op. cit., p. 67. 8 Ibid. 9 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, Grove Press, New York 
2005. 10 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, New York 2000. First published in 1955. 
European colonialist procedures, which until then had been reserved exclusive­ly for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Blacks of Africa.”11 
As Singh states, “the theory of totalitarianism (as the major ideological point of the Cold War), not only linked fascist destruction to the Soviet regime, it also suggested an extended chain of reasoning about existential dangers posed by ‘terrorist uses’ of technology, by those lacking proper philosophical condition­ing and historical preparation for exercising state power.”12 
This resulted in shifting the debate regarding the systematic procedures of death exercised in the colonies away from the systematic procedures of death in the concentration camps in Europe during WWII. This is instrumental in under­standing the current situation of former Eastern Europe vis-a-vis Western Europe and/or the European Union as the European Union appears to be the modern­izing saviour of the whole region. It is said that Eastern Europe no longer exists and it is therefore now called former Eastern Europe. However, paradoxically, its very non-existence as former Eastern Europe is over-present and over-existent when we consider the allocation of Western European capital. This move allows me to interpret, read, and understand Eastern Europe as the non-existing fron­tier of (as/in/at) the new Europe, (more precisely of the European Union), which sets its hegemony against the rest of Europe. 
To formulate this differently, former Eastern Europe is a frontier, but it is a spec­tral one; it does not divide, as a frontier normally does, but rather allows for a repetition and reproduction within itself of modes of life ( biopolitics), modes of death (necropolitics), structures of governmentality, institutional control, sys­tems of knowledge and regimes of aesthetics, and contemporary art and theory 
100 from “former” Western Europe. 
Moreover, it is possible to argue that, in global capitalism, the institutions—pri­marily—of the ideological state apparatuses function as biopower; therefore, art and culture, along with theory and criticism, and education as well, are today pure biopolitical machines (only taking care of themselves and their hegemon­ic Euro-Atlantic interests), while the social and the political (with its, as it is 
11 Césaire quoted in Singh, op. cit., p. 67. 12 Singh, op. cit., p. 67. 
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claimed, “autonomous” judicial system), not to mention economy, are pure in­struments and conductors of the necropolitical global capitalism. Why has this happened? Capitalism is a system that lives from exploitation, dispossession, and discrimination and is not at all cultural (although it affects culture), but it also is an economic and therefore social and political system. This has the con­sequence that presently art and its institutions are only biopolitical machines, while the social is necropolitical. It is of fundamental importance to expose the role of debt servitude being imposed on mass populations in the interest of transnational capital. 
Europe is being renewed today through a genealogy that excludes all those who are seen from its Western perspective as unimportant (who are constructed as subhuman through a process of dehumanization). This process stays unreflected upon also due to the new rhetoric developed in contemporary philosophy and theory of the posthuman. As stated by Maldonado-Torres 
These dehumanizing forces, logics, and discourses hardly seem to find an end in the current neoconservative and neoliberal moment or in the liberal and Eurocentric radical responses that it sometimes generates. Continued Manichean polarities between sectors considered more human than others, the accelerated rhythm of capitalist exploitation of land and human labor—sometimes facilitat­ed, as Fanon well put it, by neocolonial elites among the groups of the oppressed themselves—as well as anxieties created by migration and rights claims by pop­ulations considered pathological, undesirable, or abnormal—to name only a few of the most common issues found today—make clear that decolonization will re­main unfinished for some time.13 
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Part 1. 
As developed in many of my writings, I argue that in neoliberal global capital­ism two modes of life are present at once: Foucault’s biopolitics14 (“make live 
13 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Inter­ventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, California, 1 (2/2011), pp. 2–3. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59w8j02x. 
14 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended:Lectures at the College de France, 1975—76, Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana (eds.), trans. David Macey, Penguin, London 2004. 
and let die”), and Mbembe’s necropolitics15 (“let live and make die”), which reg­ulates life through the perspective of death. These two modes of life present a brutal difference in managing life and death. In biopolitics, life is under con­trol but it was still about providing a “good” life (if only for the citizens of the sovereign first world capitalist countries), while today life is being increasingly abandoned and what is at hand is “let live” under harsh systems of surveillance; at the same time, death is managed, used, and capitalized by the war machine. Today in global neoliberal capitalism biopolitical and necropolitical modes of life reproduce themselves near one another, transforming many of the former biopolitical sovereign states into necropolitical ones. 
Unity of capital/power, co-propriety of capital/power 
At end of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s (which is the beginning of what is theoretically called the Great Transformation, signifying the beginning of the transformation of the working class by way of its total decomposition, as stated by Sandro Mezzadra and Agostino Petrillo16) capital had to free itself from the antagonistic force that had historically constituted it and correspondingly limited and conditioned it.17 This precisely defines the change from Fordism to post-Fordism as the change of the mode of labour in capitalism that allowed for the new accumulation of capital. This change was induced in order to start a new cycle of capitalist accumulation. The Great Transformation brought a de­composition of society, politics, and the economy through a series of events that López Petit lists as: the free circulation of capital, the fall of the Berlin Wall (and with it the collapse of communism), and the advancement of new media and digital technologies. 
The downfall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was not driven by a humanist sensibility that “smart” political leaders in the West of Europe in collaboration with “not so smart” (but more on the verge of being defunct) communist political leaders of­fered a humanist sensibility to the people of former Eastern Europe as an act of 
15 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, Durham, 15 (1/2003), pp. 11–40. Available at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/ postgraduate/masters/modules/postcol_theory/mbembe_22necropolitics22.pdf. 
16 Sandro Mezzadra and Agostino Petrillo quoted in Santiago López Petit, La movilización global: Breve tratado para atacar la realidad [Global mobilization: A brief treatise for at­tacking reality], Traficantes de Suenos, Madrid 2009, p. 26. 
17 López Petit, op. cit., p. 26. 
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liberation from communist’s totalitarianism. This was the outcome of the logic of repetition of the unrestrainment of capital.18 The creation of the trust agency named Treuhandanstalt19 in 1990 by West Germany, which turbo privatized (in the turbo expedient period after the fall of the Berlin Wall) all publicly owned enterprises in former East Germany (as explained in the first section, speaks clearly in favour of this thesis. 
Similarly, the war in Iraq was presented as freeing the Iraqi people; a similar scenario was put into motion in Afghanistan (i.e. to help the liberation of Afghan women from the burka). In the first case (Iraq) it was oil that was at stake and in the second (Afghanistan) heroin, both vital for the contemporary imperial war states. The effect of this transformation is the present decomposition of societies. 
Therefore, nationalisms, chauvinisms, racisms, homophobic madness and an­tisemitism are all processes that were and are used precisely tocanalize the in­tensified effects of the Great Transformation. It is no surprise that they are most visible in the former Eastern European context,where they function as a genu­ine buffer to hide the “truth” that the fall of the Berlin Wall was necessary not to bring freedom, etc., but to adjust the limit (and not just to go beyond the limit) in order to provide new possibilities for capital accumulation. 
Carlo Galli reported in his book Political Spaces: The Modern Age and the Global Age20 that the modern space was a space that was constituted by a plurality of interests and ideologies,21 but I emphasize that neoliberal globalization is some­thing else. It presents an inextricable complexity, which means that it is not a pluralistic space but a space in which complexity does not permit extrication. 
103 
18 I refer here to  Santiago López Petit’s notion  unrestrainment  [of capital]. Santiago López Petit,  La movilización global: Breve tratado para atacar la realidad [Global mobilization: A brief treatise for attacking reality], op. cit. 
19 In the span of the 30 months of its existence, the Treuhandanstalt agency privatized 8,500 companies; 4,000 companies were closed and more than three million jobs lost. By the end of 1994 the agency had generated a debt of 200–250 billion Deutschmarks (the re­ported figures vary). Cf. “Goldrush – How to Sell Off a Country,” Global Screen, https:// www.globalscreen.de/mm/en/content/59813 (accessed: 10 September 2019). 
20 Cf. Carlo Galli, Espacios políticos: La edad moderna y la edad global, Nueva Vision, Buenos Aires 2002. 21 Carlo Galli quoted in López Petit, op. cit., p. 28. 
It is therefore a space that is not at all plural, but one that cannot be disentan­
gled or untied. 
Mbembe, in his analysis of Africa as a “postcolony,”22 envisioned precisely such a process, which he called “entanglement.” 
If we try to delineate a genealogy of a short but dramatic restructuring of the composition of capital and its consequences for the historicization of capital­ism, then we have to take into account its transformation that started in the 1970s and that today, as stated by López Petit, hascome to an end. This is why we talk about global capitalism and its logicof financialization. The transforma­tion named the Great Transformation presents the dis-articulation of politics, of the economy, and of the social life of theworking class (the main protagonist of capitalism and its cycle of struggles in the 1970s). This period is best illustrated by Margaret Thatcher and the class struggle against the miners in Great Britain, or in Poland by Solidarnost.23 The outcome was a rearticulation, or a mode of re-exploitation of the working class through its dis-articulation, which trans­formed it into a new motor for capital. The working class, through processes of precarization, was transformed “from an obstacle to capital into its new motor.” It is also necessary to take into consideration the new media technology and sci­entific developments (“the banal” event of MTV, or the Internet), which started to be of enormous importance already at that time. 
In contrast to the society of discipline, the society of surveillance extends its control outside the structured sites of social institutions through “flexible and fluctuating networks.” Therefore, globalization cannot be explained in terms of one single displacement of the limit because it stays within the limit of capital, 104 which is its very motor of unrestrainment and functions with the logic of repeti­
22 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al., University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001. 
23 Polish: Solidarność; the independent self-governing trade union “Solidarity,” was estab­lished at a conference held on 17–18 September 1980, in Gdańsk, and officially registered on 24 October 1980; in 1981 the organization’s membership reached close to 10 million (approximately half of the Polish workingclass). Cf. Mikołaj Gliński, “The Solidarity Move­ment: Anti-Communist, Or Most Communist Thing Ever?,” Culture.pl, 21 September 2015, https://culture.pl/en/article/the-solidarity-movement-anti-communist-or-most-commu-nist-thing-ever. 
the idea of europe 
tion. As stated by López Petit, it is about thinking of the event of the unrestrain­ment of capital as its new way of being accumulated. The consequences of the Great Transformation that brought about the complete decomposition of socie­ty in the sole interest of capital were extracted from the terrain of politics and shifted into the space of culture. It was also the beginning of the advancement of theories about the cultural turn (with Fredric Jameson24) that allowed for the unbelievable expansion of cultural studies into the realm of theory, a process of the “culturalization” of politics and the economy instead of the “re-politiciza­tion” of political economy. 
The Great Transformation presents a shift in the relation between capital and power. Before the disarticulation of the working class, we could talk, via López Petit, about the unity of capital/power;25in the course of the Great Transformation we see the dismantling of this unity and its transformation into the co-proprie­ty of capital/power. Therefore, this relation can be historicized, and it changes with the historical/present mode of capitalism. The changes are not a question of a nice established narrative, but they do show an intensification of the pro­cesses of expropriation and exploitation carried out in accordance with each specific historical moment of capitalism. The discussion put forward by Paolo Virno regarding the important shift from a Fordist to post-Fordist mode of labour in capitalism can also be reworked, as proposed by López Petit, as a shift from the unity of  to the co-propriety of capital/power. 
This unity of  capital/power presented a social pact between workers and cap­italists (i.e. the bourgeoisie) and the outcome was capitalist social democra­cy, which brought—not as a generous gift but as a result of a struggle—social, health, and pension benefits for the workers (the welfare state was the most advanced form of this unity). The trade unions had an extremely important role in this process. López Petitargues that the class struggle was functioning, so to speak, within the plan of capital. Capitalism needed a pact in order to produce surplus value; moreover, the way labour functioned within the composition of capital production presented the only way for capital to survive. 
24 Cf. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital—A Reading of Volume One,Verso, London 2011. 25 López Petit, op. cit., pp. 35–36. 
The socialist planning state, which was/is rarely part of the discussion in the West (and if it is, then only as a totalitarian restriction of workingrights), was the best example of this unity. Therefore, it is possible to saythat the imposed vision of socialism as only and solely totalitarian was necessary in order to hide the best example (of the already realized nightmarish form) of the West’s Fordism, which was the socialist planningstate. 
Former Yugoslavia was almost a role model at the time, but was hidden, while today, being a true historical model, it is being presented in numerous panels in the East and West as a brand (I will argue) for adefunct future. The socialist planned economy was the perfect display ofwhat in Fordist capitalism was, so to speak, hidden. When the unity of capital/power was threatened, the response (or, better said, the punishment) by capitalists, as explained by López Petit, was exemplary. López Petit speaks of true social engineering methods of punish­ment (and not of the “control” that is connected with post-Fordism) that were presented in a vertiginous form of inflation, and open-ended crisis, etc. This is why the penalization of miners by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain in the 1980s, when post-Fordism was already in the house, so to speak, was so exem­plarily tough (what we witnessed was “class struggle” in the West at its purest). 
In Socialism, the state responded to this threat not only with inflation (which was used as a repressive apparatus in capitalism anyway), but also with true food shortages (which also proliferated, in the last decades of the1970s and 1980s, in humorous narratives regarding how to get a cup of coffee). It is clear that such narratives are needed today (especially for former East Germany) in order to prevent study of the period and especially to prevent study of what it is that we can conceptualize regarding these relations today. 
In the background of the unrestrainment of capital is the absence of the limit of capital, but beware, it is not about going beyond the limit. Therefore, the crash of the neocons and neoliberals does not signal the end of globalization, but its continuation—although maybe (and I repeat, maybe) without a neoliberal ide­ology (or, put differently, with a neoliberal ideology that is modified), because, as stated by López Petit, neoliberalglobalization, or global capitalism, is a his­torical form of capitalism. 
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Therefore, to recapitulate what we have elaborated so far, it is possible to say that there exist two modes of the relation between capital and power. One is the unity of capital/power and the other is the co-propriety of capital/power. The co-propriety of capital/power signifies a mutual drive, force, the push of capital, and power. Capital is going further beyond its limit thanks to power, and, as stated by López Petit, at the same time power is expanding thanks to capital. We saw this mutual drive not only with the proposal to rescue Wall Street and U.S. banks from collapsing in November 2008 by the U.S. Senate, but also in the shift of capital’s voracity to the level of morality. 
When capital pushes power beyond it (further away from it), and inversely, when power pushes capital, then we effectively start to explicate the unrestrain­ment of capital. Co-propriety means that there exists interchangeability be­tween them, allowing for mutual substitution, but under a condition, with the proviso, as emphasized by López Petit, that they have to maintain their specific identity, or they have been given equivalent status, but under the condition of maintaining their difference. 
I want to further rethink some of the processes implemented in Southeastern Europe in order to explore the logic of global capitalism, the changes it has brought to the territory, to the understanding of hegemony, democracy, zon­ing, ideology, and “underdevelopment.” Southeastern Europe (which, for the purpose of clarification, consists—or consisted, since the list changes dai-ly—of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia) has come to be syn­onymous with animosity between the above states. Slovenia is, at the present moment in 2019, not on this list. 
If one looks at the political agenda of the states classified by the European Union (EU) as part of the Southeastern European region, becoming a Member state of the European Union is a common feature of their process of dis-affiliation with the Southeastern European region. With the exception of Greece, which has been a member of the European Union since 1981, and Slovenia, which became a member on 1 May 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in the second wave of EU enlargement (1 January 2007), the “rest” of the region within Southeastern Europe has recently been renamed the “West Balkans,” and so forth. 
The process of zoning (as we call this shifting of names) is therefore a process that changes the territory from one paradigmatic space of economic interest to another paradigmatic space of economic interest and that coincidentally re­quires transformations in the judicial, political, and cultural prerogatives so that they conform to the needs of the EU. The most important condition that a state inside the process of zoning must satisfy to be eligible for future EU mem­bership is the establishment of a functioning democracy, with its incident rule of fully embracing the (neoliberal capitalist) law. Kosovo offers a paradigmatic example of this shift. 
Part 2. 
Nationalism 
Nationalism has surfaced as the prevalent mode in which social and political life is organized in the countries of the former Eastern Europe. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries comprising Southeastern Europe have been considered transitional. It is said that the appearance of nationalism only rep­resents what has already been there for decades, but hadbeen successfully sup­pressed during the past socialist and communist periods, and came overtly out with the “liberation” of these countriesfrom the totalitarian communist system. Our thesis is that nationalism, contrary to such a claim, is the mode in which the present transitional elites (from the East of Europe, helped by those from the West of Europe) buffer or hide their direct submission to neoliberal global cap-italism—in short, nationalism is the way they hide their readiness to open up their countries to the worst possible exploitation and expropriation by capital. 
The paradox, of course, is that losing social rights is presented as gaining ne­
108 oliberal “capitalist freedom and democracy” (this shift, in reality, means being forced into a condition of wild precariousness and instability, marked by the loss of jobs and rights). To be socially de-privileged, without social, health, and labour rights, today means being “emancipated” within neoliberal global capi­talism. This is presented through a system of intensified rationalizations (read: real shortages, etc.) that are imposed through the radicalized management of surveillance as well as the extreme privatization of the social, political, and eco­nomic space. 
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This nationalism is also supported by the EU, even more so by the old (West Europe) EU core, as they need the disorder and pathology of nationalist social and political spaces in order for them to execute the allocation of capital. What does the implementation of neoliberal global capitalism mean? 
In the Western European context, this means the total embracement of the biopolitical machine as a force regulating every level of the capitalist system. The past capitalist “social” state, the so-called 1970s capitalist welfare state (a product of the capitalist social democratic vision) is dismantledtoday as well, although the reasons behind this are presented differently(different histories are constructed and different vocabularies are implemented). In Eastern and Western Europe, the vision of public interest no longer exists. Public health in­surance, public social insurance, public education, and other public interests are being slowly and steadily privatized. In both contexts what is at stake is depoliticization, i.e., taking away the social contradiction (class antagonism) of the social and political space. 
To “smoothly” handle these over-intensified privatizations, two different pro­cesses are implemented. In the “former” West a process of radical individuali­zation as a biopolitical subjectivity is pushed forward, where the individual is presented as the manager of her/himself, which is seen as the most effective ele­ment of neoliberal global capitalism. Conversely, due to the incomplete process of capitalization, which prevents the smooth implementation of the complete fragmentation of the social and political space through radical individualiza­tion, a process of national “unification” has been imposed on the former East. The result is nationalism, a pathological model that provokes social disorder and allows capital allocation to bring about order. 
Accordingly, nationalism is in fact a model of depoliticization that is simultane­ously embraced differently by both the Right and Left political elites. While the Right political parties in the transitional countries rely on nationalism and feed themselves therewith (and also use it in such a way so as to capitalize on their own position), the Left political forces have to make a double turn. On the one hand, they have to de-link themselves, at least on the surface, from right-wing nationalistic forces. On the other hand, they have to de-link themselves from what was left of the working class from the past that still puts forward political demands. 
The latter de-linking is necessary to prove their proper position as apolitical, neo-liberal, managerial, depoliticized capitalist forces. In order to enter the big family of the depoliticized EU (which is, on the other side, harshly organized, framed, and made into a Fortress Europe through measures of intensified administrative and bureaucratic acts, and acts of law), the left transitional political forces have to prove their capability to de-link themselves from the past communism, which is today placed on the same level as Nazism. On 25 January 2006, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which brings together parliamentari­ans from forty-six European countries, passed a resolution that for the first time strongly condemned the crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes. The resolution urges former Eastern European communist countries to modify their textbooks and to build monuments to victims of the totalitarian commu­nist regimes, therefore prompting a paradoxical form of an obscene “de-Nazi­fication.” As has been argued by many writers, it would be “easier” to take the condemnation of communist state crimes seriously if the EU denounced the far bloodier record of European colonialism, which was a system of racist despotism that dominated the world in Stalin’s time and before. 
One consequence of these superficially claimed paradoxical demands (which is consistent with the process of total depoliticization) is the use ofgender as the marker with which to testify to and “check” the process of the emancipation of a certain territory. Instead of talking about politics or thechanges brought about by neoliberal global capitalism, we are forced to talk about a certain situation, for example, of “emancipation” through the gender zoning of a certain territory. This act is then presented as a new manner of politics. 
I have already stated that the Left transitional political elite have to prove clearly that they are capable of performing and embracing depoliticization in a proper state in order to be embraced by their Westerncomrades. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we witnessed thedevelopment of capitalist society, with its tendency to instil brutal exploitation (approaching enslavement) and violent bureaucratic formalization (of responsibilities, etc.) in every level of society. 
The former Left (now transitional neoliberal managers, parties such as LDS, SD) despises workers and their demands for political answers. From the leftist per­spective, the working class should be a political force aiming for change, but this class is so demeaned as to make the leftist intellectuals ashamed of being 
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connected to it. On the Right side, whole strata of society (sexual minorities, migrant minorities, etc.) are identified as disrupting national unity,26 which is increasingly associated with the “decent” people of the nation through a clearly chauvinistic and racist mechanism. 
In Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Romania, it is the Roma people who are tar­geted. In France, it is the second and third generations of French citizens from the colonies, in Austria, refugees and migrants. Intellectuals, artists, cultural workers, and theoreticians are also distancing themselves from what is being increasingly publicly identified as “lower class elements.” 
Therefore, in parallel with what was defined as the unique cultural post-mod­ernism of former Yugoslavia (in the 1980s), another process has to be envisioned and elaborated, a process that would permeate the culture, social fabric, poli­tics, and economy of former Yugoslavia and all its respective republics, which are today new states in Europe. It was the process of the construction of sec-ond-rate citizens in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and throughout former Yugoslavia, based on the myth of lost ancient territories disseminated by the communist party nomenclature and militaryapparatus of former Yugoslavia that started the “Balkan War” therein in the1990s. 
The war resulted in the massive annihilation of people, the Srebrenica geno­cide, a myriad of other ethnic cleansing procedures, and the destruction of cit­ies; all hastened to cite these emblematic cases ofcontemporary genocide after World War II in the heart of Europe. The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide, refers to the killings in July 1995 during the “Balkan War” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when more than 8,000 Bosnians (Bosnian Muslims), mainly men and boys, were slaughtered in and around the town of 111 Srebrenica (BiH) by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (in BiH) under the command of General Ratko Mladić, supported by Slobodan Milošević and the mass media and public opinion in Serbia. 
After the war, the ethnic cleansing continued through a myriad of processes of ra­cialization, dispossession, exploitation, and deregulation. In 2002 Žarana Papić 
26 Cf. Tatjana Greif, “Schengen in Practice,” Reartikulacija, Ljubljana, (3/2008), pp. 9–10. Available at http://grzinic-smid.si/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Rear2008tikulacija3.pdf. 
described this process in Serbia with the notion of neoliberal Turbo-Fascism.27 At its core is a racialization that refers to the assigning of racial connotations to those termed (ethnic) minorities. These processes are judicially, economically, discursively, and, last but not least, representationally conceived and normativ­ized, and they have progressively begun to metastasize. 
Alternately, the only possible unity that is proposed and tolerated is the organic national body, which is actually based on the old ideology of blood and soil, which seeks to expel from the nation’s (seen as “natural”) body all those who threaten it (from im/migrants to ethnic Roma to non-heterosexual groups). In Slovenia, the results of such nationalistic operations are the Erased People. Slovenia (not Slovakia) has long been seen as a case of successful transforma­tion from a totalitarian socialist republic into a miniature capitalist nation state. Slovenia has, as part of its history and present, the case of the Erased, which could be seen as a clear necropolitical measure in the heart of contemporary Europe (even before Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics). 
The Erased People is the term for 25,000 to 30,000 people from former Yugoslavia whose residency rights were taken away in 1991 and 1992 by the newly inde­pendent state of Slovenia because they were “of other ethnicity.” They lost the right to work, social care, everything. They simply stopped existing in the eyes of Slovenia. 
How did this happen? In February 1992, at a time when Slovenia was still in its in­fancy, the Slovenian government, which was headed by the then Prime Minister Lojze Peterle (offically Alojz Peterle, a member of the European Parliament from 2004 until 2019) and the Minister of the Interior, Igor Bavčar (with the support of 112 the State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior, Slavko Debelak), adopted the macabre necropolitical measure of erasure, transforming 25,000 to 30,000 indi­viduals into persons without residency permits, depriving them of any rights. These 25,000 to 30,000 people were mostly workers and internal migrants that were working and living in Slovenia; they were of non-Slovenian ethnic roots, Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, Roma, Kosovars, Macedonians, etc. What happened on 
27 
Žarana Papić, “Europe After 1989: Ethnic Wars, the Fascisation of Social Life and Body Politics in Serbia,” in: Marina Gržinić Mauhler (ed.), “The Body,” special issue, Filozofski vestnik, Ljubljana, 23 (2/2002), pp. 191–205. 
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26 February 1992 (the date when the Aliens Act came into force) was the total revocation of their permanent residence status, and this revocation was imple­mented by a simple bureaucratic telegram sent by Slavko Debelak the next day, on 27 February 1992, with instructions for “the clearing of the records.”28 The number of the telegram is 0016/4-14968. At that time Slavko Debelak was subor­dinate to Igor Bavčar. 
Janez Drnovšek was elected president of the Slovenian government in April 1992. Matevž Krivic refers to the recorded transcription of the first meeting of Drnovšek’s cabinet in June 1992, when Bavčar, being the Minister of the Interior in Drnovšek’s government as well, informed him of the “problem” regarding the violation of human rights in Slovenia.29 
What happened to them under the auspices of the new state can be termed a “par­ticularly brutal” policy of dispossession and “regroupment.”30 The Slovenian state also lacks a history of internal immigration from and to former Yugoslavia. It is necessary to acknowledge the existence—not only in Slovenia but also in the EU (in the passage of the EU from a biopolitical to a necropolitical regime) of different forms of subjugation, of harsh circumstances of exploitation, discrim­ination, and segregation. Benjamin Stora calls this “ethnoracial regulation.”31 
In considering the “tensions of the French empire,” Stoler and Frederick Cooper, already in 1987, stated that the tensions reside in a network that “joined liber­alism, racism, and social reform.”32 Similarly, we can say for Slovenia that it ac­quired a quasi-bourgeois EU identity as a malfunctioning copy of the European colonial state, where Slovenia in a turbo manner (in just few decades) joined neo/liberalism and racism, and, moreover, forgot about any social reforms. What is necessary, then, is to locate racism as a central category within the pa-113 
28 “27. 2. 1992,” The Erased: Information and documents, Mirovni inštitut, http://www. 
mirovni-institut.si/izbrisani/en/27-2-1992/index.html (accessed: 11 September 2019). 29 Matevž Krivic, “Bavčar: ‘Odmisliti človekove pravice!,’” Mladina, 7 March 2004, https:// 
www.mladina.si/94301/bavcar-odmisliti-clovekove-pravice/. Cf. “4.6.1992,” The Erased: 
Information and documents, Mirovni inštitut, http://www.mirovni-institut.si/izbrisani/ 
en/4-6-1992/index.html (accessed: 11 September 2019). 30 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Cul­
ture, Durham, 23 (1/2011), p. 134, note 39. 31 Benjamin Stora quoted in Stoler, op. cit., p. 125. 32 Stoler, op. cit., p. 125. 
rameters of the abstract state. It should be acknowledged that in Europe we have 
a fully constructed entity of a racial state and global capitalism. 
Likewise we have to be alert to the fact, as stated by Stoler, that “racial states can be innovative and agile beasts, their categories flexible, and their classifications protean and subject to change. They thrive on ambiguities and falter on rigidi­ties. […] Racial formations have long marked differences by other names.”33 
Borders 
The European Union constantly speaks of how everything is becoming increas­ingly democratic as well as liberal and open to democratic possibilities and po­tentialities. However, in reality we can witness fascist tendencies, racist pub­lic speeches, and a torrent of hateful attitudes. These tendencies have become normalized and cohabit easily with the neoliberal capitalist machine, which is disgustingly tolerant of the social and political processes of discrimination. 
In order to further understand the situation, we must both consider the histor­ical factors and analyse the contemporary forms of racism, within Europe and the rest of the world, that are hidden behind different rhetorics. The contem­porary Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo34 (2005) stated that in order to understand historical and contemporary imperialism, it is necessary to endorse an analysis of liberalism (at present, neoliberalism is the major ideology of glob­al capitalism) and an analysis of colonialism, which forms the foundation of Western imperial wealth. 
This paradox encourages us to ask: What is the logic that organizes a possi­bility to declare that the borders are gone? The so-called imbalance between Eastern and Western Europe today is no longer a question of opposition, but rather of repetition. It is the same repetition I suggested when speaking of glob­al capitalism—a repetition of one event alone (according to López Petit): capi­tal’s lack of restraint. 
Ibid., p. 130. 
34 Domenico Losurdo, “Le radice americane (e coloniale) del Terzo Reich” [The American colonial roots of the Third Reich], lecture, Milan, Italy, 15 May 2005. 
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Today, there is a lot of talk about the disturbance between the nationalistic East of Europe and the neoliberal West of Europe. But as we can see, we are witness to a repetition of the neoliberal capitalist West amidst the nationalistic East, but they do not disturb, so to speak, each other, but rather reinforce each other. 
However, this repetition does not involve a process of mirroring, if this were the case we would then speak about repetition bringing the enjoyment of minimal difference. The repetition that is repeated presents arepetition of one part with­in the other.Based on Ugo Vlaisavljević’s insights in “From Berlin to Sarajevo,”35 I can claim that the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the consequent disappearanceof the border dividing the East and West, while enthusiastically celebrated,result­ed from the wrong conceptualization of the border itself.36 Maybe it is necessary to rethink the concept of the border. Vlaisavljević, referring to Étienne Balibar, points to a process in Europe that states that the way we perceive borders chang­es, and with this change we can conceptualize Europe differently as well. 
Vlaisavljević states that the best way to understand the position within the EU is to actually look toward the EU’s borders that have been establishedby those states that are not integrated into it. Balibar, as Vlaisavljević’s text reactualizes him, is presented as the theoretician who in his major works about Europe in the 1990s had already begun to identify a process of change in the definition of borders. Balibar envisioned a process of the simultaneous fragmentation and multiplication of borders, on the one hand, and the disappearance of certain borders, on the other. 
In 1997, he posited that the borders were flexing, although he warned that this does not mean that they were disappearing. On the contrary, borders are be­coming multiplied and diminished in their localization and in their function, 115 stretched or doubled, becoming zones, regions, border-territories. What is at stake here is precisely a reversed relation between “borders” and “territories”: borders, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, started transforming into zones.37 
35 Ugo Vlaisavljević, “From Berlin to Sarajevo,” Zarez, Zagreb, 11 (267/2009), pp. 23–25. 36 Ibid., pp. 23–25. 
37 
Étienne Balibar, La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et apres Marx [The Fear of the Masses: Politics and philosophy before and after Marx], Galilée, Paris 1997, pp. 386–387. 
One consequence of establishing zones or territories instead of fixed borders is that the question of borders disappears so that the physiognomyof the border can change radically. We no longer speak of Eastern andWestern Europe, but about the transformation of an entire territory into a zone that functions in such a way that it becomes a (new) border. Vlaisavljević clearly points out that this is the function of the new territory called the “Western Balkans,” which has the function of just such a border-zone. 
Vlaisavljević stated that the Berlin Wall is gone, but it has been replaced by a bureaucratic process of visas, and that the border police are not at the borders anymore, but in the hearts of those cities that are not yet part of the EU; within fortified embassy offices, policemen, rather than embassy and consular bureau­crats, keep the walls standing firmly. Today, as Vlaisavljević notes, the “former Western European” states’ embassy personnel are increasingly professionalized bureaucratic police. Integration into the EU, as states, starts before a future EU Member state is integrated. 
In short, Europe no longer needs the Berlin Wall, as it has established invisi­ble internal judicial police and managerial borders that function just as well. The slogan proclaimed by unified Germany in 2009 was: “Come, come to the country without borders”—the only problem being if you (we) happen to be, by “chance,” in any of the many detention camps or detention prisons in Germany or in similar facilities elsewhere in the EU, or if you (we) are waiting in line somewhere in “the land without borders” to get a visa or asylum papers. 
Global capital pressures the nation state to remove the legal-political barriers that prevent the unconditional mobility of trans-multinational capital. This is one of the major functions of European Union legislation that is made operative throughout the whole space of the EU. The civilizing mission of the old bour­geois of Western Colonial European states indicates that what is at the core of the EU is not a benevolent mission to help the Former Eastern European states “progress,” but a way to make new regulation more effective. 
The EU worked in the past through “gentlemen’s agreements” that kept out­lawed transactions and violent processes of colonization concealed, and this is what is to be understood and implemented as well today. Capital within global neoliberal capitalism specifically pushes against the legal-political state barri­
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ers. The fact that we live in this so-called neoliberal global world does not mean that we are exempt from borders, but that they are “removed” in order for the mobility of transnational capital to flourish, while other borders are simultane­ously reinforced. 
In line with Foucault, it is also possible to identify a nation state biopolitics that is in reality meant only for the population seen as “natural” citizens of the nation state; the others, both inside and outside the nation state simply meant nothing. Racism was a specific inclusion with exclusion; it was a situation of apartheid within and without the nation state. As Rastko Močnik has argued, the function of the nation state and its state apparatuses was to “coordinate” the interests of national capital (with state coercion, of course) and to provide life benefits to those being recognized (in blood and soil) as fellow nationals of the respective nation state.38 
But what do we have today? We not only have a transformation of the nation state, but also a development of a new form of state—the war state. What we have in front of us is now the opposite (but not a binary). The task of the war state is to maintain the illusion of society despite the ever more brutal logic of capital exploitation and expropriation (which was also brutal in the 1970s, but in adifferent way). That iswhy the unity of capital and power is no longer viable and instead we have to expose the co-propriety of capital and power. Attacks on the banks are not enough. It is necessary to also change the political struc­tures that are caught in the relation of co-propriety with the centres of financial capital. So, if we see a radical difference between the 1970s andtoday, we can reformulate it as having to do with two different biopolitics,the classical one of the 1970s and the other that has changed into a necropolitics. 
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In the war state, the state apparatuses exist only to maintain the illusion of so­cial harmony and not to take care of the life of a proper population. This meas­ure means that from its biopolitical perspective (the politics of taking care of the population while systematically controlling it), the contemporary state changes 
38 Rastko Močnik, “Konec univerze, zmaga visokega šolstva: bo teorija ostala brez institu­cionalne podpore?” [The end of university, the triumph of higher education: Will theory remain without institutional support?], manuscript, 2011, p. 15. Available at http://www. sociologija.si/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Univerza_OS.pdf. 
into a necropolitical regime, which only takes part in the war of transnational capital—abandoning the citizens to find a way to survive on their own). 
Therefore, as summarized by Rastko Močnik, while the state of the past fostered the socio-economic level of the society, today it is only concerned with the so-cio-political level.39 The political in such a case is but the management of keep­ing order in society and therefore presents a total depoliticization of politics. In reality, the agents of capital monopolize the political apparatus: a modern state policy, therefore, has the appearance of “general management” and uses, as stated by Močnik, strategies of show business and mass media advertising in order to manage the status quo.40 
Our task is therefore to raise the question of what kind of political, economic, social, and cultural (as well discursive) dispositions have made the racial coor­dinates of the nation state and the racial epistemic coordinates of contemporary neoliberal global capitalist governance so legible. What has changed, perhaps, is not only what is known about racist politics, but how normalized they have become in Slovenia and Europe today. The unrecognized, but palpably visible, although denied, racist history is then normalized within other topics related to the security and protection policy of the EU, which in the final reckoning be­comes nothing other than Fortress Europe with its racist epistemic context. 
39 Ibid., p. 16. 40 Ibid., p 16, note 49. 
Peter Klepec* 

Crisis, Europe1 
Is there a crisis of Europe? Or, even better, are there several crises of Europe? Perhaps, rather differently, there are crises, but in Europe? These questions are obviously not the same, however, there is hardly anyone today who would not answer affirmatively to at least one of them. There is a general ubiquitous belief that Europe is going through some kind of crisis. This is not something new, since Europe—or better, what counts as Europe—seems to be in a state of crisis by definition. What does it mean to claim that, and is the term “crisis” appro­priate here? Which crisis and a crisis of what exactly? The trouble is that both words, i.e. “Europe” and “crisis”, are very loose, and that everything depends on how, first, we define them, and second, how they interrelate. Terminology, as we will try to show in the present essay, does matter. Rather literally, since “Europe” and “crisis” are not just any words. But then what are they? Are they terms, names, notions, concepts, representations, or ideas? Something else, per­haps? What are here, first, the consequences and implications of terminology, and, second, what do the terminological choices reveal or what do they mask? To speak about “Europe” and “crisis” seems to be somewhat natural, self-ex­planatory, and self-evident, because there are several crises in Europe: there is “the crisis of the European (political) project”, “the crisis of European identity”, “the crisis of the (European) idea”, “the crisis of European culture”, “the EU cri­sis”, the Eurozone crisis”, the sovereign debt crisis (in Europe), the (European) migrant or refugee crisis, the political-military crisis in relation to other “crises at the borders of Europe” (wherever that may be), the crisis of decision-making processes in the EU, the crisis of democratic politics/policies in the EU, the crisis with (right-wing) (European) populism, the Brexit crisis, and so on and so forth. 
This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
Are these crises, “Europe’s crises,”2 interrelated and just varieties of one single crisis? A crisis of what, then? Of Europe, of the EU, of the Eurozone, of the West, or of the world as such? The trouble is that these terms are simply not synony­mous. And, the trouble is that the term “crisis” is notoriously loose and vague. As Immanuel Wallerstein put it in 1982: “Crisis is a word that comes easily to the lips. We seem always to be in some crisis or other.”3 Today the situation is not very different. Or, as Nancy Fraser put it: “Whoever speaks of ‘crisis’ today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the term’s banalization through endless loose talk.”4 So, despite many changes in these three and a half decades, talk about crisis is (still) ubiquitous, even more, it seems that despite all the chang­es, the very term “crisis” is precisely here as a vague description of these very changes. “Crisis” describes some changes; more precisely, changes that we do not want or that we do not know what they are really about. “Crisis” is then per­fectly suitable for describing the times we live in. These times can be described quite differently and in a variety of ways. For both Wallerstein and Fraser, for instance, despite important differences in their views, we are living in times of transition, times of “interregnum,” in times when “the Old is dying and the New cannot be born (yet).” No wonder, then, that “crisis comes easily to the lips.” And no wonder that Europe is frequently put in relation to a crisis, since times of transition doubtlessly affect it, yet nobody knows exactly what such times will bring about for it and its role. There are certainly more sides to the coin here. There is, as always, a yawning and moaning discourse about the general societal decline and about the waning of European power—which is nothing but nostalgia for those past (colonial) times, as well as a call to restore them today in the wake of the decline of European power. But this part of the topic does not interest us here. There is also a more detailed and in-depth approach, and the fact is that literature on the topic of crisis and the crises of Europe is really vast and enormous, yet we have here neither the skills nor the time/space to address it properly. Our aim is to intervene in the topic in the form of an exercise. Our rather naive title (re)presents it in a grammatical form: a comma separates the 
2 See the compendium of various papers on the topic: Europe’s Crises, edited by Manuel Castells et al., Polity Press, Cambridge 2018. 
3 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Crisis as Transition”, in: Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis, Monthly Review Press, New York 1982, p. 11. 
4 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, Verso, London & New York 2019, p. 7. 
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two terms. As such, it pleas for a (temporal) suspension of the relation of both these terms; in the interim it is possible to show some of the consequences of using these terms in our contemporary situation—this is how we here under­stand the suggestion of Reinhard Kosseleck5 that “crisis” and “critique” belong together. What interests us here are some implications and presuppositions of the talk about “crisis” and “Europe.” In other words, what does the word “crisis” reveal here? What does it enable us to see and, more importantly, what does it hide, mask, and cover up in our present situation? 
Crisis, crisis, everywhere! 
Today it seems not only that crisis is everywhere, but as Gérard Wajcman put it, that it has also “become a normal, everyday course of the world.”6 “Crisis” has become ubiquitous and one wonders how and why. Or, as Timothy Garton Ash put it: “Cryogenically reanimated in January 2017, I would immediately have died again from shock. For now there is crisis and disintegration wherever I look.”7 Both these two statements are surely exaggerations and generalisations, yet they nicely render the generalimpression of an ubiquitous crisis. But “crisis” has many shapes and many faces; it means different things to different people. Its rough meaning is “that something is wrong with something”; however, it is yet to be specified what exactly “crisis” or “wrong” actually is. So, “crisis”, a word, means several things at once. What does it mean, then, to say that “the world is in crisis” and that “crisis is everywhere now”? Is “crisis” really every­where? Or better, does it affect all the places and spaces of the world in the same manner and in the same way? Clearly not, since for some parts of the world there is no crisis at all, while for others the very term “crisis” is an understate­ment. Perhaps we should be more careful with words and terms. To say that “the world is in crisis” implies that there is “one world,” “the world”—would it not 121 be more appropriate to speak about the many “worlds” of our global capitalistic system? The latter is, as Badiou put it, worldless, devoid of any world. From a common-sense perspective, this seems to be sheer nonsense, since there is obviously a “world” out there. However, can we really call it “the world”? Fur­
5 See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern 
Society, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 1988. 6 Gérard Wajcman, Les series, le monde, la crise, les femmes, Verdier, Paris 2018, p. 22. 7 Quoted in: Ivan Krastev, After Europe, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2017, 
p. 62. 
thermore, what is the normal, everyday course of the world? Is not the boundary between the normal and the a-normal, the pathological, as Canguilhem would put it, more complicated and less sharp, more imprecise, than we usually think? Perhaps the very fact that the normal course of the world is now in crisis would also suggest that this is not normal at all? And if, as Marx showed, the capital­istic world or capitalism is prone to crises, this “normal course” today is going from one crisis to another, faster and faster, so that we have a kind of “perpetual crisis”. Is not the latter, as Agamben would put it, but a normalised “state of exception”? Is the latter, following Antonio Gramsci’s term “interregnum”, as Nancy Fraser suggests, to be understood as a situation wherein “the Old is dy­ing and the New cannot be born,” or is it, perhaps, as Wallerstein would have it, but a transition to another long-term cycle, to another form or to another centre in the run of capitalism as the world-system? Should we identify it with the times of modernity as such? Or should we, rather, identify it with the whole history of the West, as suggested by Foucault in an interview from 1975? For Fou-cault,8 crisis is something eternal, perennial, since there was no single moment in modern Western history that was not permeated with a feeling of some kind of crisis. Does that mean that we should search for our initial answers, as many thinkers from Heidegger and Spengler to Adorno and Horkheimer, Arendt, and Foucault have done by scrutinising the very foundations of the West, its histo­ry, and its rationality? While the situation in geo-political terms has certainly changed considerably since their times, and while the critique and criticism of colonial or post-colonial (European) politics, theories, and attitudes have made their impact, a kind of  pessimism and gloominess remains with us even today. 
Even if Arendt, as the least “pessimistic” among the aforementioned thinkers, and perhaps as the most compatible with today’s ubiquitous pro-democratic stance, claims that “the crisis of our time,” is at hand, her position is not so straightforward and simple. It is true that in her classic work Between Past and Future the term crisis appears several times and plays the role of a kind of central guiding motif. For her “this crisis, apparent since the inception of the century, is political in origin and nature.”9 In other words “the crisis of the present world is 
8 Michel Foucault, “La politique est la continuation de la guerre par d’autres moyens” (in­terview with B-H. Lévy), L’Imprévu, No. l, 27 January 1975, p. 16 (In: Dits et Écrits I, Gal-limard, Paris, p. 1570). 
9 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Penguin, London 1961, p. 91. 
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primarily political, and […] the famous ‘decline of the West’ consists primarily in the decline of the Roman trinity of religion, tradition, and authority.”10 For Arendt “the general crisis that has overtaken the modern world” in fact “forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices.”11 So, if “a more general crisis and instability in modern society” is visible for Arendt, that also “means that wherever the crisis has occurred in the modern world, one cannot simply go on nor yet simply turn back,” since “in every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has occurred.”12 Therefore, for Arendt, “crisis” is a call for new thought and action, new views and judgments upon this world. We could say that quite a similar point is made by Foucault in the aforementioned interview, for he claims that politicians, economists, philosophers, and others use the term “crisis” for a de­scription of the present precisely when they lack concepts and when they do not have proper conceptual instruments for its analysis. For Arendt, and for Foucault too, crisis is ubiquitous, yet for them it is not the final word or the final judgement. It is rather a call and a request for new and more accurate theoreti­cal tools, concepts, and descriptions. To state “there is crisis (everywhere)” can just be a beginning, not the end or the final word. 
In other words, “crisis” is just a term, not a defined concept. It covers several meanings and they all derive from ancient Greek and medical/juridical dis­course (that is why, as we will see later, it also takes the form of a diagnosis of an ill or a disease). Although “crisis” has today become (and perhaps forever was) what Ernesto Laclau would term an “empty signifier,” meaning nothing and everything at the same time, it is precisely as such constantly an object of 123 struggles for its interpretation, for a hegemony, for how to and who will define its proper and more precise meaning. It is of crucial importance, then, to speci­fy it further, especially in relation to the predominant views on Europe and the European situation. 
10 Ibid, p. 140. 11 Ibid, pp. 173, 174. 12 Ibid, pp. 185, 194, 178. 
For the purpose of illustration, let us take a short detour concerning the well-known case of an economic crisis that happened more than ten years ago. In the vast secondary literature thereupon it is now consensually called “the economic crisis of 2008” and it shook the USA first, but then quickly moved across the At­lantic to Europe too. Although from today’s perspective it might seem that “you had to see it coming,” it came as a total surprise to almost everybody. Especially to mainstream economists, who—as Krugman has shown—in the beginning of this century even tried to ban words such as “crisis” and “recession” from their vocabulary,13 despite the fact that after WW II there were more than 160 econom­ic crises all over the world. The crisis, so they say, is now all over; however, its vast proportions have left consequences for global capitalism as well as for Eu­rope, and, most importantly, for our common future too. The question whether this was “just a crisis” or something more sinister is still hotly debated today. How to describe it, then? What term is appropriate for it in its relation to Eu­rope? We will here briefly pick just three of such descriptions from among many, which all avoid the term “crisis” and speak instead about a “Grand Recession,” a “catastrophe,” and, in relation to Europe, a “decline.” The first term comes from Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Cen­tury, the second from the equally bestselling work TheMaking of the Indebted Man of Maurizio Lazzarato, and the third from the historian Adam Tooze in his recently published work Crashed. How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Each of them, of course, provides several arguments in support of the author’s terminological choice. 
Piketty claims the following: 
The global financial crisis that began in 2007–2008 is generally described as the most serious crisis of capitalism since the crash of 1929. The comparison is in some ways justified, but essential differences remain. The most obvious of these is that the recent crisis has not led to a depression as devastating as the Great Depres­sion of the 1930s. Between 1929 and 1935, production in the developed countries fell by a quarter, unemployment rose by the same amount, and the world did not 
Krugman mentions here Robert Lucas, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics, who claimed in 2003 that “the central problem of depression-prevention has been solved.” See: Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Penguin, London 2008, p. 9. 
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entirely recover from the Depression until the onset of World War II. Fortunately, the current crisis has been significantly less cataclysmic. That is why it has been given a less alarming name: the Great Recession. To be sure, the leading devel­oped economies in 2013 are not quite back to the level of output they had achieved in 2007, government finances are in pitiful condition, and prospects for growth look gloomy for the foreseeable future, especially in Europe, which is mired in an endless sovereign debt crisis (which is ironic, since Europe is also the continent with the highest capital/income ratio in the world). Yet even in the depths of the recession, in 2009, production did not fall by more than five percentage points in the wealthiest countries. This was enough to make it the most serious global recession since the end of World War II, but it is still a very different thing from the dramatic collapse of output and waves of bankruptcies of the 1930s. Furthermore, growth in the emerging countries quickly bounced back and is buoying global growth today. The main reason why the crisis of 2008 did not trigger a crash as se­rious as the Great Depression is that this time the governments and central banks of the wealthy countries did not allow the financial system to collapse and agreed to create the liquidity necessary to avoid the waves of bank failures that led the world to the brink of the abyss in the 1930s.14 
Lazzarato picks another angle of the story. He claims that we are now in a situ­ation when we are already going from one financial crisis to another. He speaks in this context about “a period of permanent crisis,” which he calls “‘catastro­phe’ to refer to the discontinuity of the concept of crisis itself.” Why “catastro­phe”? Because for Lazzarato we are now facing a new economy, “the debt econ­omy,” which 
has deprived the immense majority of Europeans of political power, which had already been diminished through the concessions of representative democracy. It has deprived them of a growing share of the wealth that past struggles had wrested from capitalist accumulation. And, above all, it has deprived them of the future, that is, of time, time as decision-making, choice, and possibility.15 
14 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Ma.) & London 2014, p. 472. 
15 Maurizio Lazzarato,The Making of the Indebted Man, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles 2012, pp. 123–124; 8. 
For Tooze, the crisis of 2008 had disastrous consequences too, but viewed from another perspective. The following, rather long, passage is related to the fate of Europe faced with this economic crisis: 
Far from being beneficiaries of EU crisis management, business was one of its casualties, and the European banks above all. Since 2008, it is not just the rise of Asia that is shifting the global corporate hierarchy. It is the decline of Europe. This might ring oddly to Europeans used to hearing boasts of Germany’s trade surplus. But as Germany’s own most perceptive economists point out, those surpluses are as much the result of repressed imports as of roaring export success. The inexo­rable slide of corporate Europe down the global rankings is clear for all to see. Though we might wish otherwise, the world economy is not run by medium-sized “Mittelstand” entrepreneurs but by a few thousand massive corporations, with interlocking shareholdings controlled by a tiny group of asset managers. In that battlefield of corporate competition, the crises of 2008–2013 brought European capital a historic defeat. No doubt there are many factors contributing to this, but a crucial one is the condition of Europe’s own economy. Exports matter, but, as both China and the United States demonstrate, there is no substitute for a profit­able home market. If we take the cynical view that the basic mission of the euro-zone was not to serve its citizens but to provide European capital with a field for profitable domestic accumulation, then the conclusion is inescapable: Between 2010 and 2013 it failed spectacularly. And not first and foremost as a result of miss­ing eurozone institutions, but as a result of choices made by business leaders, dogmatic central bankers and conservatively minded politicians. […] Rather than an autonomous actor, Europe risks becoming the object of other people’s capital­ist corporatism. Indeed, as far as international finance is concerned, the die has already been cast. In the wake of the double crisis, Europe is out of the race. The future will be decided between the survivors of the crisis in the United States and the newcomers of Asia. They may choose to locate in the City of London, but after Brexit even that cannot be taken for granted. Wall Street, Hong Kong and Shang­hai may simply bypass Europe.16 
Without going into further detail regarding any of these three descriptions, it is clear from the passages quoted that they seek a more appropriate way of think-
Adam Tooze, Crashed. How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Allen Lane, London 2018, pp. 16–17. 
crisis, europe 
ing and talking about “economic crisis”. The latter is too vague; it has to be supplemented by other terms and notions to gain more nuanced and specific descriptions for the current situation and predicaments Europe finds itself in. 
Perhaps we should add that for those authors the term “crisis” is in a way too mild, too optimistic, since for them the state of things is more serious and more sinister than the term “crisis” might suggest. The term “crisis” namely also im­plies that however dire, terrible, or horrible things are, the “patient” (in our case: Europe) is not dead yet. That is why many are claiming that every crisis is an opportunity, a challenge. Why? Because the term “crisis” is vaguely inter­changeable with “unrest”, a change (a rather an undesired one), a “conflict”, but this “diagnosis”, based on the judgement that an acute and severe state of things has been achieved, also entails that everything is not yet lost, because one is not at the end, but at a “turning point” between a fortunate and an unfor­tunate change in the state of the evaluated entity. So, a crisis is an opportunity to change things for the better. A “critical situation”, a “crisis situation”, is sure­ly an acute situation, it borders on the “pathological” and it threatens the goals of the persons involved. It demands (our) action, solution, decision. It searches for the sense and meaning of a situation; it is related to judgement—for Aristot­le, to judge, krinein, is a “determination of what is just” (Politics, 1253a35). This judgement pertains to those who are in power, who govern: “For both governors and governed have duties to perform; the special functions of a governor are to command and to judge.” (Politics, 1326b11)17. 
“Crisis” therefore implies several things at once: judgement, decision, choice, alternative, opportunity, solution. As such, it is a call, a request, a demand, that something has to be done, but at the same time it is also a kind of consolation, solace: there is still hope. And, as is well known, where the latter exists, there is 127 also fear. The term “crisis”, therefore, is split into its optimistic and pessimistic sides, split and torn between hope and fear. Both hope and fear—as Hegel knew perfectly well—are signs and companions of desire: our desire when something is concerned and when it is described as being “in crisis”. We are therefore not 
17 Quoted from: Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle. The revised Oxford Translation, 
edited by Jonathan Barnes, Volume Two, Princeton University Press, New Jersey & Chi-
chester 1984, p. 1989, 2105. 
indifferent to this “something”, or in our case “Europe”, in the statement “Eu­rope is in crisis.” 
Turbulent, dark, savage, mighty, and yet impotent 
Any talk about “the crisis of Europe”, “the European crisis”, or “Europe’s cri­ses”, is far from neutral. It namely implies, as we just saw, our own position in relation to Europe (or what counts for us as “Europe”), our claim that “some­thing is wrong with it,” and yet at the same time covers this up, since it is a kind of diagnosis that remains optimistic. When we talk about “the crisis of Europe” we also surreptitiously talk about our desire, our hopes, our fears, our anxieties, and our despair concerning what we observe, witness, and describe as happen­ing with Europe, to Europe, and in Europe. And, last but not least, the very term “Europe” is not so self-evident and clear as it may seem. 
It namely designates several things at once. It is a term designating a continent, a name for it, and at the same time a geo-political project regarding which it is in fact nearly impossible to find any consensus about what it actually refers to. The real problem and real perplexity with Europe starts at this level. Is it a name, a notion, a concept, an idea, or a project? For some philosophers, such as Hus­serl, it is an idea,18 while for other philosophers it means various things: “At this point, however, it must be noted that in the relevant philosophical literature on Europe, ‘Europe’ is not only referred to as a concept or an idea. A frequent appel­lation is also that of a ‘figure’. And there is a long list of other names as well: an image (Paul Valéry), a category (Alain Badiou), a schema (Denis Guénoun), and even, reflecting the ambiguities and limitations of all these terms, ‘a little thing’ (Jacques Derrida).”19What is Europe then? For Gasché, “it is a conception that is always only in the making, never closed off, and structurally open to future transformation and change. Thus the question arises of what precisely it is that one calls by the name of Europe. And this does not simply ask what the name Europe refers to, but, in addition, it asks about the kind of term Europe is.”20 
18 For more on this, see: Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task. A Study of a Philo­
sophical Concept, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2009. 
19 Ibid, p. 9. 
20 Ibid. 
crisis, europe 
Europe is also a name for a certain political project, which throughout history has had many different versions. For a long time it seemed that Europe—colo­nial, imperial Europe—is simply identical with the West. As historian Norman Davies, among others, has shown,21 throughout history Europe has had differ­ent meanings as well as the idea of “the West” or of “Western civilization”. Its name can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, who saw their free land as the antithesis of the despotisms of the East, especially Persia, but they did not con­sider themselves to be Europeans. But they, ironically perhaps, lay down the matrix of Europe’s self-understanding since the Greeks believed themselves to be in the middle, between the Orient and the West, between Asia and Europe. In a similar vein, Europe itself has always considered itself to be split, split from within and divided from “the rest”, “the remainder”, “the Other”. Europe throughout history had been prone to wars, tragedies, and disasters up until the end of WW II. It is precisely this fate that was addressed after the war by many, for instance by Churchill in his famous speech of 19 September 1946. If for Churchill Europe was defined by its tragedy and plight, the only way to avoid this fate would be to “build a kind of United States of Europe.” Churchill evokes Europe as a wound to be healed and in that context there is a solution in the form of a dream of a unified body of Europe, a dream about healing the division and cut in the middle of Europe. As Étienne Balibar put it after the fall of Berlin Wall in 1991: “The question here is not whether the balance is equal (it isn’t, at that), but how, in this merciless dispute, comes to be constituted the dream of an ‘end of the division’ and, consequently, the imagination of Europe as a unified body that has been cut up and needs to be sewn back together. Following the disappearance of one of the two blocs, the struggle itself is van­ishing, which in fact constitutes a great trial of truth: now or never is the mo­ment for the dream to materialize, for Europe to rise up, renewed or revitalized. This is also the moment when the dream risks being smashed into pieces.”22 This, in a nutshell, is the main political reason for today’s EU (apart from more important economic reasons). The primary aim of the EU in this context is not only to avoid war(s), but also to heal the wound and split. 
21 Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Pimlico, London 1997. 
22 
Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans­lated by Jameson Swenson, Princeton University Press, London & New York 2004, p. 90. 
Europe itself has been and still is understood primarily in terms of plight, wars, and tragedy—of a wound to be healed. If the EU is a way to heal it, it is, none­theless, not (the whole) Europe. Europe and the EU, however, share some for­mal features. As joint projects, they both share some structural presuppositions: they are a joint venture of at least two national states in Europe or European countries. This venture presupposes and starts from the fact that Europe was split from the very beginning. Europe and the EU are by definition split into various countries, various institutions, various views, dreams, conceptions, vi­sions, and fantasies. Here, however, the strict similarities between the EU and Europe (at the abstract level, where we are now) stop. While Europe seems to be a question, the EU is an answer, although whether it is the right one, one has to add, is still a matter of debate. 
Europe is namely by definition a paradoxical entity: one that constantly ques­tions its own identity, borders, and frontiers: “Where does Europe begin and end?”23 If Europe is an agent, it is but a paradoxical one, because its desire and its will are constantly in question. In that way, Europe is a model split subject, and therefore a model hysterical subject, a subject that does not know what it really wants: What does Europe want?24 In a way, we could say that the mo­dus vivendi of Europe is not only a split, or being split, but also a question: a question of what counts in and what counts out, a question concerning its bor­ders and frontiers. In an exaggerated way, one could even say that when we say Europe we are actually simultaneously putting a question mark next to it (Europe=Europe?): “It is not simply ironic that all critique of Europe must ulti­mately seek its resources in the theory and practice of self-questioning that is itself characteristic of European ‘identity’.”25 Europe is a question also to itself, and in that context one could repeat Hegel’s famous dictum about the secrets of the Egyptians, which are secrets to the Egyptians. To say that Europe is al­ways in question means to acknowledge that this not an easy thing to bear or an easy position to be in. A question as such, as a grammatical form, is namely 
23 
Anthony Giddens, Turbulent and Mighty Continent. What Future for Europe?, revised and updated edition, Polity, Cambridge 2014, p. 151. 
24 
See: Slavoj Žižek and Srečko Horvat, What Does Europe Want?: The Union and Its Discon­tents, Columbia University Press, New York 2014. 
25 
Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task, p. 7. 
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far from innocent, benevolent, or benign. As Aaron Bodenheimer has shown,26 a question as such is by its very nature obscene. Its goal is to make a hole in its addressee. As such, a question is an ideal weapon of authority (recall police in­terrogations and interpellations) as well as a weapon against it, since it wants to lay bare its ignorance and/or imposture. There are no neutral or innocent ques­tions. Neither a simple question like “Daddy, why is the sky is blue?” nor the often-heard “Europe, what do you want?” is a benign question. Even if Europe were to answer the question about what it wants, even if it were to say that it wants an x, immediately another set of questions would arise: But—what do you really want? Don’t you know what you really need? Etc. Being split and de­fined by a question is not something easy or even cosy. That is one more reason why Europe finds itself frequently in quite obscene situations and why it is by definition seen as indecisive, hesitant, irresolute, uncertain, unsure: “To have politics, one has to decide, but Europe does not decide upon anything.”27 Even capricious, whimsical, and dangerous: 
there are many who confidently pretend to know what exactly Europe has stood for, and continues to stand for—namely, a hegemonic phantasm and moribund worldview. By depicting Europe and the West as a homogeneous power of dom­ination over the rest of the world, postcolonial criticism of European imperi­alism, and its construction of non-European cultures, knows perfectly what Europe is. Indeed, it knows it so well that it itself indulges in the same lack of differentiation of which it accuses the West in its relation to its others. It thus turns “Europe” into the blind spot of its own discourse. As indicated, to invoke the name Europe, apart from referring to its location, culture, and history, is also to intimate something else: it is to suggest a concept or idea—a concept or an idea called “Europe”—even though it may not be immediately clear to what content such a concept or idea is assigned.28 131 
This abstract level of Europe as a political project can be illustrated in many ways. Let us pick only a couple of examples taken from very recent literature 
26 Aaron Ronald Bodenheimer, Warum? Von der Obszönität des Fragens, Reclam, Stuttgart 1985. 
27 
Jean-Claude Milner,Considérations sur l’Europe. Entretiens avec Philippe Petit, Éditions 
de cerf, Paris 2019, p. 37. 28 Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task, p. 16. 
on the topics of Europe and its crises. We will start with the following claim of Manuel Castells in his text “Achilles’ Heel: Europe’s Ambivalent Identity”: 
Identity is clearly central to the future of the EU. Yet available evidence suggests that while most European citizens hold multiple identities, national identity tends to be more salient than European identity, and the forced integration pro­ject, the economic crisis and the growth of immigration have resulted in an iden­tity crisis for Europe. For a small minority of Europeans, largely members of social and economic elites, the EU is a cosmopolitan project in which transnational and transboundary relationships are only likely to grow. For many others, instead, it is linked to processes of globalization and marketization that have largely exclud­ed them. Recent events have created pulls in each direction […]. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that it is in the realm of values, of new values, where we could find the seeds of a potential European identity. […] Moreover, the mere enumeration of these values shows that while they are a reasonable wish list, it may not be easy to combine them in a coherent set, beyond their popularity in public opinion. So, these elements of a European project, while they must be materials to work with, cannot be asserted as a finished model to be imposed. In a fully democrat­ic, multicultural, multiethnic Europe, exposed to global flows of communication and information, no project can be imposed from the state. And yet, the problems raised [here] are still relevant. While national and local identities will continue to be strong and instrumental, if there is no development of a compatible European identity, a purely instrumental Europe will remain a fragile construction, whose possible, future wrecking would trigger major crises in European societies, and around the world.29 
For Castells, the EU is Europe, but even this simplified and amputated Europe, if we may put it that way, has a serious problem with its own identity, which for Castells himself is ambivalent. However, for Castells the real trouble consists in the fact that this identity has yet to be produced “spontaneously from below” and cannot be imposed in an authoritarian manner “from above”: 
Thus, even if there is no clear European identity model, there still can be identity in the making, that is a process of social production of identity. In other words, 
29 Manuel Castells “Achilles’ Heel: Europe’s Ambivalent Identity” in: Europe’s Crises, ed. by Manuel Castells et al., Polity Press, Cambridge 2018, pp. 191–192. 
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it is not possible to create, artificially, a European identity, but European insti­tutions could help the development of a series of mechanisms that, in their own dynamics, would configure the embryos of this shared system of values through­out Europe. It is by engaging in social experimentation, by letting society evolve by itself, but helping to constitute a European civil society, that we could see the emergence of a new, strong, European identity in the foreseeable future. Because if a European identity project does not emerge, nationalist resistance identities from retrenched nations will prevail, eventually dooming the European dream.30 
These two rather long passages taken from Castells nicely present the predica­ment of Europe: even in its mutilated version of the EU it has a major problem with its own identity, which has to be resolved or we are all doomed. 
This way of talking about predicament and its solution is not an isolated case. Europe is, as Keith Lowe put it, a “savage continent,” or, as historian Ian Kershaw wrote in 2018, “a strange mixture.” Kershaw’s description is in gen­eral terms in line with Castells’s: “Europe’s history after the Second World War has been a heady mixture of great achievements, severe disappointments and even disasters, as the crises of recent years have graphically demonstrated. It has indeed been a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs […].”31 Europe, or better, the EU, has a problem with is its identity: “What the European Union has been unable to accomplish is the creation of a genuine sense of European identity.”32 However, nobody knows what the future will bring to us: “What will happen in the decades to come is impossible to know. The only certainty is uncertainty. Insecurity will remain a hallmark of modern life. Europe’s dips and turns, the ups and downs that have characterized its history, are sure to continue.”33 
Similar descriptions of Europe can be found in recent literature on Europe and 133 crisis: on one hand, there is Europe as dangerous, yet Europe (or the EU) is its own solution. The problems of Europe, or the crises of Europe, have only one cure: more Europe, or simply, more EU. Let us briefly mention these solutions found in Giddens, Judt, Bauman, Krastev, and Gasché, regardless of their differ­ences. Gasché, to begin with, thinks that there is no one or final decision, since 
30 Ibid, pp. 192–193. 31 Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster. Europe 1950–2017, Penguin, London 2019, p. 541. 32 Ibid, p. 544. 33 Ibid, p. 562. 
he sees Europe as an “infinite task.” Gasché’s project is really an interesting one, but we will not go into it here. For our purposes, here it suffices to mention Gasché’s open reminder at the beginning of his book of what will be excluded from his topics. He openly admits that although his book 
is indeed a book on Europe, it does not deal with “Europe” simply as some past or present entity or as some geopolitical, legal, and cultural entity that is yet to be created […]. I do not intend to broach the intricate problems that this unification, and the establishment of a transnational European identity, pose in practice. There will be no discussion of the long and difficult history of Europe’s inner and outer borders, nor of all the trouble this history continues to represent today in a united Europe. I will not address the issue of what sort of legal and political unity a united Europe should have […]. This book will also not be concerned with the Europe pro­moted by the current economical and financial Caesarian powers of the continent, in short, with the undoubtedly crucial question of whether the attempts to turn Europe into a primarily economic zone, or to shape it into a political construction on the basis of a still to be adopted (provisional or definite) European constitution, are sufficient to construct a Europe that would meet the various expectations at the heart of the project of a United Europe. Undoubtedly, the question of whether or not a Europe (understood as an economic power that is competitive among the world markets and that is politically united by a constitution whose prime goal is merely to further cement its economic clout) does justice to the expectations and dreams for Europe that are fostered by its cultural, political, and legal traditions is a highly significant one. But this issue will have to remain in the background here. Finally, this book will not inquire into the resistance that the unification of Europe actually encounters on a daily basis, at every step, in its inner or outer conflicts— whether merely ideological or violent and bloody—conflicts that have repeatedly bedeviled the establishment of a United Europe.34 
It is precisely this last feature of Europe excluded from treatment in Gasché that is in the foreground in the majority of the recent literature on Europe. Giddens, for instance, calls Europe a “turbulent and mighty continent”: “The EU’s problems remain serious and dangerous.”35The EU for Giddens is simply equated with Europe: in his book he uses the terms “the EU” (or “the Union”) 
34 Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task, p. 3. Giddens, Turbulent and Mighty Continent, p. 3. 
crisis, europe 
and “Europe” interchangeably. But for Giddens even the EU is split, divided, not into two parts, but into three: into what Giddens calls the EU1, EU2, and paper Europe: “Turning the Union into a community of fate in a positive sense means building solidarity and feelings of belonging to the EU as a whole rather than only to its constituent nations or regions. I believe these developments are not possible but necessary if Europe is to emerge from its malaise.”36 So, for Giddens, Europe is defined by a danger and malaise, while historian Tony Judt spoke about Europe (or is he speaking about the West in general?) as being beset with an “ill”—“ill fares the land”37? What is that “ill”? For Judt, some­thing is profoundly wrong with the way we live today: we cannot go on living in a similar manner. The economic crisis of 2008 was, for Judt, a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy. And yet we seem unable to con­ceive of alternatives. If it is to be taken seriously again, Judt posits that the Left must find its voice. The choice will no longer be between the state and the mar­ket, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government. If we do not, others will. “We need to learn to think the state again. After all, it has always been with us.” Europe is perhaps not de­fined by an “ill”, but by a disease, or as one of the most famous contemporary sociologists Zygmunt Bauman has put it: “That the disease which brought the European Union into the intensive-care ward and has kept it there since, for quite a few years, is best diagnosed as a ‘democratic deficit’ is fast turning into a commonplace. Indeed, it is taken increasingly for granted and is hardly ever seriously questioned.”38 
Perhaps this is not the real issue, as Ivan Krastev in his recent book After Europe claims: “It is fashionable these days to discuss the crisis of the EU in terms of either the Union’s democratic deficit or its cosmopolitan makeup. But what’s really at its core is the crisis of a meritocratic vision of society.”39 For Krastev, 135 “crises are a dividing factor” of Europe: “In reality, all the crises that Europe faces today divide the Union one way or another. The eurozone crisis divides the union over a north–south axis. Brexit highlights the division between the core and the periphery. The Ukraine crisis divides Europe into hawks and doves with 
36 Ibid, p. 8. 37 Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, Penguin, London & New York 2010. 38 ZygmuntBauman,A Chronicle of Crisis: 2011–2016, Social Europe Edition, London 2017, 
p. 89. 39 Krastev, After Europe, p. 87. 
respect to dealing with Russia. But it is the east–west divide that reemerged after the refugee crisis that threatens the future survival of the union itself.”40 Krastev is therefore not afraid to paint a critical and gloomy picture of Europe, but at the end of the day he stays optimistic: “The argument of this short book is that the [European]  Union is going through a really bad time today, torn apart by numerous crises that damage confidence in the future of the project among cit­izens across the continent. So the disintegration of the Union is one of the most likely outcomes. Yet, paradoxically, 2017 comes with a renewed source of hope that was lacking in 2016. No one expected the outcome of the Brexit vote or the American presidential election. The shock inspired by these twin events sends us a message that we do not understand the world as well as we thought we did. In 2017, we therefore face a very different dynamic. We are not only aware that the unthinkable can happen,”41 but what if is this “unthinkable” has already happened? What if “the unthinkable” is not to be understood in the sense that one day Europe may find its way, but in the sense that Europe (as the EU) has already found and founded a wrong (neoliberal) way? 
All the quoted descriptions of Europe’s predicaments and crises do not real­ly question the way Europe has succumbed to neoliberalism, especially after the crisis of 2008 and the subsequent austerity politics/policies. In the briefest terms: if one speaks about the crisis or crises of Europe, one simply does not question the foundations and functions of today’s EU. 
The EU, as it is today, is presumed to be the cure for Europe’s woes and predica­ments. The presumption of all this talk about the “crisis of Europe” is that more Europe in the form of the existing EU will “heal the wound.” Europe is seen as a danger and simultaneously as its own solution, illness, and cure, in the same manner as the notion of pharmakon in Plato is viewed by Derrida. “Europe” is a perfect example of that: the same thing that caused the trouble will rescue and solve it, or as Slavoj Žižek citing Wagner put it: “The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it.” All the talk about the “crisis” in and of Europe is therefore a variant of what Žižek calls a “Hölderlin paradigm”: 
40 Ibid, p. 44. 
41 
Ibid, p. 109. 
crisis, europe 
More generally, the whole of Judeo-Christian history, right up to our own post-modernity, is determined by what I am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm, which was first articulated by Saint Augustine in City of God: “Where the danger is grows also what can save us. (Wo aber Gefahr ist wächst das Rettende auch.)” The present moment appears as the lowest point in the long process of historical decadence (the flight of the gods, alienation…), but the danger of the catastrophic loss of the essential dimension of being-human also opens up the possibility of a reversal (Kehre)—proletarian revolution, the arrival of new gods (who, according to Heidegger’s late work, are the only ones that can save us), and so forth.42 
This paradigm, to stay at an abstract level, is present in the central statement of the Mont Pelerin Society from 1947, which laid the foundations for neolib­eralism. This statement is: “The central values of civilization are in danger.”43 What if the cure for this danger, neoliberalism, has turned into a poison, as the economic crisis of 2008 and its after-effects have proven to be for Europe?44 
There is then a strict dividing line in answering this question and it is related to the term “crisis”: those who think that Europe is in crisis do not find the way the EU functions today to be problematic or neoliberal, while those who do not use the term crisis but seek more appropriate terms for a description of the current situation abandon the term “crisis” and turn around the “Hölderlin paradigm”: Europe is no more; we have to end (this) Europe, neoliberal Europe,45 we have to rebuild a different, Left Europe and EU. What we have now as the EU is but “a transnational juggernaut haphazardly thrown together and rolling in a neolib­eral direction.”46 
In other words, inside Europe as it is, inside the EU, “crisis” is nothing but a method of neoliberal governance: 137 
42 
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) & London 2006, p. 76. 43 Quoted in: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 
2005, p. 20. 44 Tooze, Crashed, p. 17. 45 See: Dimitris Alakoglou, Cédric Durand, Razmig Keucheyan, Stathis Kouvelakis, Costas 
Lapavitsas and Wolfgang Streek, En finir avec l’Europe, La Fabrique éditions, Pariz 2014. 46 Costas Lapavitsas, The Left Case Against the EU, Polity, Cambridge 2019, p. 19. 
But we must not isolate the ‘Greek crisis’ from the ‘European crisis’ or the ‘global crisis’. They are aspects of a generalized war to change the world in accordance with the norms of capitalist rationality. […] Neoliberalism continues to be im­posed on societies, which it transforms using economic blackmail. The ongoing war waged by creditors is conducted by all available means: blackmail over jobs, financial strangulation, and fear of privatization. The term given it acts as a mask: ‘the crisis’.47 
47 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Never-Ending Nightmare. The Neoliberal Assault on De­mocracy, translated by Gregory Elliot, Verso, London & New York 2019, p. 120. 
Rado Riha* 

Europa als Fall der Idee1 
I 
Dasheutige Europa wird nicht selten als Verwirklichung der Idee Europas ver­standen und vorgestellt. Worüber reden wir aber eigentlich, wenn wir von der IdeeEuropas sprechen? Diesem ‚worüber‘ wollen wir hier in dessen formel­len Bedeutung nachfragen. Nicht Europa selbst, sozusagen einem ‚Europa an sich‘, gilt unsere Nachforschung. Es interessiert uns nicht die Frage, was die-ses Europa, das in Form einer Idee angesprochen wird, eigentlich ist. Unser Interesse gilt vielmehr der Form selbst, in der es angesprochen wird, der Gestaltung Europas in Form einer Idee. Was bedeutet es, Europa die Form ei­ner Idee zu geben, sie sozusagen in eine Idee einzukleiden und sie in dieser Form vorzustellen? Was ist eigentlich die Idee, um als eine Formbestimmung Europas dienen zu können? 
DieIdeeimkantischenSinne als einenVernunftbegriff verstehend, als einen Begriff also, dem unmittelbar kein gegenständlicher Referent in der objekti­ven Wirklichkeit entspricht, wollen wir im Folgenden der Frage nachgehen, wasesfürEuropaalseinem selbstständigenwirtschaftlichen,politischenund kulturellen Gebilde bedeuten könnte, sich im Rahmen einer ihm eigenen Idee verwirklichen und weiterbilden zu wollen. Wenn wir der Antwort vorgreifen: dass die Idee Europas keine normative Instanz sein bzw. als eine solche fun-139 gieren kann, versteht sich wohl von selbst – auf diese Weise besteht Europa heute in Form seiner rechtlich-politischen Gesetzgebung. Die Idee Europas kannden sich als europäisch anerkennenden Ländern nicht als ein zu verwirk­lichendesnormatives Ideal vorgeschrieben werden. Vielmehr kann von einer 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.  
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
Idee Europas nur dann gesprochen werden, wenn diese Idee als eine regulative Instanz aufgefasst und als solche verwirklicht wird. 
Es gibt also nur ein Europa, das vermittels der jeweiligen Ausarbeitung, Verwirklichung und Weiterbildung seiner selbst,von Fall zu Fall also, auch fähig ist, eine ihm eigene Idee auszuarbeiten, zu verwirklichen und weiterzubilden. Etwas verallgemeinert gesagt: Ideen, auch die Idee Europas, existieren nicht im Himmel der Ideen. Ideen stellen inmitten einer empirischen Situation den Punkt der Ununterscheidbarkeit von Denken und Handeln dar. Sie existieren, so unsere These, nur in Form ihres jeweiligen Falls. Der Fall der Idee ist kein Beispiel der Idee – er ist vielmehr das, was in einer gegebenen Situation den Exzess dieser Situation darstellt – aber einen Exzess, der mit dem Anspruch auftritt, unmittelbar universalisierbar zu sein. 
II 
Beginnen wir, um unsere Behauptungen näher zu entwickeln, mit einem Umweg. Und zwar mit zwei kurzen Zitaten aus Badious Ist Politik denkbar? Bei beiden handelt es sich um einen affirmativen Bezug Badious auf Kant – ein Bezug, der in Badious sonstigem Verhältnis zu Kant eher eine Ausnahme bildet. 
Das erste Zitat lautet: „Die Evakuierung des Dings-an-sich ist in Wirklichkeit die Auflösung der subjektiven Konstitution der Erfahrung und nicht, wie es Hegel glaubt, ihr Übergang an die Grenze. Denn die Erfahrung ist das Subjekt nur als (topologisch) mit einem Realen, das ihm fehlt, verbundenes“.2 
Ich glaube, dass man Badious gegen Hegel gerichtete Verteidigung des 
140 Kant’schen Ding an sich, auch wenn sie im Rahmen von Badious Abhandlung über die Denkbarkeit der Politik mehr oder weniger bloß als Randbemerkung fungiert, ernst nehmen sollte. Und zwar aus zwei Gründen. 
Erstens, die Verteidigung gründet auf dem Übergang von der Zwei zur Drei, der den Kern der materialistischen Dialektik Badious bildet. Im Lichte die-ses Übergangs stellt sich uns Kants Philosophie folgendermaßen dar: es gibt 
Alain Badiou, Ist Politik denkbar [Politik], übers. von Frank Ruda und Jan Völker, Merve, Berlin 2010, S. 93. 
europa als fall der idee 
nur Transzendentales und Empirisches, außer dass es noch die anwesende Abwesenheit des Ding an sich gibt. 
Der zweite Grund, Badious Verteidigung Kant‘s ernst zu nehmen, ist mit den zwei zentralen Problemstellungen der Kant’schen Revolution in der Denkungsart verbunden. Die erste Problemstellung betrifft Kant‘s strittige, nennen wir sie „ontologische Differenz“ von Erscheinung und Ding an sich. Laut Kant ist die einzige objektive Wirklichkeit, die wir als endliche vernünftige Wesen haben, diedurch diegemeinsame Tätigkeit zweier subjektiven Erkenntnisvermögen, der Sinnlichkeit und des Verstandes, konstituierte Vorstellungswirklichkeit. Trotzdem hält aber Kant unbeugsam daran fest, dass wir unsere phänomenale Welt nicht schon für die Welt - für die Welt, wie diese an sich selbst ist - halten dürfen. Sein unbeugsames Festhalten führt uns zu folgender Schlussfolgerung: Die phänomenale Welt ist zwar die einzige Welt, die wir haben, und überhaupt alles an Wirklichkeit, was wir Menschen besitzen, aber diese Welt ist nie wirk­lich ein Alles. Immer ist in ihr auch noch etwas einbeschlossen, was ihr nicht angehört, etwas Nichtkonstituiertes – die Welt an sich beziehungsweise, um mit Kant zu sprechen, das Ding an sich. Wir können diesen Sachverhalt auch so ausdrücken: Mit der phänomenalen, objektiven Welt ist ein mit der subjektiven Konstitution der objektiven Wirklichkeit zusammenhängendes, aber auf sie ir­reduzibles Reales, der Exzess einer in ihr anwesenden Abwesenheit der ‚Sache selbst‘ untrennbar  verbunden. 
Mit anderen Worten: unsere phänomenale Welt ist nicht nur vom negativen Bezug der abwesenden ‚Welt an sich‘, sondern auch von diesem negativen Bezug in seiner positiven Form gekennzeichnet. Sie ist von der anwesenden Abwesenheit der ‚Sache selbst‘ bestimmt. Erst die anwesende Abwesenheit der jeweiligen ‚Sache selbst‘ verleiht der phänomenalen Welt ihre Konsistenz. Sie 141 gewährleistet, dass unsere phänomenale Welt nicht nur, wie Kant in der ersten Kritik sagt „ein blindes Spiel der Vorstellungen, d.i. weniger als ein Traum“3, sondern etwas Objektives, von der Erkenntnis Unabhängiges ist. Was auch be-deutet, dass es für die phänomenale Welt wesentlich ist, in ihr auf diese oder andere Weise die Abwesenheit der ‚Welt an sich‘ beziehungsweise der ‚Sache selbst‘ zu artikulieren, diese Abwesenheit in ihrer Anwesenheit sichtbar und 
3 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [KrV], A 112, in ders., Werkausgabe in 12 Bänden [WA], herausgegeben von Wilhelm Weischedel, Bd IV, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1999. 
spürbar zu machen. Kurz, sie als anwesende Abwesenheit, als Exzess zu be-stimmen. 
Die erste zentrale Problemstellung der Kant’schen Philosophie führt nun zur folgendenFrage:Wasistdieseinder empirischenWirklichkeitwirkendeanwe­sende Abwesenheit der ‚Sache selbst‘, ihr Exzess, seinem ontologischen Status nach? Wir werden hier zu dieser Frage auch gleich eine erste Antwort liefern, um sie im Folgendem näher auszuführen:  Die Rolle des Exzesses einer anwe­senden Abwesenheit in der Welt des Objektiven wird in der Philosophie Kant’s vondenVernunftideen,genauer, vom jeweiligen Fall derVernunftidee über­nommen. Mit dieser ersten Frage und ihrer Antwort hängt wiederum eng eine zweite Frage zusammen, und zwar: Vermittelst welcher logischen Operation kann der ontologische Status jener ‚Sache selbst‘, jenes Falls der Idee erfasst werden, der inmitten der empirischen, objektiven Erfahrungswelt als ein aus ihr ausgesondertes Moment, als Exzess wirksam ist? Vermittels welcher logi­schen Operationen kann in der phänomenalen Welt der ihr eigene Exzess als Exzess sichtbar gemacht werden? Und zwar genau als Exzess? 
Diese zweite Frage wird, der hier vorgeschlagenen Lesart Kant‘s nach, von der zweiten zentralen Problemstellung der Kant‘schen Revolution in der Denkungsart gestellt. Die erste Problemstellung kann als ontologische Problemstellung be-nannt werden, die zweite als logische.4 Die logische Problemstellung führt uns nun zum zweiten angesagten Zitat aus Badious Ist Politik denkbar? Vermittelst dieses Zitates aber auch zu unserem eigentlichen Thema, zu der Europa eigenen Idee. Das zweite Zitat ist kürzer als das erste und lautet: 
„…das politische Engagement  hat die gleiche reflektierende Universalität wie das Geschmacksurteil von Kant.“ 5 
Das angeführte Zitat macht uns darauf aufmerksam, dass nicht nur wirtschaft­liche und kulturelle Zusammenarbeit für die Gründung der Europäischen Union verantwortbar waren, dass eine solche Gründung vielmehr auch ein po­
4 Beide Problemstellungen sind untrennbar miteinander verbunden, aber Kant gelingt es erst in seiner Kritik der Urteilskraft, sie wirklich zu einer einzigen, onto-logischen Problem-stellung miteinander zu verbinden. 
5 Vgl. Politik, a.a.O., S. 88. 
europa als fall der idee 
litisches Engagement und eine politische Entscheidung verlangt hat. Uns in-teressiert aber bei Badious Hervorhebung der politischen Relevanz von Kants reflektierender Urteilskraft, wie gesagt, nicht die Möglichkeit einer solchen politischen Relevanz selbst. Für uns ist Badious Bemerkung nur als ein klarer Hinweis auf die zweite, logische Problemstellung der Philosophie Kants bedeu-tend. Als Hinweis auf die Notwendigkeit der Festmachung jener spezifischen logischen Operation also, vermittels deren der Exzess der phänomenalen Welt in dieser Welt und für diese Welt selbst dargestellt werden könnte. Diese logi­sche Operation wird im besprochenem Zitat auch unmissverständlich benannt: es handelt sich um Kants in seiner dritten Kritikentwickelten Theorem der re-flektierenden Urteilskraft6. 
III 
Versuchen wir jetzt, das Gesagte etwas genauer zu auszuführen. Als Ausgangspunkt können wir eine, wie es scheint, einfache Frage nehmen: Die Vernunft ist sozusagen immer schon mit ihren Ideen in der empirischen Wirklichkeit anwesend. Wie kommt aber die Vernunft, die sich auf keine apriorische sinnliche Gegebenheit, auf keinen Referenten in der objektiven Wirklichkeit stützen kann, eigentlich zu ihren Ideen? Kant’s Antwort auf diese Frage teilt, mit der Kant eigenen üblichen Bescheidenheit, die Vernunftideen und ihren Status in zwei geschichtliche Epochen ein: in die Epoche vor Kant und in die mit und nach Kant. Und erst diese zweite Epoche macht es möglich, eine Antwort auf die Frage zu finden, wie die Vernunft zu ihren Vernunftideen kommt. Die Antwort lautet: erst durch eine spezifische, an ihr selbst ausgeführ-ten Operation, die sozusagen zum ersten Mal in der kantischen Philosophie vorgestellt wird, kann die Vernunft ihre Ideen bilden und mit ihnen in der em-pirischen, objektiven  Welt anwesend sein. Es handelt sich um die Operation 143 der Selbstkritik der Vernunft. 
Wenn man Kant‘s Philosophie als System der drei Kritikenliest, dann kann man auch zur Feststellung kommen, dass Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft als Vollendung seines kritischen Systems,  auch die Vollendung einer Aufgabe darstellt, die von Kant schon in der transzendentalen Dialektik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft 
6 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft[KdU], in: ders.., WA, Bd. X, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974. 
gestellt wurde. Es handelt sich um die Aufgabe der Selbstkritik der Vernunft. Diese Aufgabe ist im Grunde genommen die Lösung des folgenden Problems: Die reine Vernunft ist, Kant nach, „mit nichts als sich selbst beschäftigt“7. Diese Selbstbeschäftigung besteht in einem fortwährenden Suchen nach dem Punkt des Unbedingten. Das Unbedingte, das von der Vernunft „mit einer nicht zu dämpfenden Begierde“8 gesucht wird, von der sie zur Grenzüberschreitung der Erfahrung getrieben wird, ist etwas, was die Vernunft von innen her affiziert und sie zum Denken zwingt. Es ist gewissermaßen ein wahres Gedankending. Ein Gedankending in der Bedeutung: Es ist die ‚Sache selbst‘ des Denkens, sei­ne absolute Bedingung. Die Selbstkritik der Vernunft der ersten Kritik ist nun im Grunde genommen eine breit angesetzte Operation, in der es darum geht, nachzuweisen, dass die von ihrer Begierde getriebene Vernunft, dann und nur dann, das ist Kants Hauptpointe, wenn sie sich wirklich nur mit sich selbst be-fasst, auch schon die Grenzen eines bloßen Gedankenuniversums überschrei-tet.Und mit dieser Überschreitung werden die Vernunftideenin der phäno­menalen Wirklichkeit als etwas sichtbar, was, obwohl in ihr einbeschlossen, in dieser Wirklichkeit als ihr Exzess fungiert. 
Rufen wir uns noch einmal kurz den Hauptanspruch der Selbstkritik der Vernunft in Erinnerung: Erst dann, wenn die Vernunft nicht mehr versucht, ihre Ideen als etwas objektiv Gegebenes anzusehen, und sich gänzlich sich selbst unddemUnbedingten,derUrsache ihrer„nicht zu dämpfenden Begierde“ zuwendet, kann es ihr gelingen, das Reich bloßer Gedankengebilde zu durchbrechen und etwas ihr Heterogenes, Reales ins Spiel zu bringen. Von der Kant’schen Operation Selbstkritik der Vernunft wird also der parado­xe Anspruch gestellt, dass die Vernunft außerhalb ihrer selbst bei sich selbst sein soll. Der Anspruch zielt auf ein irreduzibel Äußerliches ab, von dem das Denken innerlich bestimmt wird. 
Den Anspruch der Selbstkritik der Vernunft, der von ihr verlangt, außerhalbih­rer selbstbei sich selbst zu sein, gelingt es aber der Kant’schen Philosophie erst ziemlich spät zu verwirklichen. Und zwar durch die Ausarbeitung eines neuen Begriffes, des Begriffes der reflektierenden Urteilskraft in der dritten Kritik. Erst anhand dieser begrifflichen Neuerung gelingt es Kant nachzuweisen, das die 
7 KrV B708/A680. 8 KrV, B824/A796. 
europa als fall der idee 
Vernunftideen eine  materielle, weltliche Existenz gerade als ein Exzess der ge­gebenen Welt haben. 
Gehen wir, um das Behauptete näher auszuführen, in zwei Schritten vor. Versuchen wir zunächst in wenigstens groben Zügen die wesentlichen Merkmale von Kants reflektierender Urteilskraft festzumachen. Wie wir wissen, unter­scheidet Kant zwei Arten der Urteilskraft. Die Urteilskraft im Allgemeinen ist das Vermögen, ein Partikuläres als im universellen, allgemeinen Begriff enthalten zu bestimmen. Aber das Universale ist entweder schon  gegeben, die Urteilskraft ist in diesem Fall bestimmend. Für die Welt der bestimmenden Urteilskraft gibt es nur Partikuläres und Universelles, Besonderes und Allgemeines, und diese Welt wird so erkannt, dass wir ein Besonderes dem allgemeinen Begriff subsu­mieren, der schon ähnliches Besondere enthält. 
Die andere Art der Urteilskraft ist die ästhetische reflektierende Urteilskraft. Hier haben wir es nur mit der Vorstellung von Etwas zu tun, das halt vor un­seren Augen steht, wirklich oder in Gedanken, wir verfügen aber mit keinem universellen Begriff, der es uns erlauben würde das vorgestellte Etwas zu bestimmen. Die Aufgabe des reflektierenden Urteilens besteht hier darin, im Urteilsverfahren selbst einen allgemeinen Begriff zu konstruieren, von dem das vorgestellte Etwas auf den Begriff gebracht werden könnte. 
Zwei kurze Bemerkungen zu dieser groben Beschreibung der beiden Urteil­sarten. Die erste betrifft den Status des Allgemeinen, mit dem das reflektieren­deUrteilenoperiert.DiezweitedenspezifischenBezugspunktdesreflektieren­den Urteilens. 
Der Grund dafür, dass wir im Akt der reflektierenden Urteilskraft keinen all-gemeinen Begriff zur Verfügung haben, liegt nicht darin, dass wir diesen Begriff aus Unwissen einfach nicht kennen, oder aber unfähig sind, ihn unter den bestehenden allgemeinen Begriff herauszufinden. Wir verfügen über kein Allgemeines, weil es im Fall der reflektierenden Urteilskraft einen allgemeinen Begriff streng genommen gar nicht gibt. Das Allgemeine der reflektierenden Urteilkraft ist prädikativ unbestimmt und unbestimmbar, es ist generisch. Es kann nur in der gleichzeitigen Bestimmung dessen gefunden bzw. erfunden werden, worauf es sich jeweils bezieht. 
Der Bezugspunkt des reflektierenden Urteilens ist das, was von Kant der Fall, genauer, der Fall der Idee genannt wird. Der Fall des ästhetischen Urteils, des Urteils vom Schönen oder Erhabenen, ist jenes, was im jeweiligen Besonderen seine irreduzible Besonderheit, das heißt, sein Singuläres darstellt. Genauer gesagt, das, was es selbst als eine irreduzible Singularität ist. Das Singuläre, das ist jenes, was in jeweiligen Partikulären etwas mehr als dieses Partikuläre ist – ohne aber, und das ist wesentlich, empirisch bzw. objektiv etwas mehr zu sein. Das Singuläre ist einerseits nicht ablösbar von seinem Besonderen, von dessen situationeller, empirischer Gegebenheit. Andererseits wird dieses Singuläreein Fall erst vermittelst seiner unmittelbaren Verbundenheit mit dem Allgemeinen, Universellen. Es ist ein Singuläres, insofern es unmittelbar uni­versalisierbar ist, es ist etwas, mit Kant gesprochen, was für alle Zeiten und für alle Völker gelten kann. Das Singuläre des Falls ist jenes im Besonderen, dass als das Dasselbe seiner möglichen mannigfaltigen transtemporalen und transhistorischen Konsequenzen existiert. Es existiert also bloß in der Form der jeweils von Neuem entschiedenen Entscheidung „das ist der Fall“. Und nur insofern, als das Singuläre in einer prinzipiell unendlichen Reihe von immer derselben und universell gültigen Konsequenzen zur Geltung gebracht werden kann, gibt es auch sein Universelles. 
Die Anwesenheit der Vernunftideen in der Erfahrungswelt, wo sie der Definition nach keinen Ort haben, da ihnen hier kein Objekt entspricht, hat ei­nen besonderen ontologischen Status: die Ideen sind weder auf eine unmittel-bare Gegebenheit der objektiven Wirklichkeit, noch auf die halluzinatorische Realisierung des bloß subjektiven Begehrens der Vernunft zurückführbar. Die Ideen existieren in der Erfahrung in der Form eines Falls der Idee 
Das heißt, sie existieren in einer partikulären Gegebenheit der Welt, die in ihrer Gegebenheit derealisiert ist und nur als Punkt eines absolut Singulären zählt, das unmittelbar schon Moment des Universellen ist. Die De-Realisierung ist eineOperation,durchdieGegebenheitender objektivenWirklichkeitzum potentiellen Material der Idee, kurz, zu Gegebenheiten des jeweiligen des Falls der Idee umgewandelt werden. Vom Gesichtspunkt der Kritik und Selbstkritik der Vernunft aus besteht die Erfahrungswelt objektiv nur insofern, als sie ihre Objektivität auch schon verliert, insofern als sie als eine Welt ausgewiesen wer-den kann, in der die Selbstkritik der Vernunft ihre Folgen verwirklicht. 
europa als fall der idee 
Die Objektivität der Welt besteht nur in dem Maße, als partikuläre Gegebenheiten dieser Welt in den „Körper“ der Sache des Denkens umgewandelt werden kön­nen, in die materielle Präsenz von Etwas, das auf verschiedene Weisen darauf hinweist, dass in der Welt Fälle der Idee existieren. In dem Sinne kann behaup­tet werden, dass die Selbstkritik der Vernunft den Materialismus der Idee anti-zipiert, der nachher von der Verbindung des Singulären und Universellen im reflektierendem Urteil verwirklicht wird. Die Idee ist, um es noch einmal zu wie­derholen, der Ort der Ununterscheidbarkeit von Denken und Handeln, und zwar einem Handeln, von dem eine doppelte minimale Differenz konstruiert wird. 
Es handelt sich, erstens, um einen Akt, von dem eine minimale Differenz zwi­schen dem Denken und der „Sache des Denkens“, die das Denken affiziert, konstruiert wird. Und es handelt sich, zweitens, um einen Akt, von dem die Wirklichkeit als Fall der Idee konstruiert wird, d.h. als minimale Differenz zwischen der Wirklichkeit selbst und der Wirklichkeit als Existenz eines Falls der Idee. Oder auch, als minimale Differenz zwischen all den partikulären Ereignissen, die in der Wirklichkeit der Fall der Idee sind, und dem Fall der Idee selbst. 
Wenn wir uns hier an das „Weißer Quadrat auf weißer Grundlage“ von Malevich und auf die Art und Weise, wie das Gemälde von Badiou im seinem Jahrhundert gedacht wird, erinnern: das Weiße Quadrat selbst ist nichts anderes ist, um Badious Worte zu gebrauchen, als die minimale, nichtige, aber absolute Differenz zwischen  Weiß und Weiß. Diese minimale Differenz ist gleichsam der Fall des Weißen Quadrats, in ihr hat das Weiße Quadrat seine materielle, auf dem Bild sichtbare Existenz. 
Ebenso existiert auch die Idee in der Welt nur in der Form ihres eigenen Falls. Sie existiert in der Wirklichkeit als minimale Differenz zwischen der Wirklichkeit und der Wirklichkeit als Körper bzw. Fall der Idee. Der Fall der Idee wiederum ist eine minimale Differenz zwischen dem, was jeweils der Fall ist und dem Fall selbst. Er ist eine Partikularität der Welt, deren Partikularität dem untergeordnet ist, auf die Singularität ihrer selbst hinzuweisen. Jener Singularität, die unmit­telbar universalisierbar ist und von der Formel der reflektierenden Urteilskraft „das ist der Fall“ ausgedrückt wird. Der Fall des reflektierenden Urteils, das ist die Vernunft, die in der Form von etwas materialisiert ist, das in der Welt enthalten ist, ohne ihr anzugehören. Der Fall ist ein Exzess der gegeben Welt. 
In der Form des singulären Universellen des Falles arbeitet die Vernunft an der Konstitution der objektiven Welt so mit, dass sie die Welt gleichzeitig dereali­siert: der empirische Gebrauch der Vernunft ist der Modus einer nicht-objekti­ven Konstitution der objektiven Welt. Es handelt sich um eine Derealiserung der Wirklichkeit in dem Sinne, dass empirische Gegebenheiten als Körper bzw. Fall der Idee fungieren. So wie der Enthusiasmus der Zuschauer während der FranzösischenRevolutiondie empirischeWirklichkeitderealisierthat,uman ihrer Stelle diese selbe Wirklichkeit als Fall der Idee, als ein auf die Ursache zum Fortschreiten zum Besseren hinweisendes Geschichtszeichen zu setzen. 
Uns auf den Begriff des Falls derIdeestützend können wir jetzt, abzuschlie­ßend, auch auf unsere Anfangsfrage antworten, wie eigentlich die Idee als Formbestimmung Europas verstanden werden könnte. Die Antwort lautet: Die Idee Europas ist weder etwas empirisch Gegebenes, noch existiert sie im Himmel der Ideen. Sie besteht nur im fortwährendem Prozess ihrer eige­nen Bestimmung, in Form der Antwort auf die Frage also, was eigentlich die Idee Europas eigentlich ist und bedeuten kann und vielleicht auch soll. Es gibt keine Idee Europas an sich, es gibt sie nur in Form eines ständigen Bestimmungsprozesses, was der jeweilige Fall der Idee, der Idee Europas in unserem Fall, ist. Der Fall Europas als Idee ist der Punkt des Singulären, der unmittelbar universalisierbar ist. Die Idee Europa besteht nur von Fall zu Fall. Und der jeweilige Fall der Idee Europas stellt immer ein Exzess der gegebenen empirischen europäischen Wirklichkeit dar, er befindet sich in der Lage des Exzesses der gegebenen Situation, von etwas, was die gegeben Wirklichkeit von innen her, in Form einer innerer Ausnahme übertrifft. 

Collective Subjectivity between Populism and Anti-Populism 

Timothy Appleton* 

Brexit and the Tautology of Being 
The former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Theresa May, will be remembered for very little. Perhaps the most outstanding element in her political discourse was the slogan: ‘Brexit means Brexit’.1 This phrase has produced a great deal of mirth among British liberals, due to its alleged conceptual emptiness. Not for the first time, I disagree with them. Personally, I think that Brexit means Brexit is the most coherent political concept that May articulated during her en­tire period of government. It’s certainly better than her other famous phrase: ‘We want a red, white and blue Brexit.’2 It is clear that what May meant, when she stated that Brexit means Brexit, was that the Tories were going to go ahead with Britain’s exit from the European Union come what may, a promise (which remains unrealised) that helped them win the general election of 2017, albeit without an absolute majority. From my point of view, however, the phrase is im­portant for another reason: it evokes an important theoretical principle, which could be called the tautology of being. What do I mean by this? 
In order to understand this idea, I believe we should start with what in phi­losophy is called an Event. How should this concept be defined? For my money, the most comprehensive and rigorous definition of it can be found in the work of Alain Badiou.3For Badiou, an Event is something that comes to supplement what he calls a Situation, which he defines in terms of an operation that collects and ‘counts’ a certain set of multiples, thus producing a figure that he calls the 151 One. Badiou will add that a Situation implies the presence of a State. The State, according to him, is an attempt to consolidate a Situation by distinguishing the multiples that it already includes from those that it might include in the future. Indirectly, however, this process produces a third category of multiple, which, although it is included in a Situation, cannot be said to ‘belong’ to it. This third 
1 www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-brexit-means-brexit-conservati-
ve-leadership-no-attempt-remain-inside-eu-leave-europe-a7130596.html 2 www.bbc.com/news/av/38223990/theresa-may-we-want-a-red-white-and-blue-brexit 3 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, Continuum, London 2005. 
* Universidad Camilo José Cela, Madrid 
category is what Badiou calls a singularity. He also calls it ‘the evental site’, in the sense that it constitutes a terrain upon which an Event may be constructed. However, the fact that an Event may be erected on the ground of a singular mul­tiple does not mean that it will be. A subjective decision must also intercede, a decision on whether the multiple in question truly constitutes a singularity or not. To put it in terms of Badiou’s ‘mathematical ontology’, such a process involves deciding that a set can belong to itself, an operation that is prohibited in standard set theory. This, then, is what I call the tautology of being: it means that there not only exists, in the midst of a Situation, a singular multiple, but also that – in violation of all previous norms – it can be identified as such, thus producing an Event. I believe that Theresa May’s tautology can be interpreted in the same way. Brexit means Brexit affirms the very existence of something un­toward. Can we therefore deduce that Brexit is an Event, in the sense of Badiou? Badiou himself would say not. Why? 
It should be remembered that Badiou connects a State of the Situation with the political State in the traditional sense. Indeed, this is why he imported the word State into his ontology in the first place. Given, then, that an Event is a kind of multiple that only exists by subtracting itself (Badiou’s term) from the State of the Situation, this implies that no element that has been produced in the ambit of a political State – which corresponds to a State of the Situation – can truly be considered an Event. This explains the extreme radicalism of Badiou’s political positions: according to him, all politics necessarily takes place at a distance from the State. Hence since Brexit was something that was convoked by the British State, it cannot in any sense be considered an Event, according to Badiou’s theo­retical argument. I have a discrepancy with this conclusion, however. I believe that the Brexit can indeed be called an Event, even, up to a certain point, within the theoretical framework set out by Badiou. How so? If one wants to extend the concept of the Event (yet without compromising its singularity), it seems to me to be quite clear what one must do. One must delink the State of the Situation from the political State. In other words, one must separate Badiou’s philosophi­cal theory from his (minimal) social theory. I even believe that Badiou himself does this, in certain symptomatic moments. For example, he uses the political metaphor of the State to talk about moments of relative stability that are found in the other ‘conditions’ of philosophy that he has identified: art, science and love, even though it should be obvious that, in theoretical terms, these areas have nothing to do with politics. Would it really be so easy, however, to separate 
brexit and the tautology of being 
the two ontologies? I think it would. In fact, I think that a similar manoeuvre has already been carried out in the work of Jacques Ranciere. How does Ranciere analyse the political panorama? 
Ranciere, like Badiou, holds that politics entails the production of a singularity, which he believes will find itself in absolute ‘disagreement’ (his term) with a cer­tain plenum social.4 The antagonism that Ranciere conceives of, at this level, is between what he calls politics and the police. Couldn’t the second of these terms – the police – be considered to be a State in the traditionally political sense, of the kind that had already been denounced by Badiou? Ranciere is somewhat ambiguous on the matter, although I would say that in general terms, he does not see it in that way. To put it in Heideggerian terms, the exact ‘ontic’ form that this ‘ontological’ category will assume in his work is never entirely specified. I think that a key factor here is that Ranciere believes that the proper name of the subject of politics – understood as a force that is opposed to the police – is the people. This term is important because it constitutes an absolutely void theo­retical category, which allows Ranciere to connect it subsequently to concrete political elements that are completely different from one other, and some of which might even constitute segments of what is traditionally called the State. For example, he speaks at a certain point about ‘citizens, workers, women, pro­letarians’.5 In contrast, Badiou believes that there is only one real emancipatory political subject in action today: the proletariat. This reflects the fact that, for him, there only exists one type of political State in the current Situation, which is that of capitalism. Here another question arises, however. If Ranciere is more in line with our theoretical position at this level, then why don’t we just use his work in order to contemplate Brexit, and do without that of Badiou? 
I don’t wish to ignore Badiou because I think that there are some nuances in his work that are extremely useful and which cannot be found in Ranciere. Which ones? First, I think it’s important that Badiou views the Event in terms of a deci­sion with regard to a social antagonism. I believe this is especially useful if, for example, one wants to discuss sovereignty, which I would define in the same 
4 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 1999. 5 Ibid., p. 59. 
way (a definition that would clearly be influenced by the work of Carl Schmitt).6 I think that sovereignty in this sense is a crucial aspect of the Brexit debate. The second thing that Badiou’s project allows us to do, I think, is to contem­plate what a subjective adherence to the void of a Situation would look like. This is a key dimension of the Event, and Badiou opposes it to an adherence to the plenitude of a Situation, which would be precisely the function of the State (according to Badiou) or – better – the police (according to Ranciere). In fact, Badiou develops a whole theory of this point; he believes that if a sub­ject adheres to a plenitude after glimpsing the void, this is the most regressive form politics that can exist.7 I believe that this theory allows us to consider a new form of (void) patriotism that is relevant to politics today and which can be distinguished from, for example, a certain (plenus) xenophobia, which would constitute a perversion of the former. Once again, I think these factors are also extremely relevant to Brexit. Returning to Ranciere, I would say that there is a further absence in his work: he refuses to use the word populism. I consider this term important because I think it represents the (philosophical) ideology that corresponds to the aforementioned people, which, as I pointed out, should probably be considered the privileged subject of politics. Why does Ranciere re­ject the word? He does so because he believes that it is automatically pejorative, in the political context in which we find ourselves today, above all in Europe.8 I would accept this point. However, I believe that populism can continue to be of use in our analysis, and also in our praxis. If it is true that I prefer to see things in terms of populism, however, and taking into account that Ranciere does not accept the term, why don’t I simply refer to the work of those authors who have embraced it openly? Here I have Laclau and Mouffe in mind. .What relevance might their work have, in this context? 
The difference between the theoretical work of Ranciere and Badiou on the one hand, and Laclau and Mouffe on the other, is that the former do not deploy the theory of hegemony, whilst the latter do. Might this concept help us to think about Brexit? After all, if Brexit were considered a hegemonic process, we could 
6 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology – Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago, Chicago 2005. See also, Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago, Chicago 2007, p. 49. 
7 See: Alain Badiou, Ethics – An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Verso, London 2001. 
8 Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi Huberman, Sadri Khiari, Jacques Ranciere, What is a People?, Columbia University Press, New York 2013, pp. 101–105. 
brexit and the tautology of being 
perhaps conceive of it as something more politically complex, which might be fruitful in itself. For example, one might conclude that Brexit doesn’t only include emancipatory elements – as any Event must – but also repressive (or ‘transformist’, to use the Gramscian jargon associated with the theory of hege­mony) ones, and perhaps such a mixture would provide a more ‘realistic’ view of the issue. I believe, however, that the theory of hegemony is too realistic at this level. What do I mean by this? Essentially, I think that hegemony is good at describing the dispersion of elements in an already-existing social field, but at the cost of diluting its dimension of singularity, which is what I consider to be its essential aspect. What are the theoretical factors that lead me to this conclu­sion? I believe that in the end, Laclau and Mouffe are not able, within the scope of their theory, to decide between antagonism in the singular and antagonisms in the plural, and this inevitably undermines the importance of the first. As they themselves say: ‘Until now, when we have spoken about antagonism, we have kept it in the singular in order to simplify our argument. But it is clear that antagonism does not necessarily emerge at a single point: any position in a system of differences, insofar as it is negated, can become the locus of an an­tagonism. Hence, there is a variety of possible antagonisms in the social, many of them in opposition to each other.’9 Now on the one hand, this argument could be seen as a useful deconstruction of the ‘exclusive singularity’ that one finds in projects such as that of Badiou. On the other, it seems to me to be highly po­litically problematic. Why? 
If we want to understand the problem, I think it is necessary to focus on the am­biguous status of the term ‘the social’ that is referred to in the previous quota­tion. If it is true, as Laclau and Mouffe have argued on other occasions, that the absolute limit of this social is a singular antagonism, then how can they argue that within the social itself there exist other singular antagonisms? Wouldn’t 155 this imply that within the social, understood as the limit of all objectivity, there are other socials, other limits of all objectivity? This would surely be absurd. To put it in other terms, antagonism cannot be and not be at the same time the absolute limit of all objectivity (Russell’s paradox haunts us here). A supporter of the theory of hegemony would surely say that this is not truly a problem at all, since the kind of difference that is to be found in a ‘system of differences’ – an 
9 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London 1985, p. 131. 
aspect that was also mentioned in the comment by Laclau and Mouffe – is dis­tinct from that which is found in an antagonism strict sensu, which constitutes the limit of difference as such. I totally accept this point. But this is not what Laclau and Mouffe are claiming. They are actually arguing that both types of difference can be considered antagonisms. I would of course accept that there exist distinct modalities of difference; however, there cannot exist distinct mo­dalities of antagonism. If that were the case, then the category itself would col­lapse. I think that this ambiguity is what makes it impossible to think the sheer singularity of an antagonism from the perspective of hegemony. Essentially, in the latter theory, singularity is mixed, in an indiscernible way, with plurality. I should perhaps add something here. This conclusion does not imply that for a thinker like Ranciere, for example – who I believe is able to think through all the consequences of the category of singularity –, there do not exist different political antagonisms. There certainly do, and I have already given examples of them in his work. What it does mean, however, is that such antagonisms do not refer to the same ‘social’ (in the sense of Laclau and Mouffe). In truth, what Ranciere appears to show us is that there are as many social fields as there are social antagonisms, without any possibility of a ‘transcendental’ combination of either. Nevertheless, and despite the problems that I see with the category of hegemony, I do indeed believe that Laclau and Mouffe should be commended for insisting on the possibility of a populist movement, now understood in terms of a subject who is able to militate in relation to a singular antagonism. 
In conclusion, I believe that it is a ‘populist’ theory – to use the term of Laclau and Mouffe –, of the type proposed by Ranciere – qua ‘ontological’ radicali­sation of the theory of Badiou –, which allows us to conclude that Brexit is a singular, and therefore an emancipatory, Event within the British political Situation. As I have explained, this Event is based on a sovereign decision re­garding an antagonism, and whilst there exists the possibility that this deci­sion could subsequently be perverted, thus producing a xenophobic reaction, I do not believe that this ‘perversion’ is part of the original ontological horizon of this decision (which is what the theory of hegemony would have to assume). To put it in the terms of a lesser theorist, Theresa May, I think we can indeed conclude that Brexit means Brexit. 
Boštjan Nedoh* 

A State of Refugees? Agamben and the Future of Europe1 
The passport is the most noble part of the human being. It also does not come into existence in such a simple fashion as a human being does. A human being can come into the world anywhere, in the most careless way and for no good reason, but a passport never can. When it is good, the pass­port is also recognized for this quality, whereas a human being, no matter how good, can go unrecognized. (Bertolt Brecht, Refugee Conversations, 1940) 
Drawing extensively on Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the historical concepts of citizenship and nation-state as they appeared in the context of European biopo­litical modernity, I recently attempted to estimate the impact that the so-called 2015-16 “refugee crisis” in Europe had on those concepts in practice.1 Following Agamben’s arguments from his 1993 brief intervention “Beyond Human Rights”, I argued that the massive presence of refugees, understood in terms of state­less people or irregular migrants, on the territories of European states broke up the fantasmatic nexus between sovereignty, nativity, and territory that are tied together in the concept of nation-state. To recall briefly the core of the argu­ment, Agamben argues that the modern and specifically European concept of nation-state consists of “a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, na­ked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty.”2 Historically, modern na-157 tion-states emerged mostly in Europe on the ruins of the medieval monarchies, 
1 See Boštjan Nedoh, Mass Migrations as a Messianic Event? Rereading Agamben’s State of Exception in Light of the Refugee Crisis in Europe, Law, Culture and the Humanities, online first (2017), doi: 10.1177/1743872117703717. This article is a result of the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy”, the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject” and the research project J5–1794 “The Break in Tradition: Hannah Arendt and the Conceptual Change”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
2 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Ce­sare Casarino, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London 2000, p. 21. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of philosophy 
where the nation as a homogeneous social formation “superseded” the medie­val feudal organisation of social life.3 In this context, such a historical break did not remove the medieval notion of sovereignty from the political realm; rather, as Eric Santner has argued,4 with the decline of medieval monarchies and the emergence of modern republics, medieval sovereignty transitioned from kings to new bearers: the people. However, precisely because the people became the new bearers of sovereignty, they, following Santner, also became the object of biopolitical techniques as described by Michel Foucault: the collective body of the people is now treated in the same way as the so-called second sublime body of the king was treated in medieval monarchies by the courtly physicians. This transition indeed implied far-reaching consequences: the collective body of the people was in fact immediately doubled into the body of the nation, and the state of the people immediately appeared to be the nation-state, which is to say, as Agamben observed, the state that makes the bare life of the nation (or the birth of its citizens – the etymon of “nation” is the Latin word “native”, which simply meant “birth”5) the foundation of its own sovereignty. And this immedi­ate passage from bare life to the nation resulted in the fact that in the context of European modernity, as Agamben famously states, the realm of bare life com­pletely overlaps with the realm of politics so that the latter fully becomes the biopolitical space.6 
In turn, refugees or, better yet, stateless people or todays asylum seekers are those whose presence on the soil of a particular nation-state breaks up such a fantasmatic nexus between nativity, territory, and state (or, which is the same, between birth, citizenship, and territory): “If the refugee represents such a dis­quieting element in the order of the nation-state, this is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen and that between na­
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na­tionalism, Verso, London and New York 2006 (revised edition). It is interesting to note that Anderson, along the same lines, further argues that modern nationalism “superseded” religion in its role of the ideological supplement for the organisation of social life (p. 15). 
4 See Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: People’s Two Bodies and the Endgame of Sover­
eignty, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL 2011. 
5 Agamben, Means without End, p. 21. 
6 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roaz-
en, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1998, pp. 3–4, 11, 111, 119–120, 122, 131, 148, 153, 171, 181. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
tivity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty into crisis.”7 Considering the fact that the number of refugees worldwide has grown substan­tially in recent decades and that a “growing section of humankind are no longer representable inside the nation-state,”8 it is thus no coincidence that Agamben in his stubbornly anti-sovereign and anti-biopolitical stance proposes nothing less than “to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.”9 In fact, as he argues, “given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical catego­ries, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable category for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community.”10 
In the present contribution, I will attempt to take another step further in the direction proposed by Agamben and shed light on apparently marginal and also largely unthematised insights that he discusses in the same text (i.e. in “Beyond Human Rights”) regarding practical political examples and solutions that may emerge on the basis of such a categorical criticism of the biopoliti-cal concepts of citizenship and nation-state. More specifically, I will contend that Agamben’s proposal according to which we should see the subjects of the coming political community and particularly the residents of European states as “being-in-exodus of the citizen”11 should be taken as a paradigmatic example according to which Europe as a political subject could and should rethink itself both post-2008 Eurozone crisis and after the 2015-16 so-called “refugee crisis”. Yet, I will try to unfold these arguments by linking Agamben’s discussion with 159 the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of repression, which in any case clearly echoes in Agamben’s above-mentioned intervention. Specifically, my argument will be that the concepts of citizenship and nation-state are indeed biopolitical concepts that historically emerged in the context of the passage 
7 Agamben, Means without End, p. 21. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 16. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 25. 
from classical sovereignty to biopower, as described by Foucault. Yet, these con­cepts are also dialectical concepts that are, moreover, grounded in the psychic mechanism of repression. As we shall soon see, stateless people or refugees or in general those not inscribed in any formal-symbolic political order, actually embody the repressed element (bare life) in the constitution of citizenship and nation-state and now re-emerge as the return of the repressed in the Freudian sense. In other words, during the refugee crisis, European states encountered their own repressed otherness – undetermined bare life, understood precise­ly in the sense of lacking any specific symbolic determinations – which, from Agamben’s perspective, always already reminds us of the fundamentally contin­gent origins upon which a nation-state founds itself. My contention is thus that during the refugee crisis Europe has found itself in a kind of clinical situation, facing its own repressed counterpart. It is here that a decisive break with biopo­litical or essentialist conceptions of the nation-state and citizenship should oc­cur, paving the way for a renewal of European politics on a radical and irreduc­ible difference between the concepts of the people and the nation, and between political subject and citizen, respectively. In Agamben’s own words: “The refu­gee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-con­cept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed.”12 That is to say, in order to remain faithful to the emancipatory legacy of Europe,13 our task is, perhaps paradoxically, to rethink it on the basis of (Lacanian) subjective destitution and of traversing the fundamental fantasy that frames politics ex­clusively within the biopolitical nexus nation-state-territory, hence to enact the detachment between politics, citizenship, and territory. 
The fiction of sovereignty and the return of the repressed 
Yet before we discuss in greater detail Agamben’s suggestions as regards how to approach not only the Israel-Palestine conflict, but also regarding how to recon­sider Europe as a political subject, we should begin by providing a complete pic­ture of what is the original motive underpinning this intervention of Agamben, namely, his critique of the concepts of human rights and, in relation thereto, of citizenship as they function within the system of the nation-state. Departing 
12 Ibid., p. 22–23. 
13 
In recent decades, this approach has been most stubbornly supported by Slavoj Žižek. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
from Hannah Arendt’s brief 1943 text “We, Refugee”, in which she envisaged the Jewish “refugees driven from country to country” to be “the vanguard of their people,”14 Agamben links the idea of statelessness as a general human condi­tion with the paradox of human rights. In fact, if anywhere, the latter should come to the fore exactly in the case of stateless people, deprived of all symbolic inscriptions, including inscription into the system of the nation-state through the status of citizen. As Arendt had already observed, the historical experience of stateless people, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, reveals, to the contrary, the radical crisis of human rights for those who are supposed to be their most exemplary subjects. For people deprived of citizenship and of all symbolic inscriptions in general, whose only remaining “quality” was that of being alive, their fate was extermination and violence with no rights guar­anteed at all. Following Arendt, the conclusion that Agamben draws from this historical experience is that human rights, rather than being complementary to the rights of the citizen so that where the rights of the latter stop there should begin human rights, are instead co-dependent on the rights guaranteed by cit­izenship.15 As soon as one loses the rights guaranteed by citizenship, paradoxi­cally, one also loses human rights or becomes vulnerable to the violation of the latter. And, as the ultimate consequence, the deprivation of people of all sym­bolic inscriptions leads or, in the course of the twentieth century led, to radical dehumanisation and exposed them to the risk of death without murder being committed, as Agamben famously defines the position of homo sacer. 
On the basis of this complete overlapping between human and citizen (or the immediate vanishing of the former in the latter), which leads to the dehumani­sation of non-citizens or stateless people or refugees, Agamben then recognises the same pivotal role that human rights play in the foundation of the modern (biopolitical) nation-state. As he puts it: 161 
Human rights, in fact, represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being), which in antiquity belonged to God and in the classical world 
14 Arendt cited in Agamben, Means without End, p. 16. 15 For more on this, see also Balibar’s reading of Arendt discussion of the codependence of 
human rights and the rights of the citizen and on the “right to have rights”: Étienne Bali-
bar, Equaliberty, trans. James Ingram, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2014, 
pp. 165–186. 
was clearly distinct (as zoe) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in the management of the state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty. […] The fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there may not be any difference between the two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immedi­ately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.16 
Before we move on to the implications that Agamben draws from these premises, it is worthwhile pausing for a moment and further reflecting on such unambigu­ous and clear echoing of Freud’s vocabulary in these formulations of Agamben. This will also enable us to complement or even modify Agamben’s view on at least two crucial points. There are two moments that are particularly significant in the above-cited passage: on the one hand, it is pretty clear that, although he strongly relies on Foucault’s biopolitical perspective, Agamben here regards both citizen and nation as fictions (recall his expression the “fiction of sover­eignty”), but, we should add, “true fictions”17 in the Lacanian sense, insofar as they nevertheless produce real effects of identity in reality (through identifica-tions).18 On the other hand, if the nation-state is constructed on the basis of the human being without any specific qualities or determinations being immediate­ly “sublated” into the status of citizen, so that it functions as a “vanishing pre­supposition” of the latter, we should regard the so-conceived bare life precisely as a repressed presupposition that, as Agamben maintains, “must never come to light as such.” In turn, if such a repressed presupposition comes to light, it immediately reveals the contingency of the bond between human and citizen or between birth and nation. If, for Agamben, refugees, especially if present on the territory of the nation-state in great number, embody such a figure that reveals 
16 Agamben, Means without End, pp. 20–21. 
17 This widespread expression indeed refers to Lacan’s thesis that “truth has the structure of fiction.” 
18 It is worth recalling here how Balibar considers the “nation” precisely in terms of the Freudian “secondary identification” taking place in the unconscious “other scene” (an-dere Schauplatz), thus enabling all other ordinary or primary identifications (see Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, trans. James Swenson, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2003, pp. 25–29. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
this contingency, it seems fully justified to regard this figure in the Freudian terms of the “return of the repressed.”19 What is again and again repressed in the formation of the nation-state, that is, its “vanishing presupposition,” returns on the scene as an external threat or unheimlich alien in the symbolic network of “national identity.” Taking into account Lacan’s basic definition of the subject as that which the “signifier represents for another signifier,” we could argue that bare life corresponds to the subject qua primal repressed binary signifier20 that the signifier “citizen” represents for all other signifiers of the (bio-)political-ju­ridical order. 
However, as was already well-documented in last decade or so,21 following Freud’s crucial articulation of repression,22 the so-conceived primal repressed signifier also fixes the drive that now circulates around this gap of “one-signifi­
19 To be sure, this perspective on refugees as the “return of the repressed” was recently un­folded by Giovanni Bettini in the more narrow context of his psychoanalytically informed criticism of the generally very problematic notion of “climate refugee” (see Giovanni Bet-tini, “And Yet It Moves! (Climate) Migration as a Symptom in the Anthropocene”, Mobili­ties, 14 (3/2019), pp. 336–350). Some insights in my present contribution, especially those regarding my reading of Agamben’s figure of the refugee via the Freudian-Lacanian theory of repression, originates both in Bettini’s now published article, which I had the opportu­nity to read in a pre-published version, as well in a series of productive conversations Bet-tini and I had over the past few years on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the contemporary phenomenon of migration. 
20 “There is, then, one might say, a matter of life and death between unary signifier [S1] and the subject [$], qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. The Vorstellungsrepräsen­tanz is the binary signifier. This signifier constitutes the central point of Urverdrängung” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton and CO., London and New York 1998, 
p. 218). That the relation between unary signifier and the subject as binary/primary re­
163 
pressed signifier is a matter of life and death means that the subject can “live” only by disappearing under the coverage of the signifier, so to speak. In turn, it risks (symbolic) death if it remains uncovered or unrepresented by the signifier (for another signifier). 
21 For more on this, see, e.g., Adrian Johnston, “From signifiers to joius-sens: Lacan’s senti­ments and affectuations,” in: Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and the Emo­tional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Columbia University Press, New York 2013, pp. 119–149; Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex?, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2017, p. 16. 
22 “We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the drive [die psychische (Vorstellungs-) Repräsentanz des Tribes] being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the drive remains attached to it.” (Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” in The 
er-less”.23 By means of this fixation, the symbolic order of signifiers is libidinal-ly invested. This implies that, as Adrian Johnston has rightly noted, signifiers, or, better yet, the unary signifier, as representative of the primal repressed sig­nifier, is far from being a “pure signifier”, as Lacan sometimes misleadingly argues in his attempts to demonstrate what he calls the “autonomy of the sym­bolic,” but is always already libidinally contaminated. The effect of symbolic differences (or of a signifying pair) in the Lacanian sense (which substantially differs on this point from the difference in the classic linguistic sense) can be produced precisely because the primal repression links S1 or the unary trait and the object a as its correlative surplus, which also emerges at the place of the pri­mal repressed signifier. It is due to this bond that the “return of the repressed” can be experienced as something traumatic and uncanny, and not as simply frustrating or painful. 
The figure of refugee functions as the return of the repressed precisely insofar as it is by association connected with the primal repressed element (bare life or the subject qua repressed binary signifier) and emerges as its object-effect. Such a figure may be exposed to the risk of death not only because it lacks an at least minimally stable symbolic representation of the signifier, but also due to two other interrelated reasons: on the one hand, this element if fantasmatically perceived to not be a substitute for, but the exact missing part of the subject’s own being that he or she loses in the alienation in the symbolic Other where he or she achieves symbolic identity; on the other hand, there is the superego’s injunction (imposed on the subject) to enjoy this excessive element. Seen from this perspective, Agamben’s consideration that the figure of the refugee is “a disquieting element in the order of the nation-state,” because “by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen and that between nativity and na­tionality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty into crisis,” seems to fully correspond to such a Freudian-Lacanian conception of the repression of bare life in the figure of the citizen and its correlative re-emergence in the form of the symptomatic excess of the return of the repressed, which is indeed subjected to further repression/exclusion. 
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Vintage, London 2001, p. 148.) 
23 
Zupančič, What Is Sex?, p. 47. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
However, if the thesis that we just sketched holds, then we should, retrospec­tively, also adjust or slightly modify Agamben’s basic disposition, which presup­poses the equity between the lack of political-juridical status and the lack of any kind of symbolisation at all. If refugees usually function as the “return of the repressed” in the order of the nation-state, this is not simply because they lack inscription in any symbolic order, that is to say, because of their paradoxical sta­tus of “bare life”. Instead, they appear to embody the excluded position of “bare life” precisely as a consequence of prior symbolisation. Looking back to modern European history, this becomes especially clear in the context of anti-Semitism in general and particularly in the case of the Nazis’ extermination of European Jews, which is also the main example that Agamben refers to, when he stresses, for instance, that 
[o]ne of the few rules the Nazis constantly obeyed throughout the course of [the] “final solution” was that Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized (that is, after they had been stripped of even that second-class citizenship to which they had been relegated after the Nuremberg Laws). When their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when human beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in the Roman law of the archaic period: doomed to death.24 
What Agamben neglects in this account is the fact that it was due to the pe­culiar symbolic position that Jews occupied in the Nazis’ symbolic-ideological network that they first became the bearers of a second-class citizenship of which they were subsequently even stripped and thus became denationalised – in or­der to be deported to extermination camps. In other words, it was due to the particular symbolic constellation that the Jews embodied not simply one social group among many, but one corresponding to the figure of the “neighbour,” and 165 were consequently “doomed to death,” as Agamben puts it. 
In fact, following Alenka Zupančič’s recent contribution,25 the figure of “the neighbour,” unlike stranger, is not symmetrically opposed to that of citizen, but rather points to the traumatic position of “beyond stranger.” This position 
24 Agamben, Means Without End, p. 22. 25 Alenka Zupančič, “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself?!”, Problemi International, 3 (3/2019), pp. 89–108. 
indeed corresponds to the topological place of the death drive as “beyond the pleasure principle,” that is, to the very unheimlich excess (subjected to repres­sion) in the citizen him- or herself. Thus, we could say that refugees as bare lives pass from strangers to neighbours not due to their lack of all symbolic in­scriptions, but rather because this lack of inscription is simultaneously replaced by their fantasmatic embodiment of the traumatic jouissance, which should be repressed in the figure of the citizen: “the neighbour” entails “‘traversing’ a certain limit”26(which is the limit of the “stranger” as the mimetic counterpart of the “citizen”) in as much as jouissance entails traversing the limits imposed by the pleasure principle – jouissance is by definition ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle, beyond that limit. Hence, Jews were stripped of all political-juridical statuses and consequently deported to the extermination camps because they were fantasmatically perceived as “pieces” of that peculiar jouissance beyond the pleasure principle, associated with the unary trait or S1. In any case, this, in turn, implies that what is repressed in the formation of the nation-state is not simply bare life, which rather corresponds to the point of primal repression, but instead the insistence of the drive, which is by definition something “excessive” in relation to the pleasure principle of the “citizen,” something “beyond” and at the same time fixed with the primal repressed signifier. 
On this point, it seems worth putting this discursive synchronic aspect of an-ti-Semitism into the historical context more thoroughly by linking it to Balibar’s historical analysis of “neo-racism.”27 To begin with, it is interesting to note how Balibar, although he does not refer to psychoanalysis at this specific point, nev­ertheless unfolds pretty similar arguments regarding anti-Semitism, which he conceives as an already “cultural” or “differentialist” form of racism. Lacking “objective” or “biological” features, such as skin colour, the “race” in this case is entirely determined symbolically in the way we just discussed above. As such, this “new” kind of racism could be regarded also as a limit-concept between the classic hierarchical biological racism of the 19th century and “neo-racism” or “racism without race,” which is, according to Balibar, nothing other than a form of “generalized anti-Semitism.”28 Historically, neo-racism emerged in 
26 Ibid., p. 92. Étienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?”, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Verso, London and New York 1991, pp. 17–28. 
28 Ibid., 24. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
Western Europe in the 1970s in the context of the process of decolonisation and replaced the idea of the hierarchical biological superiority of the white race over others with the assumption of irreducible cultural differences between Western European white nations (ex-colonisers) and immigrants coming to former co­lonial metropoles from decolonised countries. Such an assumption of irreduci­ble cultural differences depicts incoming migrants as “unadaptable” or unwill­ing to undergo cultural assimilation. Yet, as Balibar does not fail to note, the so-conceived irreducible cultural differences actually meant the difference not between different cultures or races, but between the capitalist and non-capi­talist cultures. In other words, the idea of irreducible cultural differences as a grounding principle of neo-racism assumes that the incoming migrants are not willing (are not culturally predisposed) to accept the white capitalist mode of production, which includes not only exploitation, but also competition/com­parison in the spheres of both capital and labour. Here, Balibar’s historical analysis actually sheds the light of truth on Lacan’s prophecy regarding the rise of racism and segregation within the process of economic globalisation:29 the (neo)racism that Lacan evokes did not emerge simply because other races and ethnicities came into former colonial metropoles and there was a spontaneous or natural racist reaction to this phenomenon – this is precisely what Balibar calls a racist theory (as opposed to a theory of racism), which assumes the racist aggressiveness as a “natural,” “instinctual” reaction to the cultural differences, which, in turn, have to be respected with the proper geographical distance in or­der to prevent this kind of supposed “natural” aggressiveness.30 On the contrary, (neo-)racism emerged due to the social competition dominating almost all as­pects of social life in the former colonial metropoles. As Zupančič puts it: “This is not an immediate bodily proximity, but rather the proximity of our value, of our surplus-value.”31 It was due to this specific capitalist competition between labour forces as commodities that the incoming migrants from former colonies 167 became “neighbours” in the strict sense of this term. 
29 “Our futures of common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line extension of the process of segregation.” (Lacan, cited in Zupančič, “Love Thy Neighbor as Thy­self?!”, p. 102) 
30 As a matter of fact, such a geographical distance had been “respected” precisely by means of segregation, that is, with the construction of ghettos on the peripheries of many Western European cities. 
31 Zupančič, “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself?!”, p. 102. 
Summing up all these perspectives that we tried to stitch together into one trajec­tory, we might say that the repression of bare life as such, its immediate, yet not complete “sublation” into citizenship, implies the exclusion of every life that has not been “sublated” into the concept of citizenship and consequently into the body of the nation. However, what is excluded is life in so far as it embodies the traumatic excess of the death drive, the element that is excessive in relation to the imaginary organic unity of homeostatic society,32 the element that, according to Lacan’s definition of enjoyment, “serves no purpose.”33 If refugees as those who are stateless, deprived of citizenship (as noted by Brecht’s character Kalle – a former worker living in exile – in the play Refugee Conversations, written in 1940 during Brecht’s own exile in Finland: without a passport, even good peo­ple go unrecognised), are usually violently expelled from the territory of the na­tion-state, it is thus not simply because they have no status,34 but even more so because they embody the repressed traumatic jouissance, the excess that should be repressed in the constitution of citizenship and the capitalist nation-state. 
“Being-in-exodus of the citizen” 
Now that we have discussed in detail the dialectical relationship between citi­zenship and nation-state, on the one hand, and the figure of the refugee on the 
32 It is interesting to juxtapose here two remarks about “homeostasis,” one by Lacan and an­other by Foucault: “the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis” (Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton and Company, London and New York 1998, p. 31); “And most important of all, [biopolitical] regulatory mechanisms must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an av­erage, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field” (Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey, Picador, New York 2003, p. 247). If we take both remarks together, then we could say that the purpose of biopolitics, which is guided by the pleasure principle, is to achieve the homeostasis of a population or a gen­eral state of pleasure. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, trans. Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton and Co., London and New York 1999, p. 3. 
34 Here, Agamben rightly points out how being stateless or without any status can only be a temporary and not a permanent position within the regime of the nation-state: “That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable status for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.” (Agamben, Means without End, p. 20) 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
other, while also linking this relation to the Freudian triad primalrepression – repression – return of the repressed, we are in a position to examine more closely the consequences that Agamben draws from such a rethinking of political phi­losophy anew on the basis of the figure of the refugee. Namely, the fact that refu­gees represent what we should call a structurally “unsublated reminder” of the dialectics of human and citizen, a reminder that cannot be simply reconciled within the status of citizenship, but which returns on the scene as the “neigh­bour,” is the main reason why Agamben briefly outlines a post-biopolitical “new politics,” which, however, “remains largely to be invented,”35 not on the basis of the universalisation of human rights in order to cover both citizens and stateless people equally, but rather on basis of the radical separation of human rights (of the citizen) from the form-of-life of the refugee. As he puts it: “The concept of refugee must be resolutely separated from the concept of the ‘human rights,’ and the right of asylum (which in any case is by now in the process of being drastically restricted in the legislation of European states) must no longer be considered as the conceptual category in which to inscribe the phenomenon of refugee.”36 The question now is what precisely Agamben is aiming at with such a sharp separation of the figure of the refugee from the biopolitical categories of the political order of the nation-state. 
In order to properly comprehend what is at stake in such an imperative of the sep­aration of the figure of the refugee from human rights as a pilaster of the biopolit­ical nation-state, it is necessary to bring into the discussion the third fundamen­tal element of what Agamben calls the sovereign trinity “nation-state-territory”: the territory. If, as mentioned earlier, the status of refugee can only be, from the point of view of the nation-state, a temporary status that should be resolved ei­ther by means of granting the refugee asylum and possibly naturalisation, or by way of violent expulsion from the state’s territory, to say the least, it is thus due 169 to the peculiar ideological link between the nation and the territory. This link re­sounds with the ancient notion of “autochthony” (which meant “springing from the land/soil”), which perfectly fits the biopolitical treatment of the nation as the population, where the bare life of the nation overlaps with national sovereignty. 
35 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11. 
36 Agamben, Means without End, p. 22. In order to avoid any confusion, let us recall again that it was in 1993 that Agamben wrote the text “Beyond Human Rights” that we are dis­cussing here. Although it was written more than twenty years ago in the middle of war in former Yugoslavia, the present situation clearly resounds in it.  
However, this does not imply any kind of transhistorisation of the concept of ter­ritory, which remains specifically modern, that is, biopolitical. 
In last decade, some critical political theorists have demonstrated how the emergence of modern biopower, with nation/population as its principal object, not simply transforms, but rather enables the concept of “territory” to emerge. As, for instance, Stuart Elden has convincingly argued,37 “territory”, although it relates to similar concepts such as land and terrain, is ultimately irreducible to them: rather than being simply the soil or enclosed and state-controlled land, which is the most widespread image of territory, the latter is instead a “political technology”38 of biopower. This expression of Elden’s should be grasped along two complementary and co-dependent aspects: on the one hand, territory (both as phenomena and as concept) historically emerges as a consequence of the invention of modern science, which, with the development of disciplines such as geometry, mathematics, physics etc., enabled more sophisticated measure­ments and calculation of space, which is no longer considered to be a barely calculable and measurable surface, but rather a three-dimensional geometrical space in the strict sense. On the other hand, mid- and large-scale measurements and calculations of space were indeed subjected to political purpose, which was precisely the purpose of planning better the living space of the population on the soil controlled by the state power. In this way, territory as calculable and measurable space immediately became a living space, that is, a space that is inseparable from the population living on the state’s soil. Agamben is thus right to consider the inextricable trinity nation-state-territory as the foundation of the sovereignty of the modern biopolitical nation-state. 
Against this background, it becomes clear why Agamben wagers all the renewal of political philosophy on the figure of the refugee: if, on the one hand, this figure reveals the contingency of the immediate passage of bare life into the form of the nation, in so doing, it also, on the other hand, breaks the inextricable con­nection between the nation and the state’s territory, thus radically bringing into question the fantasy of “autochthony” underpinning the biopolitical nexus na-
See Stuart Elden, “Governmentality, Calculation Territory”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (3/2007), pp. 562–580; and Stuart Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory”, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (6/2010), pp. 799–817. 
38 Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory”, pp. 810–812. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
tion-state-territory. In other words, the refugee not only is the figure that exceeds the symbolic network of the juridical-political regime of the nation-state; it is also the figure that is detached or unrooted from the state territory. Consequently, Agamben’s central consideration of the refugee as the “being-in-exodus of the citizen,”39 that is, as formed upon a neat separation of the juridical-political sta­tus of citizen from the form-of-life of the refugee, also implies nothing other than the “deterritorialisation” of the nation from the territory of the state. The virtu­al (utopian) ‘State of a refugee’ is precisely the “aterritorial” state conceived in terms of its deterritorialisation from its own territory as a biopolitical space. On this point, Agamben goes so far as to even propose such an “extraterritorialisa­tion” as not only an alternative to the two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but also as a “model of new international relations”: 
The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better yet, aterri­toriality) that would thus be implied could be generalized as a new model of in­ternational relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to imagine two political communi­ties insisting on the same region and in a condition of exodus from each other – communities that would articulate each other via a series of reciprocal extrater­ritorialities in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular.40 
As we can observe, here, Agamben outlines a reversal of the logic of the na­tion-state and national identity: instead of two national identities forming two separate nation-states, he suggests drawing an alternative based on national (or ethnic) de-identification, so to speak. In other words, instead of conceiving Israel and Palestine as two nation-states, he proposes their reciprocal (negative) identification with the position of the refugee as synonymous with that of the 171 “being-in-exodus of the citizen.” However, Agamben does not stop there, but proceeds further and generalises such a “model of new international relations” by extending it specifically to the European states: 
In an analogous way [to Israel and Palestine], we could conceive of Europe not as an impossible “Europe of the nations,” whose catastrophe one can already 
39 Agamben, Means without End, p. 25. 40 Ibid., p. 24. 
foresee in the short run, but rather as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the (citizen and noncitizen) residents of the European states would be in a position of exodus or refuge; the status of European would then mean the being-in-exodus of the citizen (a condition that obviously could also be one of immobility). European space would thus mark an irreducible difference between birth [nascita] and nation in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political meaning, thus decidedly opposing itself to the concept of the nation (which has so far unduly usurped it).41 
Apart from the pretty clear echoes of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “deter­ritorialisation” and “minority” in the last two cited passages, the reference to psychoanalysis which remained implicit in Agamben’s account of citizenship and nation-state here comes to the fore in a much more explicit manner. In fact, what Agamben proposes in these passages is rather to conceive the political community in general, and especially the European political community, not on the basis of the sum of the national or ethnic identities of the European nations, nor on the basis of the territorial sum of all the territories of the European states – both sums would only elevate the structure and logic of the nation-state to the higher, interstate level; instead, he suggests imagining the European political community on the basis of what we might call a “subjective destitution” in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. A (negative) identification with the position of the refugee in fact presupposes the rejection of any kind of particular national or ethnic identity and the formation of subjectivity upon secondary unconscious identification with the nation. In short, conceiving political community anew starting from the figure of the refugee presupposes traversing the fundamental (national) fantasy that frames the subject of national identity as the bearer of the sovereignty of the nation-state by positing the inextricable organic connec­tion between birth and nation or between bare life and political subjectivity. 
Moreover, it is absolutely no coincidence that, in exemplifying such a political idea with topological examples, Agamben refers precisely to the Klein bottle and Möbius strip, which were often used by Lacan to formalise the specific top­ological structure of the unconscious. As Agamben further maintains regarding “extraterritoriality,” “[t]his space would coincide neither with any of the homo­geneous national territories nor with their topographical sum, but would rather 
Ibid., pp. 24–25. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
act on them by articulating and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Möbius strip, where exterior and interior in-determine each oth­er. In this new space, European cities would rediscover their ancient vocation of cities of the world by entering into a relation of reciprocal extraterritoriality.”42 What Agamben suggests with the so-conceived “extraterritoriality” is a decou­pling of the form-of-life and state territory with the latter ceasing to function as a biopolitical space. Another way, perhaps, to articulate Agamben’s idea of “extraterritoriality” is to view it through the lens of the concept of “other space,” yet not in the sense in which Michel Foucault developed this concept,43 that is, not as a “heterotopy” that corresponds to the biopolitical space of exclusion (of which the paradigm is indeed the concentration camp), but rather as what Foucault just briefly hints to be utopian space as a counterpart of heterotopy. The utopian space, in fact, corresponds much more to the Lacanian topology of “curved space” that Agamben evokes when referring to the Möbius strip. In this respect, deterritorialisation does not refer simply to another space of exo­dus that would avoid the logic of the sovereign biopolitical territorialisation of space, but rather points to the very destitution of the biopolitical governance operating on the nation-state’s territory. In short, the utopian space does not point to another space outside the national territory, but to the deterritorialisa­tion or “curving” of the territory of the nation-state itself. 
Žižek’s analysis of one particular sequence in the The Shawshank Redemption would seem to be quite instructive in this context. Therein, at one specific point, the main character Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a prisoner in Shawshank Prison, locks himself in the office of the warden, i.e. prison governor, and plays Mozart’s Duettino sull’aria (part of his famous opera The Marriage of Figaro) quite loud on the prison’s external speakers so that the song could be heard by the other prisoners outside in the courtyard, who then cease their activities and gaze spellbound into the warden’s office. Dufresne’s fellow prisoner Ellis “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman) remarks in his voice-over narration: 
42 Ibid., p. 25. 
43 See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in: Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London and New York 1997, pp. 330–336. 
I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t wanna know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free. 
As Freeman’s narration makes perfectly clear, a loud and beautiful piece of op­era is able to produce a genuinely sublime effect of “other space,” so that even the walls of the prison (ironically, according to Foucault, prison is the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which subsequently evolved into biopolitics) dissolve and every man therein feels free for a brief moment. However, as Žižek does not fail to note in his commentary on this sequence,44 it was possible to produce such an “other space” only on the basis of the short circuit “within music itself,” that is, between the prisoners not even knowing what the singers were singing and the “sublime beauty” of the music. It is in this short circuit that the truly sublime “other space” emerged as a moment in which the enclosed physical territory ceased to function as a prison. 
As an analogy to this, we might say that the massive presence of refugees on the territory of a nation-state can produce similar effects: as the last so-called “ref­ugee crisis” demonstrated, for a short period of time, at the height of the migra­tion influx into Europe, the biopolitical regimes of the European nation-states seemed to be suspended in the face of such a huge number of refugees on the national territories. Specifically, caravans of refugees walking on the soil of European nation-states produced the effect of an “other space” insofar as the sovereign states’ apparatuses seemed powerless in their attempt to control the droves of stateless people, while the movement of the latter also managed to break up the fantasmatic nexus nation-territory, hence revealing the contingen­cy of the original bond on which the nation-state grounds itself. Seen from this perspective, a (utopian) “state of refugees” based on extraterritoriality and the separation of the form-of-life of the refugee from the body of the nation would amount not simply to an anarchic non-state organisation outside the territories 
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, Verso, London 2001, pp. 158–159. 
a state of refugees? agamben and the future of europe 
of the nation-states, but rather to the very subjective destitution of the nation, and to the unbinding of the nexus nation-state-territory that constitutes the core of European biopolitical modernity. 
And, paradoxically enough, if there is a case in recent history of at least the partial realisation of such an idea of a deterritorialised political community, it is, perhaps, the case of the so-called “sanctuary cities” that have spread in the last few years all over the USA. Although the first declarations of sanctuary cit­ies go back to the 1980s and were already then related to the idea of a refuge for illegal and undocumented migrants from Latin America, such declarations have spread mostly in the last decade or so due to the drastic changes in US immigra­tion policy. According to the most basic definition, sanctuary city means a city that, within its jurisdiction, refuses to cooperate with the federal government (the sovereign power) in enforcing immigration law in general and especially refuses to cooperate in the deportation of illegal and undocumented migrants from the state territory. So far, the declaration of a sanctuary city has no legal grounds and is not recognised within any legal system, not only in the USA, but also in Europe. Taking into account this singular feature, the sanctuary city could thus justifiably be regarded as an extraterritorial entity insofar as the force of sovereign power is made inoperative on its soil. That is to say, although the sovereign law is still in force, it is nevertheless made inoperative or profanised. In sanctuary cities – and with this I bring this article to a close – illegal and undocumented migrants actually live not in a state territory of rights, but in zones of refugium where the separation of the form-of-life from the territory of the nation-state is realised.  

Jelica Šumič Riha* 

Europe’s Borderland and Non-Citizen Politics1 
“A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in 
a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible. […] The legal and documented movements are dwarfed by clandestine migrations: the borders of 
national sovereignty are sieves.”2 
Bordering Europe 
The 20th century ended with the announcement of the realisation of two great utopias: the end of history and a borderless world. The zeitgeist of the fall of the Berlin Wall saw the world marching towards an era of limitlessness, a world with fewer barriers impeding the ceaseless flows of commodities, information, images, and persons, promising thereby the beginning of an era of “global con­viviality.” The beginning of the 21st century announced a gloomy end to these utopias. Far from disappearing, borders, due to the various processes and prac­tices ofre-bordering,3 are proliferating today to the point that one could state that “we live in a world of borders.”4 Hence, instead of fewer lines of division, we live in a world in which borders have spread and colonised virtually all as­pects of our lives. As a consequence, the very concept of the border and its functions have changed: instead of being a mere indicator of a bounded terri-177 torial jurisdiction, marking the limit of political or other authority, the border 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
2 Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, London 2000, p. 213. 
3 These involve, for instance, the creation of agencies for controlling the external borders of the European Union, the construction of the border walls in various parts of the world, as well as the creation and use of massive biometric databases at points of entry. 
4 Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2016, p. 1. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
engenders the very thing it is supposed to only demarcate and sustain. From this perspective, then, Nail can boldly claim: “societies and states are the prod­ucts of (b)ordering, not the other way around.”5 It is precisely the primacy of the border and the emphasis on its capacity to engender a political-legal ter­ritory instead of simply drawing its contours that sheds a disturbing light on Europe’s so-called “refugee crisis” and, as a consequence, the construction of the European border spaces as a response to the “crisis”. 
While in the past the issue of the border did not receive its deserved attention in political theory and philosophy in general, with the ubiquity, complexity, and elusiveness of borders, the focus of contemporary political philosophy and critical border studies in particular has shifted from what was considered to be the main function of the border: a line delimiting a territory as socially dis­tinct, to borders considered as various practices of social division, hindering, bifurcating, redirecting, and recirculating the migratory movement. In order to better understand the momentous transformation of borders in the contempo­rary world, it is helpful to turn to Étienne Balibar’s discussion of the question of borders, more precisely, of their heterogeneity and ubiquity that indicate a shift toward alternative modalities of borders. For Balibar, the “heterogeneity” and “ubiquity” of borders refer to the historical convergence of the multiplicity of functions fulfilled simultaneously by different borders (political, cultural, and socioeconomic). Yet for quite some time we have been witness to the opposite tendency where the many different instantiations of these functions no longer intersect. The result is, what Balibar calls, “a new ubiquity of borders,” as ev­idenced by the fact that “some borders are no longer situated at the borders at all, in the geographico-politico-administrative sense of the term.”6 With borders becoming differentiated and multiple once again, borders, as Balibar contends, “constitute a grid raging over the new social space, and cease simply to border ‘from the outside’.”7 Thus, according to Balibar, borders are increasingly repro­duced both outside of and within the territory of sovereign states. Crucially, as Balibar claimed, “borders are no longer the shores of the political but have in­deed become […] things within the space of the political itself.”8 Balibar thus 
5 Ibid., p. 222. 
6 
Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. C. Jones et al., Verso 2002, p. 84, n. 9. 
7 Ibid., p. 85. 
8 Ibid., p. 92. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
develops an understanding of borders not only as territorial demarcations but as “borderspaces” that include the territory beyond the borderline, as unstable and mutable spaces as their limits are constantly being redefined and expanded. 
Balibar’s concepts of heterogeneity and ubiquity help us to further elucidate the border practices in the EU. The gradual dismantling of Europe’s internal borders and the growing generalisation of immigration controls has drawn attention to the various (re-)bordering processes involved. Thus, with borders that are no longer “at the border,” as Balibar maintains, but are instead vacil­lating, the margins of the EU could nowadays be conceived of as such a bor­derzone, borderspace, borderscape, or “borderland”, a zone of transition and mobility without territorial fixity. This does not suggest, however, that borders are disappearing. Indeed, it would be more appropriate to state that “[l]ess then ever is the contemporary world a ‘world without borders’.” This is because “bor­ders are being both multiplied and reduced in their localization and their func­tion; they are being thinned out and doubled, becoming border zones, regions, or countries where one can reside and live.”9 Borders, on this reading, are not fixed; rather, borders are something that fluctuates. In addition, the geography of borders is determined in part at least by the erratic movements of migrants themselves. Indeed, their movements constitute an irreducible social and po­litical element in the making and unmaking of the European borders. In order to illuminate the political aspect of bordering practices in Europe and beyond, it is necessary to departure from the idea of borders as clearly delineated and segregated spatialities. 
Lacan’s neologism “lituraterre”, variously translated into English as “erasure-land”, “stainearth”, or “deletion on the ground”,10 seems to capture something of this mutation of Europe into a vacillating border by putting into focus this 179 mobility, dispersion, drawing, erasure, and re-drawing of borders.On the oth­er hand, however, Lacan’s “lituraterre” also relates to litorarius, the Latin for coastline or littoral. Yet what Lacan crucially highlights regarding the littoral as a border or frontier is disparity of the two domains, land and sea, to the extent that “one domain in its entirety makes for the other a frontier, because of their 
9 Ibid. 10 Dany Nobus, “Annotations to Lituraterre,” Continental Philosophy Review, 46 (2/2013), p. 
347. I am indebted to Sigi Jötkandt for drawing my attention to this essay. 
being foreign to each other”11. Lacan’s lituraterre can then be viewed as a land that is nothing but its own constantly “erasing” borderline. The question we wish to address here is the following: Is it possible to think the vacillation of Europe’s borderspace as a lituraterre,which,in a double gesture of writing and erasure,brings together two incompatible – “because of their being foreign to each other” – images or, rather, fantasies of Europe: the image that Europe has of itself, and a counter-image or fantasy of Europe brought into existence by the erratic movement of the refugees in their perilous journey through the EU territory to safety? 
It is telling that, prompted by two significant events in the recent history of Europe, the unification of Europe in 1992 and the current refugee crisis, a num­ber of prominent contemporary thinkers seek a reaffirmation of Europe by re­posing this typically European question: “What is Europe?”, and that precisely because, as Derrida admits, “we no longer know very well what or who goes by this name.”12 Indeed, Derrida asks, “to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?”13 Hence, engaging in a discussion of what Europe is involves, according to Derrida, a discussion with European memory. Deciding to inher­it Europe, in all its tensions and contradictions, for Derrida, means to inher­it two imperatives, two contradictory tasks: “The duty to respond to the call of European memory, to re-call what has been promised under the name of Europe, to re-identify Europe. […] This duty also dictates opening Europe up […]; opening it onto that which is not, never was, and never will be Europe.”14 Hence, for the inherited idea of Europe to be re-launched and thus reaffirmed, Derrida states, “a new thinking and a previously unencountered destination of Europe, along with another responsibility for Europe, are being called on 180 to give a new chance to this idiom. Beyond all Eurocentrism.”15 But this also implies, according to Derrida, that “[w]e must fight for what the word Europe means today. This includes our Enlightenment heritage, and also an awareness 
11 Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris 2001, p. 14. 
12 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 5 (emphasis in the original). 
13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 76. 15 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, Stanford 
University Press, Stanford 2005, p. 158. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
and regretful acceptance of the totalitarian, genocidal and colonialist crimes of the past. Europe’s heritage is irreplaceable and vital for the future of the world.”16 Seen in this perspective, the current refugee crisis situates Europe at the temporal disjunction between the past and the future. Yet precisely by being thus precariously poised between inheritance and promise, Europe is offered a unique chance to reaffirm itself, an opportunity, more precisely, to rethink its own foundations in order to rescue the emancipatory core of the idea of Europe. 
Setting out from the image of Europe as a lieu de mémoire, a place of tragic mem­ory out of which a new community has to emerge, a Europe that is supposed to be capable of overcoming the differences between “them” and “us”, a cosmopol­itan Europe of “radical tolerance and radical openness”17. However, the idea of Europe such as was set in motion in the post-war period, the idea of a European “unity in diversity”, was not to be viewed simply as an ethical injunction, since the benefit of an ontological impact is involved from the outset: in summoning the Member States and its inhabitants to act as if the idea Europe has of itself, a unity in peaceful diversity, has become a reality, it produces a coherence among European states and people. Hence, the very need to re-affirm Europe, implies that the idea of Europe is not to be simply discarded, announcing thereby that the task ahead is that of “Europe becoming minoritarian,” as Rosi Braidotti sug-gests,18 as if all that one had to do is to overcome our Eurocentrism and to adopt a nomadic subjectivity in order to become part of a global multitude. 
However, if the idea of Europe is still alive in a certain sense, as can be evidenced by the effects it produces in reality, this is not because this idea is reduced to an image Europe has made of itself and its role in the world, an image of an ideal Europe identified with the signifiers that give rise to such an ideal: memory, inheritance, promise, reconciliation, peaceful coexistence, hospitality, human-181 ity, tolerance, Enlightenment, reason, critique, responsibility, democracy, etc. Because the idea of Europe or, rather, its role is both ontological and episte­
16 Jacques Derrida, “A Europe of Hope,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 10 
(2/2006), pp. 407–412. 17 Ulrich Beck, “Understanding the Real Europe”, Dissent, summer 2003. http://www.dis­
sentmagazine.org/article/understanding-the-real-europe. 18Rosi Braidotti, “The Becoming Minoritarian of Europe” in Adrian Parr and Ian Buchanan 
(eds.), Deleuze and the Contemporary World, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2006, 
pp. 79–94. 
mological in yet another sense. This epistemological-onotological status of the idea of Europe could best be explained by referring to Lacan’s notion of fantasy defined as a “window onto the real” in the sense that it organises the field of the visible by separating what can be seen from what cannot be seen. We can understand the function of the idea of Europe – as a discursive apparatus that renders a given situation legible – in terms of the frame, as elaborated by Judith Butler in her book FramesofWar.The frame, as Butler conceives of it, involves the idea of ordering and the stability resulting from the very act of framing. A frame, in this respect, “seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen.”19 Considered as “operations of power,” frames aim to “delimit the sphere of ap­pearance itself.”20 Insofar as framing is seeing, it could then be said that the act of framing consists in selecting and constructing what it is that the frame frames.21 The frame then is a device allowing certain images, interpretations, norms, or truths to become recognisable and, consequently, recognised. Or, to be even more precise, the frame is a condition of possibility of recognisability inasmuch as “recognizability describes those general conditions on the basis of which recognition can and does take place.”22 But in so doing, the frame also es­tablishes the conditions of its own reproducibility. While the frame determines 
– discursively, visually, auditorily, and practically – the conditions of what is to be understood, seen, heard, or done, Butler nevertheless insists on the frame’s inability to frame everything. Indeed, the frame “does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organization to its content. In other words, the frame does not hold anything together in one place, but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to a temporal logic by which it moves from place to place.”23 
Our contention in this essay is that such a breakage of the European frame is already taking place, but in a quite peculiar manner. Indeed, in their death-de­fying passage through the territory of “Fortress Europe”, a violently defended political space, the refugees and asylum seekers are tracing out a different im­age of Europe, one that, instead of reaffirming the idea of Europe as Europe has created for itself, an “area of justice, freedom and security,” constitutes a differ­
19 Judith Butler, Frames of War, When is Life Grievable? Verso, New York 2009, p. 10. 20 Ibid., p. 1. 21 Ibid., p. 8. 22 Ibid., p. 6. 23 Ibid., p. 10. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
ent logic of inscription, a frame that allows refugees to read/understand what Europe is, namely, a “post-colonial” and “racist Europe” rather than a “raceless and humanitarian Europe”, a violently divisive force, rather than a “Europe of a peaceful unification”, in short, a “non-Europe” of exclusion rather than a “Europe of inclusion and tolerance”. Hence, once what is viewed as non-Eu­ropean and thus considered to being Europe’s constitutive outside intrudes in Europe’s space, becoming thereby Europe’s internal other, the “other within”, Europe recreates what was called “global apartheid” conditions by separating “wanted from unwanted, the barbarians from the civilised, and the global rich from the global poor.”24 In its response to what is called a “refugee crisis” – whereby the very term “crisis” already tends to obscure what is at stake in man­aging it – “Europe” has developed techniques and practices of bordering that involve not only the fortification of territorial borders but also the extension of the borderspace beyond the territorial border of the EU. Borderspaces that have been created as a space for the control and regulation of migrating bod­ies function as a fluctuating zone of exception, in Agamben’s sense, namely as zones where the rule, while being abolished, continues to reign over the bodies captured within the territory of its jurisdiction. 
Balibar’s concept of vacillation, used to indicate that borders are no longer co­terminous with territorial lines, delimiting the outer reaches of the jurisdiction of sovereign states, helps us to further clarify the bordering practices in the EU that allow borders to materialise far beyond of what is traditionally viewed as European space. Due to the ramification of the border’s dispositive – through the increasing externalisation of borders (by transforming the EU’s neighbour states into pre-frontiers of Europe; this being the European main strategy for contain­ing migration and deterring unwanted migrants, a strategy that consists in not letting the would-be migrants to leave) and internalisation of border control that 183 re-materialises borders within the EU territory (by creating detention centres for arriving migrants in order to limit their freedom to move) – one could say, with Balibar, that the territorial borders of Europe are “no longer localizable in an unequivocal fashion.”25 Ceasing to be static territorial delimitations, borders are 
24Henk Van Houtum, “Human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the EU’s external border regime,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 20 (2010), p. 958. 
25 
Étienne Balibar, “The Borders of Europe,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robins (eds.), Cos-mopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, University of Minnesota Press, Min­neapolis 1998, p. 219. 
constantly being displaced and multiplied, shifting with the moving body of ref­ugees. As Balibar judiciously remarks, the border is not everywhere for everyone. The “polysemic character” of borders can be seen in the fact that “borders never exist in the same way for individuals belonging to different social groups.”26 The polysemy of borders, alluded to by Balibar, thus involves the capacity of borders to actively “differentiate between individuals in terms of social class.”27 In bring­ing to the fore the partitioning along fault-lines of class and race of both citizens and migrants into privileged, authorised communities, and abject groups con­demned to strategies of survival through an endless process of internal borderi­sation, marginalisation, stigmatisation, and criminalisation, Balibar denounces their “false simplicity”28. Thus, the passport of a “rich person from a rich country […] increasingly signifies not just mere national belonging, protection and a right of citizenship, but a surplus of rights – in particular, a world right to circulate unhindered.”29 For “a poor person from a poor country,” by contrast, “the border […] is a place he runs up against repeatedly,” ultimately, the border itself is rede­signed as a “carceral system of placelessness” in order to be transformed into “a place where he resides.”30 This is not to be understood only in the sense that for a migrant/refugee waiting for the opportunity to cross the border, s/he has to liter­ally reside at the border, rather, the border itself moves with migrants, inscribing itself onto the migrant body. It is this aspect of the border topography that ena­bles – via the deterritorialisation of the EU’s external and internal borders – a transformation of borders into spaces in which migrant bodies are exposed to racialised violence, deportation, and, ultimately, death. 
A necropolitical lituraterre 
It is precisely at such points that there emerges what William Walters termed the “humanitarian border”. The term “humanitarian border” designates “the reinven­tion of the border as a space of humanitarian government.”31 Humanitarianism, 
26 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 79. 27 Ibid., p. 82 (emphasis in the original). 28 Ibid., p. 76. 29 Ibid., p. 83 (emphasis in the original). 30 Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 31 William Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” 
in Ulrike Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds.), Governmentality: Cur­rent Issues and Future Challenges, Routledge, New York 2011, p. 137. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
as Williams understands it, refers to “a complex domain possessing specific forms of governmental reason,”32 insofar as, at its core, it involves what Didier Fassin describes as “the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action”33, presupposing thereby the passivity on the part of those who receive humanitarian care. In fact, humanitarian care is “extended only when the migrant is removed from the body politic or when the migrant’s body becomes incapacitated to the point of political impotence.”34 Thus, as has been rightly pointed out by several critical border theorists, far from being “the other pole of the mechanisms of containment and control,” humanitarianism emerges as “one among the most effective technologies for governing, selecting, and containing migrant lives”35. As a novel formation in border policy, contemporary humanitarianism that strives to provide appropri­ate responses to irregular migrants and asylum seekers emerges as a “minimal­ist biopolitics” that takes hold over the bodies and life of migrants. The human­itarian government is, strictly speaking, a politics of life, as Fassin claims, yet what is at stake in such a “politics of life” is “the right to live as such more than human rights”,36 a politics of life, in short, that turns into a politics over life. In bringing together border policy and a politics of life, contemporary humanitar­ianism is a site of ambivalence. It is in the context of such an awkward alliance of humanitarianism and governementality that there appears a new kind of frontier marking points where the Global North and the Global South confront one another and where the demarcation line between wealth and poverty, cit­izenship and non-citizenship, transforms migrants into lives to be rescued or into excessive remainders. Hence, if certain border zones are transformed into a humanitarian border, this is because the whole defensive arsenal of borders (from advanced surveillance technology and armed guards to razor wire) are “deemed politically necessary and legitimate elements in the ‘defense’ of the 185 
32 Ibid., p. 142. 33 Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism: A Nongovernmental Government,” in Michel Feher (ed.) Nongovernmenal Politics, Zone Books, New York 2007, p. 151. 34 Gregory Feldman, The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the Euro­pean Union, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2012, p. 11. 35 Martina Tazzioli, “Border displacements. Challenging the politics of rescue between Mare Nostrum and Triton,” Migration studies, 4(1/2016), p. 5. 36 Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” Public Culture, 19/3, pp. 499–520. 
borders of the Global North faced with an ‘invasion’ of migrants and asylum seekers” in order for “border crossing [to] become a matter of life and death.”37 
The emergence of “the border as a threshold of life and death”38 thus marks the birth of the humanitarian border as a new type of border, a kind of a zero degree of biopolitics, a point at which biopolitics immediately switches into what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics”, unmasking thereby the deadly rac­ist enactment of the European borders. By focusing on “contemporary forms of [the] subjugation of life to the power of death,”39 Mbembe puts into focus the functioning of borderspaces defined as humanitarian borders in order to make visible what is being hidden, a “space of nonexistence” where the very fact of invisibility is constitutive of the state of exception. The concept of necropolitics enables us not only to better understand the racialised constitution of lives left to die, as Mbembe puts it, but to denounce the necropolitical condition that hu­manitarianism necessarily involves as the life that must be protected is biolog­ical life, a sheer ability to survive. Being one of the most effective technologies for dissimulating the veering of biopolitics into necropolitics, the humanitarian border can shed light on contemporary strategies of border-making in the EU. Using borders as filters to separate citizens from non-citizens, insiders from outsiders, the wanted from the unwanted, ultimately, humans from not-quite-humans or outright non-humans, this biopolitical mechanism produces certain bodies as “targets” exposed to institutional violence and thereby transforms every borderspace into a potential “state of exception”, as Giorgio Agamben defines it, a space where law is suspended, yet remains in force.40 
With respect to the functioning of the humanitarian border as a zone of the state of exception, it should be noted, however, that what is at stake in necropolitics is not the question of the dehumanisation of the migrant bodies in borderspac-es, but rather the continuing production and reinforcement of the conditions of bare life.41 Taking his cue from the Arendtian “right to have rights” that reveals 
37 William Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” 
p. 146. 
38 Ibid., p. 149. 
39 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15 (1/2o13), p. 16. 
40 Girogio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 
and London 2005, p. 87. 41 Ibid., p. 12. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
the circularity of rights and citizenship, whereby the lack of membership in a political community constitutes rightlessness, thus preventing migrants and/ or refugees from claiming their basic human rights,42 Agamben further develops the constitutive exclusion of bare life under the guise of the migrant or refugee. Exclusion is not only a measure to make undesirable migrants unable to claim the “right to have rights.” By reducing human life to nothing but (bare) life, the latter is not entirely outside the realm of sovereign power, but neither is it pro­tected within the given political-legal system. Excluded from and at the same time captured within the political order, bare life – exactly through its inclusive exclusion – is the constitutive feature of sovereign power.43 That “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power”44 is nowhere seen more clearly than in the case of migrants and asylum seekers. The mechanisms of border control are biopolitical instruments in Agamben’s sense precisely to the extent that they are used to install the conditions of bare life in the bor­derspace. In maintaining bare life intimately connected to the reproduction of sovereign power, the zone of bare life turns into the ever-politicisable territory of sovereignty.45 The borderspace as a zone of deportability is by definition a zone of exception not only because the state agencies involved in policing the border violate certain norms of treatment and deny certain rights to migrants, but rath­er, the borderspace is a zone of the state of exception because it is a space where the interweaving of death and freedom renders life and death indistinguishable. 
Extending Agamben’s and Mbembe’s critique of biopolitics to border policy in the EU the critical border studies emphasise those facets of the borderspace in which the differentially constructed bodies of migrants are exposed to structur­al oppression and violence. Due to the fact that the border is in a certain sense immanent to the migrant body, inasmuch as the borderspace emerges when­
187 
42 “Rights […] are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.” Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Poli­tics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London 2000, p. 21. 
43 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, 
Stanford University Press, Stanford 1998, p. 9. 44 Ibid., p. 6. 45 Nicolas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, “Introduction” in Nicholas De Genova and Na­
thalie Peutz (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Move­ment, Duke University Press, London 2010, p. 37. 
ever undocumented, illegal migrants are present, refugees and irregular mi­grants, being immobilised, tied to a local borderspace, in some radical sense, never actually cross the border, never leave the borderspace. This is because the borderspace, for them, is mobile, it fluctuates, and it can be enacted at any moment and everywhere. But precisely for being a changeable, unstable space that can be created anywhere, and at anytime, provided that it is populated by migrant bodies, the borderspace can best be described, by using Agamben’s term, as a zone of exception. Thus, if the borderspace, populated by undoc­umented, irregular migrants can be compared to a state of exception, this is because the law, while being suspended and therefore becoming indistinguish­able from the exception, remains nevertheless in force. 
The migrant body, reduced to nothing but “bare life”, could then be seen as a contemporary figure of homo sacer. Balibar seems to be joining Agamben in this respect since for him, the border functions “as an institutional distribu­tion of survival and death.”46 While Balibar does not speak of the production of homo sacer as being constitutive of the production of sovereign power, as Agamben does, he nevertheless designates the inhabitants of the borderspace, this being a true zone of death, as “garbage humans”, who are “always already superfluous” and, because of that, “not likely to be productively used or ex­ploited.”47 Considered as being superfluous, because they are not even produc­tively exploitable, as Balibar emphasises, the death of the undocumented mi­grants does not count, they remain in a sense “un-noteworthy”. In a remarkable way, the lives of the illegal migrants share some crucial traits with “infamous lives” described by Foucaualt: in both cases we are dealing with lives that are “destined to pass away without a trace” had they not – due to their “encounter with power” – been “snatched […] from darkness in which they could, perhaps, should, have remained”.48 For being considered (by Europe) as superfluous and therefore disposable, losable lives, the lives of illegal migrants, because they do not matter, are also ungrievable lives. These lives, as Butler describes them, are not even grievable as they are not lives in the true sense. Butler in particular emphasises that as “a living figure outside the norms of life […] it is living, but 
46 Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty”, p. 16. 47 Ibid., p. 25. 48 Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Power, J. D. Faucion (ed.), Penguin Books, 
London, 1994, p. 161. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
not a life. It falls outside the frame furnished by the norm, but only as a relent­less double whose ontology cannot be secured, but whose living status is open to apprehension.”49 
Those who have died along the European “humanitarian border” cannot be mourned since they are “not conceivable as lives within certain epistemologi­cal frames, [their lives] are never lived nor lost in the full sense.”50 Drawing on Foucault’s biopolitical conception of racism that functions as an instrument of division since it establishes what “a biological-type caesura within popula­tion”,51Butler situates the filtering out of supposedly inferior groups of popu­lation at the level of a differentiated perception of lives whose loss is grievable and others whose loss remains ungrievable.52 By bringing together two, seem­ingly incompatible conceptions of sovereign power, biopolitical and necropo­litical, racism puts into sharp relief the fact that, from the point of view of the contemporary sovereign power, not every life is considered to be worth optimis­ing. To follow Foucult’s argument, “racism justifies death-function in the econ­omy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.”53Hence, in order to foster (some) life, (other) life that is always-already stigmatised as a biopolitical threat, supposedly endangering the life of the human species must be rendered dispensable and let to die. Taking her cue from Foucualt, Butler states that the loss of such lives is “deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living’.”54 Interestingly, Butler situates the resistance of the ungrievable life precisely in its refusal to die, a state that resonates with the undeadness of Muselmann in the Nazi death camps. The exacerbated violence against those losable lives cu­riously fails, not only because it is not possible to negate what has already been 
49 Butler, Frames of War, p. 8. 50 Ibid., p. 1. (Our emphasis.) 51 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the College de France, 1975 – 1976, 
trans. D. Macey, Picador, New York, 2004, p. 255. 52 Butler, Frames of War, p. 24. 53 Foucault, Society Must be Defended. p. 254. 54 Butler, Frames of War, p. 31. 
negated. It is also not possible to kill life that is not truly alive “since [such los­able lives] seem to live on, stubbornly, in the state of deadness.”55 
An image from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dream-Land”56 can shed some light on this “zone of deadness.” In her highly illuminating essay “Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” Sigi Jötkandt reads Poe’s “Dream-Land” in order to confront the fantasmatic landscape depicted in Poe’s poem with “Norway”, the ultimate object of refugees’ desire, which guides them through­out their risky, death-defying journey to safety. The refugees’ “Norway” is de­picted as a place preferable even to heaven, as can be illustrated by a popular an-ti-immigrant joke from the times of socialist Yugoslavia, yet which has become curiously topical in the current refugee crisis: “Mujo (short for Mohammed) dies in a car accident on the “Balkan refugee route”. When Saint Peter asks him: Where would you like to go, you wretch, heaven or hell? Mujo replies: Can I go to Germany?”57 Mujo appears to be a calculating contemporary refugee/migrant who instead of settling down, say, in Turkey, Greece, Slovenia, or Hungary (or even Italy and France) in order to save his bare life, prefers to move to Germany if not to one of the richer countries of Northern Europe, Sweden or Norway, where he expects to enjoy the privileges of the welfare state. For refugees flee­ing war and starvation, Norway thus represents the ultima Thule,to be taken in the sense of the end and the ultimate reason for their journey. 
What the poem’s narrator – recounting his travels towards Thule, the name given by ancient historians to a place beyond the borders of the known world, supposedly situated between Iceland, Greenland, and Norway – encounters instead is what Poe calls “an ultimate dim Thule,” a sublime place “Out of SPACE–Out of TIME.” The ultimate goal of Poe’s traveller, ultima Thule, emerg­
190 es before the startled traveller’s eyes as a liminal state 
55 
Judith Butler, Precarious Life, The Power of Mourning and Violence, Verso, New York 2004, p. 33. 
56 Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream Land”, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/ detail/48631. 
57 
See Vlasta Jalušič, “Why Does Mujo Want to Go to Germany?” in Igor Ž. Žagar, Neža Kogovšek, Marina Hacin Lukšič (eds.), The Disaster of European Refugee Policy: Perspec­tives from the “Balkan Route”,Cambridge Publishing Scholars, 2018, p. 157. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
With forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over; Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore; Seas that restlessly aspire, Surging unto skies of fire; 
In “Dream-Land” Thule is presented as a pre-ontological real ruled by “an Eidolon, named NIGHT,” a place where, as Jötkandt notes, “the very limit sep­arating life from death […] never took place. Inhabited by strange creatures occupying in-between states.”58 Crucially, Poe’s fantasy of a “dream-land” forecloses in advance the possibility of escape, a possible way out. What Poe’s dreamed ultima Thule presents instead is “a space of nonexistence.” In this place between life and death, out of space and out of time, we can recognise a poetic depiction of the hell that awaits today’s refugees: a necropolitical “litu­raterre”, a death zone or astate of exception where the life of the populations, considered as “garbage humans,” who are “always already superfluous” and not likely to be productively used or exploited,”59to quote Balibar’s “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty”, is stillborn, for the limit separating life from death never took place for them. 
What lesson can we draw from Poe that will help us illuminate the refugees’ dream of reaching Norway? No doubt, refugees, by refusing to be satisfied by a minimum of safety, in short, by refusing to have their life reduced to bare life, claim their right to take the freedom to move within Europe literally. Read in terms of the right to move and find a space for living in whatever country they choose, the refugees’ Norway dream would be the clearest expression of what Badiou calls the “desire for the West,” because, far from striving to change the world by changing the economic, social, and political conditions that have im­posed on them the status of refugees, their only goal is to leave behind their devastated country and to rejoin the promised land of the developed West. 
58 Sigi Jötkandt,“Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” in Kate Montague, Sigi Jötkandt (eds.), Reason + Enjoyment, Filozofski vestnik, no. 2 (2016), p. 242. 
59 Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,”p. 25. 
In response to this more or less explicit criticism of the refugees/migrants “de­sire for the West”, Jötkandt judiciously remarks that to be able to change reali­ty instead of chasing a nonrealisable dream of “Norway”, this would presume “that one knows what ‘reality’ is.”60 Yet the “hard lesson” we can learn from Freud, Jötkandt claims, is not only that the presentation of the object of satis­faction in thought is hallucinatory. What is also illusory, Jötkandt continues, is our attempt “to make a real alteration” in the real circumstances, “in the exter­nal world.”61 However, if we are to follow Freud’s lead, as Jötkandt’s argument goes, namely that “the idea of making an alteration in reality is […] equally fan-tasmatic a solution as the refugees’ dream of Norway, should we conclude there is only the rule of Eidolon today,”62 in short, that there is no escape, no way out; that, like Poe’s traveller, instead of finding in the northern land a Dream-Land, a sublime place, the refugees seeking asylum in Europe, discover only a death zone in which life is still born or, at best, in statu nascendi? 
But would it not be possible to read refugees’ desire for “Norway”, their idea of Europe, from a radically different perspective? The change in the status of borders has some repercussions for the possible alternatives. For Balibar, the alternative is “between an authoritarian, and indeed violent, intensification of all forms of segregations, and a democratic radicalism which has as its aim to deconstruct the institution of the border.”63 This alternative thus indicated by Balibar, is curiously evocative of Lacan’s prediction according to which “[o]ur future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line exten­sion of the process of segregation.”64 Balibar offers a similar argument stating that, for his part, he would hesitate to embrace 
a radical democracy – which is necessarily international or, more accurately, transnational – with the pursuit of a ‘borderless world’ in the juridico-political sense of the term. Such a ‘world’ would run the risk of being a mere arena for the 
60 Jötkandt, “Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” p. 246. 
61 Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), The Standard Edition, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London 1961, p. 218. 
62 Jötkandt, “Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” p. 247. 63 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 92. 64 Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, Analy­
sis, no. 6, p. 12. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
unfettered domination of the private centres of power which monopolize capital, communication and, perhaps also, arms. It is a question, rather, of what demo­cratic control is to be exerted on the controllers of borders – that is to say, on states and supra-national institutions themselves. This depends entirely on whether those on the different sides of the border eventually discover common interests and a common language (common ideals). But it depends also on the question of who will meet in those unliveable places that are the different borders.65 
After migrants have found themselves in the hell of the “borderspaces” at the margin of Europe, an image of a racial, post-colonial Europe emerges, an image that Europe is not only unwilling to assume, but strives to repress if not to fore­close, however, without completely succeeding in this effort. This is because, as Butler suggests, “[t]he frame never quite determined precisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend. Something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things.”66 The stark contrast between human-itarisation of Europe’s borders and their divisive enforcement is nowhere seen more clearly than in the humanitarian project. Designated as an “uneasy alli­ance of a politics of alienation with a politics of care”, the humanitarian border creates “a site of ambivalence and undecidaeability”67 to the extent precisely to which humanitarian care involves the inclusion and exploitation of the migrant body reduced to the passive other. 
In an attempt to break with the traditional conception of migration as a more or less passive reaction to economic, political or social practices of marginali­sation and exclusion, the so-called “Autonomy of Migration” scholars consider migration as a positive political practice which, in prioritizing the subjective aspect in migratory movements, i.e., the desires, the expectations and the ac-193 tions of the migrants themselves, develops into a subversive social and political force. Thus, in order to examine the conditions for the political mobility of mi­grants, the AoM theorists focus not only on bordering practices as enactments of exclusion but also on what De Genova detects as “obscene” practices of in­clusion. While the deportability of undocumented migrants is visibilised and 
65 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 85. 66 Butler, Frames of War, p. 9. 67 Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” p. 145 
and 144. 
publicly displayed, the enactment of Europe’s border policy involves also, as De Genova claims, “its shadowy, publicly unacknowledged or disavowed, ob­scene supplement: the large-scale recruitment of illegalized migrants as legally vulnerable, precarious, and thus tractable labour.”68 That the permanent threat of deportability, as De Genova argues, has rendered “undocumented migrant labor a distinctly disposable commodity,”69 can only be examined and prob-lematized from a perspective of globalisation. 
In our global world, the world of capitalist globalisation, commodities circulate freely, but not people. Indeed, one is tempted to state that neoliberal ration-alisation of capitalism does not necessarily imply the freedom of movement. By taking the freedom of movement seriously, the refugees, in contrast, aim at transposing free global circulation from commodities to people. From the per­spective of global capitalism, the freedom of movement of individuals is inher­ently contradictory: under the current neoliberal conjecture, the exploitation of undocumented, which is to say deportable migrants, who are purposefully made “illegal” through the seemingly inconsistent bordering policy, alterna­tively marking out the porosity or impermeability of the European borders, is mirrored by the continuous reproduction of permanently precarious and dis­pensable cheap labour. Capitalism thus requires an endless reservoir of cheap and dispensable labour force, but it can only attain this goal through new mo­dalities of segregation and bordering that hinder the freedom of movement by restating deportability and thus exploitability of illegalised migrants. 
So, what lesson can we draw from the refugees’ demand for radical freedom of movement precisely because it cannot be met within the existing world order? Can refugees and migrants be seen, as Badiou does, as a “virtual vanguard of the gigantic mass of the people whose existence is not counted in the world the way it is”?70 In short, as a “nomadic proletariat” endowed with a tremendous, although still opaque emancipatory, revolutionary potential? Before trying to tackle this question, it should be noted that this issue will be dealt from a slightly different perspective, while avoiding two traps: that of romanticisation 
68 Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the ob­
scene of inclusion’,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7/2013), p. 1183. 
69 Ibid., p. 1181. 
70 Alain Badiou, Notre mal vient de plus loin, Fayard, Paris 2018. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
of migration which would consider migrants as a “political avant-garde of the present” as well as that of perceiving migration as a mere reaction or response to various practices of exclusion (political, economic, social, etc.), an approach all the more problematic as it seems to pave the way to considering migrants from the perspective of victimisation and objectification. 
While the figure of the migrant has been extensively discussed in terms of mo­bile social positions rather than in terms of fixed identities, there has been little discussion of various forms of migrants’ struggle and resistance and even less of the migrant in terms of political subjectivation. This neglect is surprising because migrant movements and their resistance are crucial to understanding not only the logic of exclusion that governs and determines the (bio)political practice of bordering in Europe today, but also the functioning of the dominant discourse or the “frame”, to use Butler’s term. Thus, to analyse the capacity of contemporary migrants to provide – through their struggle, resistance, new forms of organisation – an alternative to the logic of exclusion that dominates today, requires an in-depth inquiry into contemporary migration as resulting from one or a combination of several forms of exclusion (political, territorial, social, juridical, or economic). However, there are two aspects of the status of the migrant that need to be examined in order to develop a theory of the mi­grant as a new figure of the political subject. Unlike any of the traditional po­litical figures (sovereign, citizen, friend, enemy, etc.), the figure of the migrant is less defined in terms of its being, its identity or place than in terms of its displacement, disidentification and placelessness. 
Thomas Nail’s book The Figure of the Migrant, perhaps one of the most inter­esting recent political theoretical accounts of the contemporary status of the migrant, is an attempt to address this lacuna. Refusing to consider the migrant “as a failed citizen” or a citizen in becoming, Nail stresses instead the migrant’s movement as his/her defining feature. In this respect, Nail takes his cue from Hardt and Negri who, in famously claiming that the 21st century will be the cen­tury of migrants, highlight not only one of the main aspects of our time, namely the incredible increase in human mobility, but also put into focus the migrant as a political figure. While seeking to examine the economic, social, political and historical conditions under which the figure of the migrant emerges today, Hardt and Negri mark a break with the traditional understanding of the figure of the migrant. Perceived primarily from the perspective of the state and thus as secondary or derivative with respect to place-bound citizenship, the figure of the migrant, insofar as it is defined through its movement, without being rooted in a given social network of relations, is thus considered as a figure without history or symbolic existence, to the extent precisely that, as Hegel remarka­bly clearly pointed out, “all the value that human beings possess, all of their spiritual reality, they have through the State alone”71. In contrast to this tradi­tional way of thinking human mobility, Hardt and Negri consider the figure of the migrant from the perspective of movement in order to emphasise the idea of mobility as a creative, although imperceptible social force. In challenging thereby both traditional conceptions of migration and politics, Hardt and Negri put into focus the policitality of migration as such which allows them to rede­fine the migrant as a new figure of the political subject. 
In the same vein, Nail sets out from “the primacy of movement and flow that define the migrant,” in order to explore “the capacity of the migrant to create an alternative to social expulsion.”72 It is the perspective of movement that allows Nail to designate the migrant as a novel figure of the political subject. Indeed, for him, the migrant is “the political figure of our time.”73 While we are reluctant to follow Nail in stating that “the figure of the migrant has always been the true motive force of social history,”74 we would extend our inquiry into migrants’ struggles not only beyond examination of the concept of sovereignty defined as the agency of the undecidability of bio- and necropolitics, but also beyond the questionable primacy of mobility and movement. 
Citizenship: A demand for being 
There are many modalities in which the inclusion/exclusion divide is chal­lenged by migrants’ struggles. However, the approach that opens such a per­spective from which the inclusionary and exclusionary bordering practices in Europe can be questioned – inasmuch as they involve what Balibar terms the polysemic character of borders implying “different experiences of the law, the 
71 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. L. Rauch, Hackett, New York 1988, p. 42. 
72 Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2015, pp. 3–7. (Emphasis in the original). 
73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., p. 7. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
civil administration, the police and elementary rights” for different groups of people75 – is one that considers migrants’ struggles as being always situated and context-specific. Thus, just as divisions and segregations enacted in Europe’s borderspaces materialise in various spatial and temporal modalities in order to determine who belongs to Europe’s community and who must be excluded, migrants’ struggles mobilise, in life-threatening conditions, various spatiali-ties and transversal temporalities in order to create alternative spatial arrange­ments, literally “other,” heterotopic spaces76 in which their being “otherwise” can only be re-invented. It is precisely in such heterotopic spaces created within Europe through the migrants’ struggles themselves that the idea of Europe cen­tred around peace, unity, and humanity, finds itself radically put into question. Foucault can help us to understand how a fragile, provisory “we” is created through migrants’ resistance. According to Foucault, 
the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the “we” must not be previ­ous to the question; it can only be the result – and the necessarily temporary re­sult – of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it.77 
The possibility of becoming-other, according to Foucault, depends on our abil­ity to “imagine and to build up what we could be,” to the extent precisely that “the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”78 This refusal or, rather, this setting in motion the practice of desubjectivation is precisely what is involved in migrants resistance today. Although Ranciere‘s conceptualisation of politics is in many respects opposite to Foucault‘s under­standing of politics in terms of power and resistance, the bringing together of 197 both perspectives allows us to explore some of the most interesting modalities of migrants‘ struggle. As Ranciere himself points to some of the key divergences between his understanding of politics and Foucault‘s notion of biopolitics, the question of politics, for him, “begins when the status of the subject able and 
75 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 81. 76 See Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Diacritics, no. 16 (1986), pp. 22– 27. 77 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel 
Foucualt,” in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), Penguin, London 1991, p. 385. 78 Michel Foucualt, “The Subject of Power,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), p. 785. 
ready to concern itself with the community becomes an issue.”79 And while for Foucault, as Ranciere reads him, the question of political subjectivation is not central to his understanding of politics that revolves around the question of power, for him, by contrast, politics is primarily a question of knowing which parts of society are capable of counting for something, and which ones are not. “Politics,” according to Ranciere, “is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it.”80 
To formulate the question of emancipatory politics in terms of “political sub­jects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscriptions of the count of the uncounted,”81 means, according to Ranciere, to acknowledge that the prop­er place for emancipatory politics is the very terrain in which the system of the dominant divisions between included/excluded operates, a system that radi­cal political theorists characterise alternatively as a system of representation, identification, or counting. At present, however, this question of counting the uncountable, crucial for emancipatory politics, cannot be raised at all to the extent that globalisation means that everybody is always already included. If everybody is included, this obviously means that the exclusion of the uncount­ed has become invisible. Which is why the problem we are facing today is not that of opening the closure, but, rather, of making this supposedly all-inclusive universe legible. It is on this situation that migration, and more specifically migrants’ struggles, can shed some light. 
For something has radically changed with the globalisation of the capitalist dis­course. Globalisation, in this respect, does not mean simply that nothing is left in its place as no trope seems to be capable of controlling the unending move­ment of displacements and substitutions. Indeed, in the current space of dis-cursivity, the notion of place itself is strangely out of place. What is more, with the category of place thus rendered inoperative, it is one of the key categories of emancipatory politics, the notion of lack, necessary for the subject to sustain itself in the symbolic Other, which as a result becomes obsolete. There are two structural consequences of this. The first is that, contrary to the sovereignty dis­
79 Jacques Ranciere, “Biopolitics or Politics? ”, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran, Continuum, London 2010, p. 93. 
80 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, University of Min­nesota Press, Minneapolis 2004, pp. 26–7. Jacques Ranciere, “Onzes theses sur la politique,” Filozofski vestnik, no. 2 (1997), p. 99. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
course, which assigns its identity to the subject; in the capitalist discourse the subject appears to be disidentified. By situating, in the place of the agent, the barred subject that is essentially guideless, caught in an infinite quest for the missing signifier, the one that could at last name him, the capitalist discourse exploits the lack it installs in the subject as a way of reproducing itself. 
The cunning of the capitalist discourse then consists in exploiting the structure of the desiring subject: by manipulating his/her desire, i.e. by reducing it to de­mand, the capitalist discourse creates the illusion that, thanks to scientific de­velopment and the market, it is able to provide the subject with the complement of being that s/he lacks by transforming the subject’s lack of being into the lack of having. In this view, “having” is considered to be a cure for the lack of being of the subject of the capitalist discourse. The second structural consequence is that the subject of the capitalist discourse is completed by products thrown on the market. That is why Lacan named the subject of the capitalist discourse, the subject that is the embodiment of the lack of being, “the proletarian”. As the dominant structure of social relations, the capitalist discourse provides the conditions for an obscure subjectivation that depends on the conversion of the surplus-value, that is to say, any product thrown on the market, into the cause of the subject’s desire. It is precisely this indistinction between the surplus-val­ue and the surplus-enjoyment that makes it possible for the capitalist produc­tion of “whatever objects” to capture, indeed, to enslave the subject’s desire, its eternal “this is not it!”. 
What is thus put into question is precisely the social bond. Or to be more pre­cise, the social bond that exists today is one presented under the form of dis­persed individuals, which is another name for the dissolution of all links and the unbinding of all bonds. Both of these features of the capitalist discourse 199 could, then, be brought together in a single syntagm of the generalised pro-letarisation. In the words of Lacan, “there is only one social symptom: every individual is really a proletarian, in other words has no discourse with which to make a social bond.”82Ironically,proletarisationremainsasymptomofcon-temporary society. Only, this proletarisation is of a particular kind, one that, by being articulated with the intrinsically metonymic nature of the capitalist discourse, has lost all its subversive effectiveness, all its revolutionary poten­
82 Jacques Lacan, “La troiseme,” Lettres de l’Ecole freudienne de Paris, no. 10, 1975, p. 187. 
tial. This contemporary proletarisation can shed some light on the difficulties of contemporary emancipatory politics in finding a way out of the present im­passe. 
As noted, capitalist globalisation does not abolish borders, it makes them in­visible by blurring inside-outside distinctions that enable the placing of ex­clusions that occur within and beyond European space. It is here, obviously, that questions of how to filter, regulate, monitor, or deter migration reveals the complexity of the border issue in contemporary Europe. For the question of how to govern migration mobility ultimately revolves around the issues of the supposedly non-existent divisions between inclusion and exclusion, belonging and non-belonging. Thus, to take the freedom of movement seriously, the fun­damental presupposition of migration, already implies that we should view mi­grant mobility as being inherently political. It is political precisely to the extent that it necessarily challenges the demarcation that defines the realm of belong­ing and non-belonging, the realm of citizenship and the realm of non-citizen­ship, ultimately, the realm of existence and the realm of nonexistence. By put­ting into question the belonging/non-belonging dichotomy, migration resist­ance undermines the supposed normality of division that includes some and excludes others. From this perspective, the starting point of migrants’ struggles is the irreducible gap between the subject’s being, his/her bare life, and his/her symbolic existence, or, as in the case of refugees and asylum seekers, inexist­ence or non-existence. The crucial question for every migration struggle worthy of the name is of course: How can that come into being which, within the exist­ing European border dispositive or regime, does not exist or is discarded as not really existing? 
200 Here, we will briefly discuss a case of migrants’ struggles, that of the struggle for citizenship of the “Non-Citizens” in Germany.83 By refusing to be defined by 
83 For information about the Non-Citizens struggle see, for example, “March for Freedom”, General Flyer, Strasbourg-Brussels May-June 2014; Non-Citizen Struggle Congress Munich, “Frist Statement”, http://refugeecongress.wordpress.com; Non-Citizens, “On the position of asylum-seekers and asylym seekers” struggles in modern societies”, http://regugeet­entaction.net; Non-Citizens, “Fifth Stetement”, http://www.refugeetentaction.net/index. php?lang=en; Non-citizens, “Refugees Revolution Demonstration,” http://refugeesrev­olution.blogsport.de/downloads; Non-Citizens, “Striking Non-Citizens of Rindermarkt 
– Analysis and Persectives!”, http://www.refugeetentaction.net/index.php?lang=en; 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
a depoliticized figure, the victim, and choosing instead to be something other than mere survivors, the Non-Citizens resistance represents a challenge to the current borderisation of Europe, combining a practice of economic apartheid, protecting the “citizen” from the (criminalised) “migrant”, with a deliberate policy of deterrence indifferent to the loss of human lives that are deemed to be expendable. By calling for equality, political rights, and inclusion, the Non-Citizens’ acts of “unbordering” render visible and challenge those socio-politi­cal conditions that have forced them into “non-citizenship”, into non-existence. What we find particularly interesting in the case of the Non-Citizen movement is the way in which they publicly staged their politicality, demanding to be heard and seen as political subjects, in particular by staging their demands for citizenship and the rights that follow therefrom. 
At first sight, it may well be strange if not counter-intuitive to consider their demands for citizenship as politically emancipatory, indeed, constitutive for a radical politics today. Presented as a cut separating the pole of full rights from the pole of complete illegalisation and invisibility, citizenship constitutes that technology that renders certain populations as legitimate bearers of rights, and other populations as inexistent. Dimitris Papadopoulos, Nicholas De Genova, and Martina Tazzioli are among those “Autonomy of Migration” scholars who are sceptical of the emancipatory impact of the citizenship demands.84 Considering citizenship primarily as a divisionary policy, De Genova, one of the most prom­inent the AoM theorists, highlights the deadly effects of borderisation at the margins of Europe, in order to draw the following logicaly irrefutable conclu­sion: “if there were no borders, […] there would indeed be neither citizens nor migrants”85 Rather than striving to expand the limits of citizenships, the AoM 
201 
Non-Citizens, “European States are not in the position to render a judgement about our forced migration!”, Flyer, 2014; Non-Citizens, “No Justice No Peace”, Leaflet (2014). 
84 See Martina Tazzioli, “Border displacements. Challenging the politics of rescue between Mare Nostrum and Triton”, Migration Studies, 4 (1/2016), pp. 1–19; Martina Tazzioli, Spaces of Governmentality. Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings, Rowman and Littlefield, London 2015; Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, “After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organistiona ontology and mobile commons”, Citizenship Studies, 17 (2/2013), pp. 178–196; De Genova, Nicholas, (ed.) The Borders of “Europe”. Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2017. 
85 Nicholas De Genova, “Extremities and Regularities: Regulatory Regimes and the Spectacle of Immigration Enforcement,” in Y. Janssen et al (eds.), The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe, Rowman and Littlefield, London 2015, p. 13. 
scholars examine the political, which is to say, emancipatory potential of the freedom of movement, a “defiant remainder that the creative powers of human life […] must always exceed every political regime,”86 in order to put into focus the freedom of movement as a force capable not only of changing the existing situation but also of making (new) worlds. 
The AoM theorists certainly have a point since all-inclusive citizenship is con­tradictory, in the same way as the notion of a borderless nation-state is con­tradictory. In view of this scepticism vis-a-vis citizenship it is all the more im­portant to figure out what exactly is at stake in the Non-Citizens’ demand for citizenship. If Ranciere’s conception of politics provides precious indications that help us to understand the rather exceptional political phenomenon that represents the Non-Citizens’ struggle, this is because it sheds light not only on their particular mode of struggle but also on the enactment of Europe’s border policy that relegates them to the public invisibility and inexistence. In openly confronting the state and its police in order to provoke a response to their ac­tions and political demands, Non-Citizens set in motion what Ranciere desig­nates as the “process of a wrong, in the construction of a dissensus.”87 Through various strategies of resistance that include stating openly their demands, hunger-striking, occupying public spaces, sewing their lips together, etc., Non-Citizens have practiced political disruptions that resonate with Ranciere’s conceptualisation of dissensus thought as “a division inserted into “common sense”: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given.” Thus, just as Olimpe de Gouges and feminist activists in the time of the French Revolution, Non-Citizens could be considered to act “as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and that had the rights that they had not.” In so doing, they have succeeded in creating “a dissensus: the 202 putting of two worlds in one and the same world.”88In setting in motion of a “process of a wrong” via “an intervention in the visible and the sayable,”89 Non-Citizens could be said to have acted as political subjects. Thus, if politics, as 
86 Nicholas De Genova, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement,” in Nicolas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, p. 59. 
87 Jacques Ranciere, “Who is the subject of the rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2–3/2004), p. 69. 
88 Ibid. 89 Jacques Ranciere, “Ten Theses On Politics,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, p. 37. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
Ranciere understands it, begins with “the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one”,90 the intervention in the distribution of the sen­sible, organised by what Ranciere calls “the police”, a structuring principle that attempts to include that which is by classifying and allocating ways of being, seeing and saying to different parts of the existing community, a political sub­ject, as Ranciere defines it is nothing but “a capacity for staging scenes of dis­sensus.”91 Against the logic of the police as a distribution of that which is there in order to exhaust that which can be, “politics proper” emerges as “a gap in the sensible itself”, an intervention that “makes visible that which had no reason to be seen”.92 
What is worth remarking on regarding the Non-Citizens’ struggle is the perform-ative aspect of their interventions that construct “the encounter between two heterogeneous processes,” the policy’s process of governing and the process or rather the demonstration of equality. Hence, Non-Citizens bring, through their acts of dissensus, the logic of the police and the logic of the politics of emancipation into conflict. Put otherwise, Non-Citizens, being those who take part there where they are not supposed to, in so doing verify “the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.”93 Non-Citizens in acting politically as those who, strictly speaking, are not “qualified” to act, as they are not German citizens, in acting nevertheless, therefore mark an antagonistic division between citizenship and non-citizenship, bringing thereby into focus the always-existing condition of equality. On this reading, that follows closely Ranciere’s theory of politics and equality, their demand to be included as mem­bers of a political body in Germany, constitutes the equality test in Ranciere’s sense, since through their demand they demonstrate their equality to anyone else (German citizens). The Non-Citizens’ struggle to be included as members of the German citizenry demonstrates how the excluded, invisible, non-exist-203 ent can claim and enact their status as political subjects, while being socially and politically marginalised, illegalised, or even criminalised. From such a perspective it is then possible to claim citizenship without necessarily legally possessing the status or even believing that this aim is achievable in order to 
90 Ibid. 
91 Ranciere, “Who is the subject of the rights of Man,” p. 69. 92 Ranciere, “Ten Theses On Politics,” p. 38. 93 Jacques Ranciere, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” The Identity in Question, 
no. 61 (1992), p. 58. 
produce a political impact in contemporary Europe, for what is crucial in such public demands for citizenship is the visibilisation of the inside/outside divide. 
In revealing the antagonistic division between citizenship and non-citizen­ship, German Non-Citizen activists constitute themselves as political subjects in Ranciere’s sense. That is to say, by enacting their capacity to stage scenes of dissensus they bring up two supposedly incompatible worlds: the world of rights, visibility, and existence, and the world of no rights, invisibility, and non-existence. In aiming to include by force in the German political community that which does not seem to belong there, Non-Citizens practice what Ranciere refers to as a “heterology”, defined as a form of political subjectivisation that begins by the act of a refusal of “right names” assigned to the speaking being by the police order. As Ranciere argues, what political subjectivisation involves is 
never the simple assertion of an identity; it is always at the same time, the de­nial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy. Policy is about “right” names, names that pin people down to their place and work. Politics is about “wrong” names – misnomers that articulate a gap and connect with a wrong. Second, it is a demonstration, and a demonstration always sup­poses an other even if that other refuses evidence or argument. […] Third, the logic of subjectivization always entails an impossible identification.94 
From this perspective, the Non-Citizens demand for gaining the status of citi­zens is at the same time a demand for gaining an “other name”, better, for gain­ing “the name”, one that enables all other names: citizen. Citizen is a name that allows them to reject the names that were given them insofar as, being speak­ing beings who are allocated to the places of invisibility and inexistence, these 204 names were given to them as “not-really existing”. In calling themselves “Non-Citizens”, they give themselves a misnomer or a wrong name, to use Ranciere’s terms, an ambivalent name in order to mark that all other names that have en­tailed their social, political, in short, their symbolic existence, have been lost for them. Thus, in choosing for themselves a non-name as a political name – be­cause they are considered as “an other that has no other name becomes the ob­ject of fear and rejection”95 – they re-pose the question that signals, according 
94 Ibid., p. 62. 95 Ibid., p. 61. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
to Ranciere, the act of political subjectivation: “Do we or do we not belong to the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this?”96 
As we have seen, politics in Ranciere’s conceptualisation is not to be determined by a certain type of political action, nor a specific demand, nor by the involve­ment of a particular group (the “excluded”, for instance), but depends instead on the active appearance of a singular demand temporarily identified with the universal claim to be recognised. Such a demand is the demand for freedom of movement insofar as advocating and practicing it is based on the desire to create conditions that allow anyone to move and reside anywhere for whatever reasons. Indeed, the emergence of politics, we would argue, is the moment at which the existing socio-symbolic order is challenged not by specific, concrete content, whatever that might be, but by the fact that the demand is perceived by the state to be a sign of an insatiable More! that no amount of giving or con­cessions on the part of the political Other could satisfy. The mere fact that the demand could persist, insist beyond all particular content, that it could live on despite its fulfilment requires – at least in politics – that we make a rigorous distinction between two structurally different demands. There are indeed two quite distinct demands: a demand for having and a demand for being. 
The elementary form of demand is situated at the level of having. Whenever we demand something, whatever that might be, we not merely express our lack of having but also suppose that the big Other, the State, has ‘it’. Every demand, in­asmuch as it is formulated in terms of the lack of having, is directed at the Other that is supposed to have what we lack. By making the subject dependent on the Other – since in order to obtain what one is lacking it is necessary to presuppose an Other that lacks nothing – a demand for ‘having’ is therefore constitutively alienating. A demand for ‘being’, in contrast, is a demand that, properly speak-205 ing, makes no claims addressed to the Other as the one who ‘has’. Rather, it is articulated to the Other’s lack. To take again the Non-Citizens’ demand for citizenship: such a demand is paradoxical since it cannot even be perceived, received, as a demand by the state. Instead, it is considered to be foolish, unre­alistic, or utopian if not simply irrational. 
96 Ibid., p. 60. 
The mere possibility of expressing such a demand indicates that one cannot find one’s place in the Other, such as it is. And, indeed, non-citizens cannot exist in a socio-political space in which social and political existence depends on one’s status as a citizen. The crucial point here is that whereas a demand for having allows the Other to gain a tighter grip on the subject, a demand for being involves the subject’s separation from the Other. It is for this reason that a demand for being is intrinsically subversive, revolutionary. 
As such, a demand for being is a paradoxical demand. It is paradoxical, first of all because it can never be expressed as such. Strictly speaking, a demand for being cannot be articulated at all. Indeed, if it were articulated it would have to be articulated in the language of the Other. And, indeed, political intervention, as Ranciere understands it, i.e., the bringing of two incompatible worlds into one, is grounded on “a logic of the other”.97 This is the reason why a demand for being is always ‘dressed up’ in a demand for having. In a certain sense, it can only assert itself as a demand for something, whatever that might be, a having which is a stand-in for the unsayable demand for being: the Non-Citizens’ de­mand for citizenship. A demand for being is, in the strictest sense, a demand for an impossible having, that is to say, a demand which, under the existing positive social order, has to remain unfulfilled. 
A demand for being is a paradoxical demand for yet another reason. On one hand, a demand for ‘being’, as any other demand, is addressed to the Other. Only here the very fact that it is a demand for being, for citizenship, signifies that there is no room for the subject in this Other, to which the subject address­es its request. A demand for being is addressed to the Other by an inexistent element of sorts, those who are denied an identity in a given social order, that 206 part of society that is in excess of the classification, unaccounted for by the dominant discourse. Which is why Non-Citizens occupy public spaces in order to make their invisibility visible, their absence present. In this view, a demand for being is not a demand for something in particular, the satisfaction of which would depend on the Other’s ‘good will’, for it is quite clear that the satisfac­tion of the demand for being, for instance, the demand (say, for citizenship) made by the inexistent part of society, those who are not entitled to citizenship, one which is uncounted and unaccounted for in the given structure of assigned 
97 Ibid. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
places, would have the effect of making the Other disappear, a disappearance by which the whole of its order would be annihilated, too. To regularise all non-citizens, obviously, would be the end of the nation-state. To follow the log­ic of the Non-Citizens’ demand for collective regularisation would lead to the abolishment of the existing nation-state space insofar as it is grounded on the division between belonging/non-belonging. 
This means, of course, that to find one’s place in a given symbolic order, if this place is not already provided by the Other itself and assigned by it to the sub­ject, therefore requires that the subject bore its way into the Other, to carve a place for itself in the Other and situate itself in that place. There is perhaps no better illustration for such an inexistent place created by the act of political sub-jectivation than what Foucault called “heterotopia”. In occupying public spac­es Non-Citizens transform them into heterotopic spaces that have “the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.”98 In intruding in public spaces, Non-citizens produce heterotopias that displace or distort the “normal” function of public spaces and in so doing call the presumed distinctness of spaces into question. 
It is, therefore, only to the extent that being itself is at stake in the demand for being that the mere fact of expressing such a demand can bring about a radi­cal modification of the connection between the subject and the Other, refugees and asylum seekers, and the state. A demand is, as such, always addressed to the Other. All demands call for a response from the Other. This explains the panic on the part of the German authorities and the excessive use of force in the eviction of the “occupied zones”. What this immediately implies is that for a demand to be recognised by the politico-social Other in the first place, it has 207 to be reduced, downgraded to a “lack of having.” This may be why in an era of a proliferation of demands, all these demands, inasmuch as they are made in the name of belonging to some already existing group, in the name of some communal identity, such as is represented in the current governmental regime, can, in principle, be acknowledged by the latter. 
98 Foucualt, “Of other spaces,” p. 24. 
We would therefore conclude that it is this particularity of a demand, its funda­mental dependence on the Other, that a demand for being subverts by revealing that a demand issued from some unthinkable place, literally a non-place, to be precise, since it is made by an instance which, being a waste product of the constitution of the social order, cannot, by definition, have a place within it. A demand for being cannot be recognised by the Other as a legitimate claim since it is made by something which, from the standpoint of the Other, counts as nothing – this is exactly the position of the Non-Citizens as the actual ‘un­counted’, a remaindered excess, that which, from the standpoint of the Other, is considered to be inexistent. This means that in order to make itself be there, 
i.e. to be included in the Other’s order, the subject first has to make a place in which to inscribe its being. For instance, by intruding corporeally – through the occupation of public spaces, through the setting up of tents or lieux de vie, spaces not deemed theirs. One might even add here that there is no demand for being that does not in some sense create the space in which it is to be inscribed. One can therefore argue that the emancipatory subject speaks out or makes its demand for being from the point at which the Other falls silent. 
However, no demand can be made if one does not exist. Strictly speaking, there cannot be a subject of any (political) demand except through a proclamation of existence: “nos sumus, nos existimus”,99 a proclamation that signifies that something which, for the Other, does not exist at all, which was therefore mute, starts to speak out. The subject speaks out as if it already existed – as a citizen endowed with certain rights that follow from this legal status. In truth, the dec­laration “we are, we exist” can be issued at the moment in which the subject who claims to exist, does not yet exist, because, in the socio-political configu­ration established by the Other, there is no possible place for it to be situated in. 
Hence, the subject can speak out only by making holes in a given order of power, or better still, by adding something that, with regard to this order, is regarded as superfluous, in excess, a disturbing surplus that should not be there in the first place, indeed, that which, from the moment the Other acknowledged its existence, would cause the disappearance of that Other. In some sense, there is no appropriate, adequate regulation, directive, measure, or law that would al­low the massive regularisation of non-citizens that now find themselves in the 
99 This formulation is borrowed from Ranciere’s Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, p. 36. 
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics 
zone of illegality or criminalisation. The massive recognition of the demand for citizenship, the regularisation of their illegal status, would mean that the nation-state as we know it is done. In this sense, we would argue that when­ever the demand for being succeeds in forcing the socio-political Other to ac­knowledge it, this necessarily involves a complete reconfiguration of the ex­isting socio-political framework, thus engendering a new Other; ultimately, it involves the creation of a new order. This is perhaps the most precious lesson to be drawn from migrants struggles. This would imply that, instead of viewing migrants as passive, vulnerable victims, we should view them as political sub­jects, as agents of the construction of a new, non-segregative European commu­nity rather than its constitutive “outside”. 

Tadej Troha* 

Living in a Parallel Universe: From Brussels to Orbán, and On1 
“This time it’s different,” yet again 
The European Union, as a political project epitomising the idea of the end of history, has spent many decades bringing in the new and soon-to-be Member States to join the common end-point of democracy, but has failed to end the end, so to speak, in trying to pass over the problem that every democracy is primarily concerned with. As a supranational political entity, it has thus far failed to find a technical solution that would convincingly link the “by” and “of” the European people. Accordingly, it has become increasingly obvious that merely shifting the attention to the “for the people”, highlighting the many benefits of European integration, will be of no avail. 
Therefore, for many members of the Brussels thought collective, well versed in endemic self-indoctrinated optimism, the 2014 European elections were seen as the turning point we have all been waiting for. The reason for enthusiasm lay in the informal and essentially supplementary mechanism that was first proposed in a resolution of the European Parliament in November 2012: 
[O]n 22 November 2012 […] the EP adopted a resolution in which it urged the European political parties to “nominate candidates for the Presidency of the Commission”. Its supporters hoped that the rivalry between lead candidates, 211 and their corresponding sets of political preferences, would mobilize citizens and increase the participation rate in European elections. It was furthermore hoped that this kind of competition would also help giving the elections a 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea 
and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy 
more pan-European character and would perhaps even assist in creating a real ‘European public space’.2 
“This time it’s different”, went the slogan of the campaign that followed in 2014. This time, went the pledge, the elections would set the ground for a more trans­parent, more inclusive, more integrated, in short, more ‘European’ European Union. However, the experiment – now termed the Spitzenkandidaten system – produced an ambiguous result. While it ended up in one of the proposed can­didates ultimately being appointed to the position of Commission President, it nevertheless failed to significantly boost the democratic appearance, which it was designed to generate in the first place. However, as the limited success of the innovation was perceived to be a result of contingent circumstances – from the relatively short duration of the campaign to the “sheer novelty of the pro­cess”3 – the experiment seemed worthy of a second chance.  
The Spitzenkandidaten process of 2014 was a political innovation aimed at offer­ing European citizens clarity on the names of contenders for the top executive post in the European Union and their electoral programmes. In this sense, it fulfilled its purpose and led to a stronger and more mature relationship between the insti­tutions. It contributed to making European democracy more complete. However, this remains a work in progress. For 2019 and beyond, more effort is needed to improve the Spitzenkandidaten model, by ensuring that campaigns are active and dynamic. This is first and foremost the responsibility of the European political parties, and relies in part on their relationship with national constituents. The objective at the end of the day is for the European elections to be about European issues: about the challenges that Europeans face jointly in the Union. More than sixty years into the project and at a historic time of relaunching the Union in a smaller setting, this is what both the institution and the citizens deserve.4 
2 Hilde Reiding and Fons Meijer, “This time it’s different’ – the European lead candidate pro­cedure of 2014 and its historical background”, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 39 (1/2019), p. 76. 
3 Laura Tilindyte, “Election of the President of the European Commission. Understanding the Spitzenkandidaten Process”, 2019, p. 6. Available at http://www.europarl.europa. eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2018/630264/EPRS_BRI(2018)630264_EN.pdf (accessed 20 Oc­tober 2019). 
4 European Political Strategy Centre, “Building on the Spitzenkandidaten Model Bolster­ing Europe’s Democratic Dimension”, 2018, p. 10. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/epsc/ 
living in a parallel universe: from brussels to orbán, and on 
Hence, the goal of the 2019 reprise was self-evident. Even though some of the parliamentary groups showed early signs of refusing to play by the same rules (the Greens and the European Left each nominated two and Alde nominated no less than seven ‘lead candidates’), the illusion of the Spitzenkandidaten process having a binding nature had to be further amplified. In other words, not only was it necessary to strengthen the link between political groups and their lead­ing personas, but also the connection between the proposed lead candidates, the election results, and the future president of the European Commission had to be promoted as being obligatory: one of the faces that helped European citi­zens to establish their supranational political identity would ultimately become their (European) leader. 
Due to the opaque structure of the European political space, it is almost impos­sible to identify the agency behind this de-subjectivised, meta-biased propagan­da; it is almost impossible to identify the exact protagonists of the injunction not only to cast a vote and hence recognise oneself as a European citizen, but also to demonstrate a strictly ‘European’ motivation for voting. However, the message was clear enough. While the task of the political parties was to nominate their respective Spitzenkandidaten, the task of the electorate was to provisionally fall for the illusion, i.e. to act as if – with the idea of lead candidates – Europe had finally found a simple, yet effective, tool that would overcome the internal con­tradictions of the electoral process. 
It should come as no surprise that the majority of citizens still managed to stay immune to the interpellation, and either did not vote at all or kept the focus on their particular national contexts. The better-informed voters, however, espe­cially those who took the team building of the European political spirit serious­ly, had quite some multitasking to do. Besides keeping in mind both levels at which their electoral decisions would be evaluated, they also carried the burden of actively ignoring the formal vagueness of the procedure, of performing a con­structive disavowal of their own better knowledge. As regards the formal rules of the procedure, things were much more obscure. 
sites/epsc/files/epsc_-_road_to_sibiu_-_building_on_the_spitzenkandidaten_model. pdf#page=5 (accessed 20 October 2019). 
Once the parliamentary elections have been held, the European party which is able to command a majority governing coalition would likely [sic] see its spitzen­kandidat likely [sic] become the Commission President. The European Council proposes a candidate for the Presidency, “taking into account the elections to the European Parliament” and under the expectation that the candidate put for­ward by the party which wins the most seats will be “first to be considered”. The European Parliament then votes on the candidate, requiring a majority for them to be confirmed as Commission President. If the candidate does not obtain the required majority, the European Council proposes a new candidate within one month, to be elected by the same procedure.5 
A slip of the pen that – likely – occurred in the first sentence of this summary, published on the Euronews website just before the elections took place, is very telling. The ‘likelihood’ of any lead candidate becoming the Commission pres­ident was, in fact, highly conditional due to the rather flexible wording of the first part of the Article 17(7) of the Lisbon Treaty: 
Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the Commission. This candidate shall be elected by the European Parliament by a majority of its component members. If he does not obtain the required majority, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall within one month pro­pose a new candidate who shall be elected by the European Parliament following the same procedure. 
Notwithstanding the fact that the Lisbon Treaty (or, to be more precise, the amendments from 2009) brought forward a significant shift in the inter-insti­tutional relations in favour of the European Parliament, there was still “no au­tomaticity in this process,” as Donald Tusk summarised the discussion on the issue of lead candidates held by the Council in February 2018.6 On the one hand, 
5 Luke Hurst, “European Elections 2019: What is a spitzenkandidat”. Available at https:// www.euronews.com/2019/04/24/european-elections-2019-what-is-a-spitzenkandidat (ac­cessed 20 October 2019). 
6 “Informal meeting of the 27 heads of state or government, 23 February 2018”. Available at https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/european-council/2018/02/23/ (accessed 20 October 2019). 
living in a parallel universe: from brussels to orbán, and on 
the European Council is obliged to “take into account” the election results, but on the other, it is formally fully justified in choosing what exactly it is that has to be taken into account. 
In retrospect, the 2014 appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker, which at that time appeared to confirm the validity of the experiment, rather turned out to be a contingent exception to the rule. However, since the exception obviously took place before any rule had been established, the European public mistook it for a necessary consequence of the initial decision of the European People’s Party (EPP) being subsequently confirmed at the ballot boxes. There was hardly any­body who genuinely believed that Juncker’s election in any way testified to the political class having conformed to the will of the European people. Still, the sheer appearance of the automaticity of the process offered the minimum mate­rial support for its 2019 repetition. 
Some government leaders had serious objections against greater EP influence or politicizing the Commission’s presidency, which is why Juncker’s nomination by the European Council was accompanied by a declaration in which the European Council declared that it intended to “consider the process for the appointment of the President of the European Commission for the future, respecting the European treaties.” However, informal institutional changes that have emerged between formal treaty revisions are notoriously difficult to overturn. Several European political parties have already started preparing a procedure to select their lead candidate for the 2019 elections, and among scholars and commentators, it is also generally expected that the precedent set in 2014 is unlikely to be ignored in the next round of European elections and Commission appointments.7 
Most of the better-informed voters – who, somewhat paradoxically, were the 215 only ones prone to fall for the illusion in the first place – knew well enough that, on paper, there was no guarantee that the process would follow the script promoted by the European ideological apparatuses and confirmed (to say the least) by the “scholars and commentators” some months before the elections. However, in these circumstances, the balance between faith and knowledge – between trust in the authority of the 2014 precedent and the awareness of an ill-defined formal procedure that did not allow for a definitive answer – was 
7 Reiding and Meijer, “’This time it’s different’”, p. 78. 
difficult to keep. As a consequence, the ones who insisted on rejecting the naive position predominantly turned cynical – thereby confusing an indefinite out­come for another version of false certainty. In any event, at that point the deci­sion was still abstract – and so was the illusion. 
As the campaign advanced, things started to change. Noticing the lack of en­gagement and enthusiasm of the official EPP candidate Manfred Weber, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the likely winners of the elections had al­ready changed their minds and effectively abandoned the agreed procedure – thereby re-separating the elections from the Spitzenkandidaten contest before it even began. However, it was precisely the signs of a detour from what should have been the most probable course of events that – perhaps unexpectedly – gal-vanised the illusion proper. The very fact that most of the other lead candidates seemed not only more engaged in the campaign, but also far more ‘presiden­tial’ than the candidate who represented the political group we all knew would, in fact, win the elections – this very divergence – created the impression that something real was nonetheless going on. In these brief moments during the televised debates between the candidates, it, indeed, became possible to start visualising the future, in which some of the Spitzengespenste on the screen, who had no chances of winning the elections, would somehow play a central part in European politics. And it was at these brief moments precisely – the moments the illusion started producing real effects – that we finally adopted the illusion, which was never our own, and immersed ourselves in the parallel universe of a non-existent political entity. 
However, as the European Council, after weeks of negotiations, finally adopted the decision to nominate for the post the German Secretary of Defence Ursula von der Leyen, the effect was hardly one of relief. On the one hand, the inter­vention of realpolitik could be seen as a sobering disenchantment; but on the other, knowing that some of the protagonists of the realpolitik were involved in both stages of the process, the end effect was far more dubious. Bringing in the voters to take part in building up the parallel universe, instead of realistically facing the impossibilities and formalising the electoral process beforehand, was bad enough in itself. What was even worse, however, was to abort the particular process without even trying to face the consequences and, for that matter, as­sume responsibility for the objective deception of the citizens that arose out of the Brussels ideologues’ private Schwärmerei. 
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Incidentally, while most of the European politicians involved were busy making the Spitzenkandidaten fiasco unhappen, the most reasonable response came from a perhaps unexpected source – the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. 
[T]heleadcandidate – or Spitzenkandidat – system has not gone away, but has simply returned to its proper place. For it’s obvious that the strategic-political di­rection of the European Union is not determined by the Commission, but by the leaders of the Member States’ democratically elected governments: heads of state or prime ministers. The Commission does not need to pursue an independent programme because, even after the most recent election, the Council of Ministers again adopted a document setting out the direction for it to follow. In any case, strategic decisions are not to be taken in the Commission but in the Council, on which the elected prime ministers sit. So the point of the Spitzenkandidat, of the lead candidate, was never to somehow deprive the Council of the right to appoint the President of the Commission, which it is empowered to do by the Founding Treaty. It was to allow voters the possibility to influence the assignment of an im­portant European position. Therefore the logical approach – and we need to get back to it – is for the European parties to put forward lead candidates, and the candidate of the victorious party to be appointed President of the European Parlia­ment: not of the Commission, but of the European Parliament. And the Commis­sion must remain an organisation subject to the influence of the prime ministers.8 
Having been one of the protagonists in the controversy that effectively ended the EPP candidate’s run for the post9, his seemingly neutral assessment that the Spitzenkandidaten system “simply returned to its proper place” can hardly be considered as particularly genuine. There were several pragmatic reasons for Orbán to seize the opportunity to help undermine the goal of the predominant current of the EPP. For the outcome of the events was not only a blast to the 217 general federalist tendencies in the EU, but has also weakened the position of the formalised supranational structures in the Parliament in favour of the more informal ideological collectives that are, in principle, still based on the nation­
8 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the 30th Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp”, June 27 2019. All speeches available at https://www.kormany.hu/en/the­prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches. 
9 “EPP divorce looms after Orban rejects Weber as Spitzenkandidat”. Available at https:// www.euractiv.com/section/eu-elections-2019/news/epp-divorce-looms-after-orban-re­jects-weber-as-spitzenkandidat/ (accessed 20 October 2019). 
al premises, although not necessarily Eurosceptic.10 Moreover, one could well argue for a completely obverse approach to overcome the deadlock – that is, to introduce new instruments to further strengthen the supranational character of the European institutions, such as transnational lists or direct presidential elections. The latter, at least, would likely resolve all the inconsistencies of the existing procedure – and would, in this respect, easily fit within the category of “logical approaches.” 
However, the ingenuity of Orbán’s intervention, the reason why his suggestion leaves opponents with little to say in response, lies in his ability to propose an obviously biased solution that, in addition, goes against all the progress towards a more ‘integrated Europe’ made in the last decade, but which nonetheless gives an impression of remaining within the given framework of searching for com­mon solutions – by effectively not even being a solution proper. Orbán’s strategy has never been openly anti-European, as some superficial critics, who have nev­er read a line of his speeches, would like to see. While the vulgar Eurosceptics’ reaction to the Spitzenkandidaten debacle would simply be to exit the non­sense, Orbán’s solution holds to the concept but converts it into its opposite. The concept, originally invented to strengthen the supranational element of the Commission, thus becomes a vehicle of the anti-federalist, inter-national, re­verse transformation of the European Union, in which the Commission remains “an organization subject to the influence of prime ministers.” 
Returning to common sense 
For all that, the crux of Orban’s intervention is not the content of the proposal as such, but the immediate effect it produces – that is, the effect of common sense, the effect of bringing back reason and logic by proposing the simplest 
10 As things stand in November 2019, Fidesz’s membership in the EPP remains suspended as a result of a (joint) decision made in March of the same year: “[W]e’re keeping our mem­bership suspended. We, as the Hungarian governing party, haven’t yet decided whether or not we’ll continue our shared life with the European People’s Party. We expect the People’s Party to clarify its views and plans, and then we’ll make a decision on this. […] The ques­tion is whether the new president [Donald Tusk] will be able to stop this process [of drifting to the left]. If so, we have a future together. If not, we’ll have to build another political com­munity.” (“Interview with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the Kossuth Radio programme ‘Good Morning Hungary’”, 22 November 2019). 
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possible solution to the impasse brought about by good intentions having gone bad. Moreover, what makes this intervention even more appealing is the fact that it challenges the initial idea by activating its intrinsic common-sense po­tential – which is what “we have to get back to.” It was perfectly reasonable, Orbán implies, to introduce a democratic procedure that evokes ‘normal’ na­tional elections and thereby ‘normal’ state formation. However, to preserve the initial common sense inscribed in the innovation, we have to stay real and avoid pushing the situation beyond its limits.  
As many have noted, common sense has become one of the central political categories of the late 20th and the 21st centuries, predominantly on the right of the spectrum. 
[A]s democracy has turned into the only acceptable global norm, common sense has become more valued than ever, both conceptually and rhetorically, in public life. What is odder still is that, in the West, the appeal to common sense as the foundation for effective political solutions has […] become increasingly the prov­ince of the right, from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s xenophobic celebrations, starting in the 1980s, of the “good sense” of authentic Frenchmen, to Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s so-called Common Sense Revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s against taxes and big government, to the “common sense conservatism” touted circa 2010 by American pundits Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Glenn Beck, and their Tea Party supporters. In recent years, even the great “American” apostle of common sense, the radical Englishman Tom Paine, has been appropriated as a sage of the right.11 
What makes the contemporary return of common sense a genuine political nov­elty, however, is not so much the fact that the notion, in its reappearance on the 219 political stage, was initially the province of right-wing populism, but that it suc­ceeded – in the second phase – to escape this hold and to migrate towards the centre. Only after common sense gradually liberated itself from its non-essential right-wing attributes could it become a central political category proper – not only an occasional talking point, not only an occasional reference supporting a particular political goal, but a true foundation of a re-configured political space. 
11 Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense. A Political History, Harvard University Press, Cam­bridge (MA) and London 2011, pp. 254–255. 
However, taking the idea of common sense as the foundation, as the point of de­parture for a new political sequence seriously, amounts to recognising the pos­sibility that it might advance in all the three main directions. It can well develop into a new version of right-wing politics, but it can also result in an unexpected reinvigoration of the centre (in the form of centrist populism, as represented by the Slovenian Prime Minister Šarec12) – or, why not, it might become the basis of a leftist political project as well. 
As for Viktor Orbán, appealing to common sense – “józan ész” in Hungarian, which literally translates as “sound mind”, analogous to the German “gesun­der Menschenverstand” or, for that matter, to the Slovenian “zdravi razum” – is by no means the final argument. When he refers to it, his message is not that from this point on we can dispense with all the intellectual effort and simply get things moving – as is the case in vulgar neoliberal politicians who basically see politics as the art of self-silencing (or the art of incessantly declaring the necessity of self-silencing), the aim of which is to enable the economy to flour­ish in full liberty. Orban’s point is slightly more refined. After rediscovering the long-forgotten and, at least in part, intentionally suppressed elements of com­mon sense – which only survived due to the extreme resilience of the few13 – the task should rather be to engage in a strange kind of intellectual fidelity. 
What we call “liberal non-democracy” – in which we have lived our lives over the past twenty years – has come to an end. We can finally return to true democra­cy. We can return to straightforward and frank speech, freed from the paralysing constraints of political correctness; we can return to reality, we can honestly say what the problems of reality are. And we should not look for the answers to these problems through ideology, but through pragmatic and rational creative thinking which is based on the foundations of common sense. I am therefore convinced that 
12 Cf. Tadej Troha, “O sredinskem populizmu”, Problemi, 56 (9-10/2018), pp. 187–203. 
13 In his The Hungarians, Paul Lendvai quotes an excerpt from an old history textbook for grammar schools: “In contrast to the scorn and slander of foreign scholars who portray our ancestors as blood-suckers or a barbarian mob, and who, through prejudice, igno­rance or national antipathy make it their aim to denigrate our nation, every Hungarian can point with proud self-esteem to a natural constitution – dictated by sober common sense, what is more – as early as the ninth century, when better educated and happier peoples in Europe could not boast of a similar unity as a civil constitution.” Paul Lendvai, The Hun­garians, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2003, p. 17; emphasis added. 
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we are living through great days and great times. […] I am also convinced that in recent months the entire European and Western world has taken some important steps towards an intellectual transformation.14 
In the last few years, Orbán has provided numerous examples of how his model of “pragmatic and rational creative thinking, based on the foundation of com­mon sense” should look like in action. For instance, after the decision at the beginning of 2016 by which Austria severely limited the number of immigrants it was prepared to take in, Orbán was quick to welcome the move. However, the praise of Austrians was coupled with a surplus of self-praise that marked the difference between approaching and actually reaching the level of common sense proper. 
Common sense has prevailed, dogmatism has at last capitulated to reality and common sense, and decisions are finally being adopted which we Hungarians and several other European nations have seen as necessary right from the begin­ning; namely that we must finally state that Europe is unable to take in enormous masses of outsiders in an uncontrolled manner, without restrictions. This is the message of the Austrian decision. Their solution is that they have stated a num­ber, the maximum number of people they are able to take in annually, and that is that. We Hungarians have a somewhat different view: we think that the best immigrant is one who does not come here at all, and therefore the best number is zero. Therefore, we pursue a migration policy which of course grants political refugees all the possibilities afforded by international law, but which does not allow anyone else in. The Austrians have taken a decisive step in this direction.15 
This quote perfectly demonstrates the first facet of Orbán’s type of creative think­ing, its intensity – that is, the readiness to push the already shared, the already 221 ‘common’ common sense one step forward, to its very limit, to the point where nothing is left to tell. Here, Orbán’s triumph pertains to his skill of articulating ‘the truth’ behind the mask of a fabricated humanitarian standpoint, which, as a residual, persists also in the modified approach Austria has adopted. A deci­
14 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the conference ‘Reinvigorating Growth, Competi­tiveness and Investment – The EU from the Baltics, through Central Europe, to the Mediter­ranean’”, 10 November 2016; emphasis added. 
15 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán interviewed on Kossuth Rádió’s ‘180 Minutes’ programme”, 22 January 2016; emphasis added. 
sive step in the right direction was taken, and it was clearly affected by the pure common sense already attained in Hungary, but Austria nevertheless failed to achieve the clarity of simply stating the obvious. 
“But has common sense really prevailed? Because the fact is that the Austrians have said this is only the first step. The most important politician related to this topic is not saying the same thing at all.” – “Yes, but we should also celebrate lesser achievements.”16 
The following example exhibits another aspect of this oddly creative reaction-aryism. Again, for Orbán, fidelity to common sense by no means implies that political communication should be reduced to the bare minimum of stating the obvious; having reached the zero point of common sense, the task is rather to invent discursive strategies to inhabit the sphere of the obvious, to contemplate the effects of allowing oneself to linger in the universe of the once forbidden frankness of thought. In the above-quoted speech given at the “Saint Martin and Europe” conference in November 2016 – the one in which he introduced the idea of “creative thinking” and the intellectual transformation that it strives to accomplish – he presented his account of the meaning of a pre-Hungarian, yet very Hungarian saint born in what is now Szombathely. 
The second way in which he can set us an example – we heard the story earlier – is that, when serving in the Roman army, he saw a man shivering in the cold by the roadside, cut his cloak in two and gave half to the man. Many, including those who have spoken before me, interpret this story in terms of mercy – and with good reason. A politician, however, may also discover something else, something more. In the eyes of many of us today this act also qualifies Saint Martin as the patron saint of the social market economy, as it is in this act that one can immediately see a spirituality which gives meaning to dry statements of revenue and expenditure. Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, for us to give something to those who have noth­ing, we also need people who have something to give. We need committed people, businesses and government policy which have both a heart and common sense. No matter how infinite our heart may be when we see the suffering of others, our capacities will still have limits. This is why Martin gave the beggar only a piece of his cloak – a piece which was big enough for his needs. If my understanding is 
16 Ibid. 
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correct, he gave him neither more nor less. Had he given away his entire cloak, he would have frozen to death on the road, and we would have no one to talk about today. The imperative to exercise mercy must never be equated with our own ru­ination. In the same way, we say that a country can only cut its coat according to its cloth. If we go beyond this – for whatever benevolent reason – it is only a ques­tion of time before it ruins the entire nation, because the economy will collapse. I believe that this is the message of Martin’s act for us today, together with the 
second half of the great commandment which defines the honour of ourselves as the basis for the love we must show to our neighbours: let us help, but according to our strength and capacities; let us help, but we should do so where the need arises, by always giving the needy their necessary and appropriate share. We can proudly profess these thoughts as deriving from the Christian roots and traditions of our policy. We can proudly profess that, thanks to these, for us social solidarity is not an abstract concept, but is tangible and rational behaviour. This is a joint mission in which the Hungarian government can rely upon the Catholic Church, as one of its principal allies. So let us be proud that we Christians learnt about the market economy not only from Adam Smith, but also from Saint Martin.17 
In the former case, the dilemma between “heart and common sense” has been successfully sublated with the material act to close the borders, with objective heartlessness, as it were. Even though it holds up to the present time that “the fiercest struggles of recent years and the fiercest struggles of the years ahead are all related to migration,”18 there was no question whatsoever as to what had to be done first. Hence, the dilemma between the heart and common sense was successfully translated into a sequence of political actions that were completely managed by common sense; as for ‘heart’, it would only be produced in the end, as the final outcome of the seemingly heartless resolution.19 From this perspec­
223 
17 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the conference ‘Reinvigorating Growth, Competi­tiveness and Investment – The EU from the Baltics, through Central Europe, to the Mediter­ranean’”, 10 November 2016. 
18 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s address at the 9th meeting of the Hungarian Diaspora Coun­cil”, 14 November 2019. 
19 The initial material gesture was fully subjectivised only in 2019, when he declared that his government is, purely and simply, an anti-immigration government. “You know the Hun­garian position, so let’s tell it like it is: we have an anti-immigration government. It’s better that we say it – it’s said about us by others anyway, so let’s recognize it. We should focus more on analyzing what it means. […] Hungarians can only be replaced by Hungarians. This is our perception, and so we’re anti-immigration, because we don’t want Hungary to 
tive, it becomes clear why the migration crisis has been so alluring to Orbán. The fact that in this particular case it was possible to present the act of self-centred isolation as a prerequisite to addressing the global problem in a way that, in theory, was correct – to tackle the problem at the source, as the saying goes – offered him a model of action that appeared intellectually, as well as morally, superior to the alternative approaches.20 
However, as the peculiar reading of the Saint Martin parable clearly shows, the task becomes much more challenging as soon as one cannot resort to the initial negative gesture of isolation. Here, the dilemma between “heart and common sense” cannot be translated into a sequence of actions, but persists as such. 
delude itself into thinking that it can solve its population decline without relying on its efforts. […] Let’s not choose an easy solution, as easy solutions lead one astray. […] I’m bringing it up here because we take a tough stance on immigration, and a significant pro­portion of potential immigrants are indeed people in great need, people in difficult situa­tions. This always raises a problem of conscience. We listen to the Vatican’s standpoints in this regard, and we listen to our own: it doesn’t feel particularly good to stop people in distress at the Hungarian border with very clear, firm determination and declare that according to international rules we will only allow in those whom we’re obliged to admit under the Geneva Refugee Convention, and not economic migrants. This isn’t a simple task. And the main thrust of the attacks is that we have hearts of stone, that we’re not good people, and that we don’t help people who need help. It’s very important that on this we speak clearly, with crystalline clarity, and clearly state that Hungarians are good people, that this is a good country, a good nation, a nation that aspires to what is good. And we should state that our people are very receptive and indeed willing to take action in the interests of what is good – but in a different way from those who are pro-immigration. Our position is that help must be taken over there, and the problems must not be brought here. Because the solution is not to let in migrants, but to help them create a life worth living where they were born. This is why help must be taken over there, not problems brought over here. What I’m about to say now will be boring, but I will read out the individual acts of assistance that Hungary has provided to those areas experiencing migration outflows in recent years.” (“Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s address at the 9th meeting of the Hungarian Diaspora Council”, 14 November 2019) 
20 Drawing on Orbán’s occasional philosophical aspirations, we might interpret his model of ‘objective heartlessness’ as a curious attempt at putting into practice the following lines: “[L]ove as inclination cannot be commanded, but beneficence from duty itself – even if no inclination whatsoever impels us to it, indeed if natural and unconquerable aversion resists – is practical and not pathological love, which lies in the will and not in the pro­pensity of sensation, in principles of action and not in melting compassion; and only the former can be commanded.” (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2011, p. 27.) 
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Therefore, for the common sense of objective inequality to ultimately prevail, it has to obtain the spiritual aura that pertains not so much to the act of sharing as to the mere precondition of sharing, to the mere having enough to share – when necessary. Since “for us to give something to those who have nothing, we also need people who have something to give,” the responsibility for keeping this spiritual procedure alive will have to be shared as well. “There should be some reciprocity, something that expresses mutual responsibility, whereby not only those who have something have a responsibility to give; those who do not have something, and who need to receive from others also have a kind of a respon­sibility.”21 Therefore, the only path enabling the “necessary and appropriate share” to gravitate towards zero while, at the same time, still being big enough for the needs of the one who receives it, is for the latter to gravitate towards becoming self-sustainable. Just as, in solving demographic problems, “the best migrant is one’s own child,”22 the best welfare is workfare: 
The [issue] for Hungary today is now – it is a different country than the majority of the countries as the result of these renewal processes – it is not a welfare society, as we call it, it is a labour-based or workfare society. The social system is totally different. The target of the government is full employment. We do not pay social welfare if we do not receive something from the people in return. We have a flat rate income tax. We have probably one of the lowest corporate tax levels for small and medium-sized companies. We do not have an inheritance tax or anything similar. It is a strange combination. Ideologists are regularly in trouble when they have to define what it is exactly. It is like pornography: nobody knows what it is like, but when you see it, you know that is probably it.23 
To understand this peculiar combination that is Orbán’s Hungary, there is an additional ideological element we have to underscore. The infamous concept 225 of illiberal democracy is, in a very precise sense, a political form of nationalist capitalism that does not rely “exclusively on individual interests, but instead 
21 “Viktor Orbán’s address at the presentation of the discussion document ‘Signs of the Times’”, 30 October 2015. 22 “Speech by Viktor Orbán at the Atreju 2019 event held by the Brothers of Italy party (FdI)”, 21 September 2019. 23 “Speech by Viktor Orbán at the Round Table of the Bratislava Global Security Forum”, 19 June 2015. 
[…] regards the public good as being the most important.”24 In this respect, Orbán’s pre-dated version of “America first” is essentially coupled with “ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you-ask-what-you-can-do-for-your-country” model, promoted by a very different kind of an American President. 
According to the liberal view, individual action and who does what – whether they live a productive or unproductive life – is a purely private matter, and must not be subject to moral judgment. By contrast, in a national system, action – indi­vidual action – is worthy of praise if it also benefits the community. This must be interpreted broadly. For example, there are our gold medal-winning skaters. An outstanding sporting performance is also an individual performance that benefits the community. If we talk about them, we don’t say that they have won Olympic gold, but that we have won Olympic gold. Their individual performances also clearly benefit the community. In an illiberal or national system, distinguished performance is not a private matter, but has clearly identifiable forms. Such are self-sufficiency and work, creating and securing a livelihood. Such are learning and a healthy lifestyle. Such is paying taxes. Such is starting a family and raising children. And such is orientation in the matters of the nation and its history, and participation in national self-reflection. It is such performance that we recognise, rank, look up to morally and support.25 
It was this intra-nationalist dimension, which was reintroduced after the inter­mission of the liberal-capitalist transition lasting a couple of decades, that gave birth to a new political subject – one which, paradoxically, transcends Hungary or Hungarians. 
Becoming Central European 
If we follow Orbán’s account of history, the event that triggered the formation of the illiberal state model was the 2008 economic and financial crisis.  
In Hungary we have developed a model of political and state theory, and we have built a state on this intellectual basis. We refer to the intellectual foundation of 
24 “Prime Minister on Kossuth Radio’s ‘180 Minutes’ Programme”, 15 August 2014. “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the 30th Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp”, 27 July 2019. 
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this as Christian democratic, and we call the state which is based on it a Christian democratic state. The following question arises: where did Hungary find the cour­age to take this upon itself? It happened like this because the way in which we interpreted the great 2008–09 economic and financial crisis in Europe was com­pletely different from the way it was interpreted by the other Member States of the European Union. And we thought that the response that they gave to this crisis would be unsuccessful, because they misunderstood the true nature of the crisis. In the European Union they thought that the financial crisis was a routine cycli­cal crisis, of the sort that happens from time to time in the history of capitalism. This wasn’t what we thought. We thought that the 2008–09 financial crisis was the sign of an epochal change in the world economy. Therefore, the reaction to it could not be the same as a reaction to a cyclical crisis: it needed to be reacted to as the sign of a great realignment in the world economy. […] Therefore, we offered a different type of answer; and this gave rise to a Christian democratic political framework and a Christian democratic state.26 
Leaving aside the as yet still ill-defined notion of Christian democracy – which, as a positive determination of illiberal democracy, primarily serves the strategic purpose of taking over the term from those who have betrayed it – the general impression is quite striking in its de facto simplicity. In contrast to the majority of leftist politicians and theorists, who have somehow managed to let the event which, at that time, supposedly marked the end of capitalism, slip from memory, Orbán found a way to register the irreversible character of the crisis as such and, at the same time, avoid the immediate trap of overestimating its significance. 
While the European left spent the first years of the crisis daydreaming about a global emancipatory movement, Orbán was busy building up his local focus. On the one hand, he was patient enough to remain in the opposition and let 227 the left-centre block implode. In 2006, right after the elections, the then Prime Minister Gyurcsány’s “Őszöd speech”, was leaked,27 followed by month-long 
26 “Speech by Viktor Orbán at the Atreju 2019 event held by the Brothers of Italy party (FdI)”, 21 September 2019. 
27 “At precisely 4 p.m. on 17 September 2006, a mild late summer Sunday, a ‘political nuclear bomb’ exploded in Hungary. First the public service radio, then a little later every radio and TV channel as well as the Internet, started to broadcast excerpts from an audiotape on which could be heard the familiar voice of Ferenc Gyurcsány, who had been re-elected prime minister only the previous April. What he was saying was shocking; moreover, it 
protests; in 2008, the newly adopted tuition and health fees were overturned at a referendum; in 2009, the new Prime Minister Bajnai was forced to adopt dras­tic austerity measures due to an over 6% decrease in GDP and the subsequent IMF loan.28 Meanwhile, Orbán published an opinion piece in The Guardian, in which – perhaps surprisingly – there was not a single trace of criticism of the Hungarian government. Quite the contrary: 
[A]fter all that has happened in the past six months, central Europeans can no longer look up to old countries representing the moral values of Western civilisa­tion. This crisis was not caused by bad luck or some professional misunderstand­ing, but by character problems, especially in the US and later Western Europe. Money was stolen, not merely “mismanaged”. Investments were not simply bad, but unacceptably risky. The moral state of business leaders caused this crisis, and you cannot find central Europeans among those leaders. Central Europe has found itself in a completely new situation. Crisis management measures under­taken in the Western world are practically cutting our countries off from the EU market. In this situation, Central European countries must co-operate to defend their own interests, as well as their dream of a common Europe. The question for the European elite is whether we believe in the work of the past 20 years, wheth­er we believe in an integrated European market and an ever-widening European community. If not, then first the biggest and the strongest countries, and then the central Europeans, will turn away from the European dream.29 
was in words that were both passionate and peppered with coarse expletives, language  
that the proverbial man in the street would instantly recognise: ‘We had almost no other  
choice [than the package of cuts] because we fucked up. Not just a little bit but totally. No  
other country in Europe has committed such stupidities as we have. It can be explained.  
228  Obviously we have been lying our heads off for the last one -and-a-half, two years. It was quite clear that what we were saying wasn’t true … And in the meantime, we have, by the  
way, been doing nothing for the past four years. Nothing. You can’t name me one single  
important government measure we can be proud of, apart from pulling the government  
out of the shit again in the end [that is, after winning the elections]. If we were forced to  
give an account of what we’ve been doing in the past four years, what could we say?’” (Paul  
Lendvai (2016), Orbán. Hungary’s Strongman, Oxford University Press, Oxford, chapter 7)  
28  Cf. Andrzej Sedecki, “In a State of Necessity. How has Orban changed Hungary”, Point of  
View, No. 41, April 2014, p. 19. Available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76797650.pdf  
(accessed 10 November 2019).  
29  Viktor Orbán, “Blockades on Hungary’s Path”, The Guardian, 14 June 2009. Available at  
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jun/14/hungary-communism-europe  
(accessed 10 November 2019).  

living in a parallel universe: from brussels to orbán, and on 
Se non e completamente vero, e ben trovato: at the very moment he was, one would dare to presume, completely engaged in preparations to take over the government for the third time, he was already envisaging the main battle line he would eventually draw in the international field, creating the outlines of the new political subject – the one called the Central European. 
In the narrow – and more technical – sense, in Orbán’s vocabulary, the Central European refers to the collective entity composed of the member countries of the Visegrád Group. On many occasions, the V4 countries are presented as a politico-economic block which, through intensive cooperation, has gradually established itself as a pan-national entity, but which essentially operates on the principle of synergy through diversity. 
For us, this is a highly important framework for cooperation – not only because we seek to combine our individual strengths, but also because we learn a great deal from each other. I am convinced that the primary reason for this region’s success is that the leaders and businesspeople of these four countries are happy to learn from each other. For instance, we Hungarians are happy to learn from the Poles in relation to the family policy which they have very courageously in­troduced recently. We admire and respect the Czechs – and try to follow their example – for keeping the tax wedge as low as it is. And we also receive a great deal of inspiration from our Slovak friends, as they were the first in the region to seek to enforce a flat, pro rata policy on taxation. Central Europe – or let’s say the V4 – has become one of the pillars of European growth, as well as one of the EU’s most promising regions.30 
In a more speculative sense, however, the Central European designates a col­lective subject proper, a political subject that is more consolidated, more sin-229 gular and possibly applicable to a wider range of countries, possibly even the European Southwest. However, at the same time, the essence of the Central European is somewhat more Hungarian – formed by the Hungarian national character, Hungarian intuition, and Hungarian resilience. In this second char-acterisation, the Central European is, in short, the bearer of common sense – sometimes even the pseudo-material organ of common sense. 
30 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the Regional Digital Conference”, 17 November 2016. 
[T]he past year has proven us right. I do not have a feeling of satisfaction, although it is of course good if time proves one right – much better than if it doesn’t – but this is not a personal matter. I am glad that the Hungarians and the Hungarian government have been persistent enough to courageously represent our own ap­proach, our own way of thinking, our own perception of reality, our own pro­posals and our own mentality […]. And it is not easy to leave behind an image of Europe which is guaranteed to be successful and which is seen by everyone as the best in the world, and to step into a world in which everything is called into question. Are we still the best? Why is Europe’s share of total global production falling? Why do demographic indices show Europe’s population declining? Why are we experiencing everyday co-existence problems while living alongside mi­grants? Where is terrorism coming from? Is it just something that our enemies are importing, or does it also have roots here among us within our countries? These are questions which the people of Europe – Western European people over the past forty years – have not had to deal with before. And, as Central Europeans with razor-sharp instincts, when we were the first to say “Hey, this could lead to trouble, because there are ripples on the water and what is coming isn’t some­thing friendly,” then everyone said “You’re stupid, you’ve only just become mem­bers of the European Union, you have no idea about this yet, it’ll sort itself out. You don’t have to make such a big deal of it, everything can just carry on as it has so far.” And now it has emerged that this is not the case. There were ripples on the water, it wasn’t friendly and indeed it has led to dangerous waves crashing onto the shore; and now we need to hold on tight, so as not to be swept away. And now everyone can see this, and in fact they are saying, “Yes, sometimes even the Central Europeans can be right.”31 
Bearing in mind all the subjective and objective xenophobia this strange entity 
230 helped to produce, we nevertheless have to admit that the Central European, in a certain sense, was right. Just like the 2008 financial, economic, and fis­cal crises, the 2015 migration crisis was far from being an ephemeral event that would allow the situation to sort itself out. The migration crisis – or the refu­gee crisis, as everybody still dared to call it back then – marked an irreversible change in the European perception of the issue that had been going on long 
“Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s interview on the Kossuth Radio programme ‘Sunday News’”, 25 September 2016. 
living in a parallel universe: from brussels to orbán, and on 
before the crisis was declared.32 Since 2015, the government rescue missions in the Mediterranean, such as Mare Nostrum, have become unthinkable – and fur­thermore the unmixed humanitarian position has been deemed utopian simply for refusing to comply with the soft-common-sense assertions of ‘reasonable’ limited capacities. 
“Migration will not go away – it will stay with us,” confirmed the newly ap­pointed President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen in her first address to the European Parliament in November 2019.  “Therefore,” she con­tinued, “a Europe that is so proud of its values and the rule of law has to be able to come up with an answer that is both humane and effective.”33 In this context, the “formidable team” of Margaritis Schinas and Ylva Johansson, “with their different skills and perspectives” – the former adopting the role of the humane heart, the latter of effective common sense – are just another, perhaps the ulti­mate, proof of the Central European foreseeing the future. 
With all due modesty, but with the self-confidence acquired from the achieve­ments of the past thirty years, and thorough acquaintance with the European sit­uation, I can tell you this: thirty years ago, we thought that Europe was our future; today we see that we are Europe’s future.34 
From imitation to auto-imitation 
However, in spite of several indications that prove Orbán’s rhetorical enthu­siasm to be well grounded in the European reality, we should nonetheless be careful not to underestimate the resilience of the European core. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have argued, the “imitation game” that started in 1989 has 
231 
32 
Cf. Tadej Troha, “The Undoing of the Refugee Crisis”, in: Žagar et al. (eds.), The Disaster of European Refugee Policy: Perspectives from the Balkan Route, Cambridge Scholars Pub­lishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 255–267. 
33 “Speech by President-elect von der Leyen in the European Parliament Plenary on the occasion of the presentation of her College of Commissioners and their programme”, 27 November 2019. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ SPEECH_19_6408 (accessed 28 November 2019). 
34 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at an event marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution”, 17 November 2019. 
come to an end – an end that was in the largest part forced precisely by Viktor Orbán’s political intervention.   
To understand the origins of today’s Central and East European illiberal revo­lution, we should look neither to ideology nor to economics, but instead to the pent-up animosity engendered by the centrality of mimesis in the reform process­es launched in the East after 1989. The region’s illiberal turn cannot be grasped apart from the political expectation of “normality” created by the 1989 revolution and the politics of imitation that it legitimized. After the Berlin Wall fell, Europe was no longer divided between communists and democrats. It was instead divid­ed between imitators and the imitated. East-West relations morphed from a Cold War standoff between two hostile systems into a moral hierarchy within a single liberal, Western system. While the mimics looked up to their models, the models looked down on their mimics. It is not entirely mysterious, therefore, why the “imitation of the West” voluntarily chosen by East Europeans three decades ago eventually resulted in a political backlash.35 
While their analysis of the two shifts – the one in 1989 that initiated the imita­tion process, involving “democratization, liberalization, enlargement, conver­gence, integration, Europeanization” or, in short, “normalization,”36 and the other, beginning in 2010, which marked the break with the paradigm – is quite remarkable, their conclusion possibly comes up a little short. 
Europe today is haunted by the specter of reverse imitation. The players in the post-1989 “imitation game” are, at least in some respects, changing places. In a few cases, the mimics have become the models and vice versa. The ultimate revenge of the Central and East European populists against Western liberalism is not merely to reject the “imitation imperative,” but to invert it. We are the real Europeans, Orbán and Kaczyński claim, and if the West wants to save itself, it will have to imitate the East. As Orbán revealingly declared in a speech in July 2017, 
Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, “Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Dis­contents”, Journal of Democracy, 29 (3/2018), p. 118. Available at https://www.journal ofdemocracy.org/articles/explaining-eastern-europe-imitation-and-its-discontents-2/ (accessed 20 October 2019). 
36 Ibid., p. 117. 
living in a parallel universe: from brussels to orbán, and on 
“Twenty-seven years ago here in Central Europe we believed that Europe was our future; today we feel that we are the future of Europe.”37 
Referring to an earlier version of Orbán’s enthusiastic prophecy we quoted above, Krastev and Holmes are right to infer that the negative gesture of terminating the imitation game has resulted in a kind of reverse imitation, in “changing plac­es” between the mimics and the models. Furthermore, as we also demonstrated above, there is quite some evidence testifying to this process already having pro­duced some early results in the way migration has come to be perceived (albeit one should be careful not to neglect the strictly internal Western motivation for the change of heart). However, precisely by taking Orbán’s prophecy at face val­ue, and, as a consequence, by confusing “the specter of reverse imitation” with the reverse imitation directly taking place, they fail to acknowledge the possibil­ity of another scenario. 
In this regard, we should throw some new light on the most recent example of this procedure. When Ursula von der Leyen presented her vision for the new Commission, many were appalled by her decision to create a new post in her administration, dedicated to “protecting our European way of life.” In spite of all the critique from the Socialists and the Liberals, von der Leyen insisted on the decision by referring to the second article of the Lisbon Treaty and by, si­multaneously, downplaying the importance of the fact that one of the key goals in the mission letter to Margaritis Schinas, who was appointed to the post, in­volved “finding common ground on migration.” Eventually, Schinas himself also stepped in to defend the decision – in the name of frank speech. 
Shakespeare would have us believe that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but names are important because they give things meaning; they bring 233 us meaning. And it means something to be European. At its core, being European means protecting the most vulnerable in our societies. It means healthcare and welfare systems that all can access. It means having the same opportunities. It means promoting culture and sport as core elements of our systems and equip­ping people with the knowledge, education, and skills they need to live and work in dignity. It means feeling safe on (sic) our homes, in our streets, and all of the places we like to meet, exchange, and experience life together. Being European 
37 Ibid., p. 127. 
means being open to the world; extending heart and home to those who are less fortunate. It means standing up for these values, for these rights, for these prin­ciples across the globe. Being European means peace, freedom, equality, democ­racy, and respect for human dignity. On a very personal note, being European for me has meant living a European life, raising a European family, and dedicating 30 years of my life to European public service. I am nothing if not for Europe. I am proud to be European, and all the more so for having been given the unique opportunity to serve our union.38 
In addition, the never-to-become President of the Commission Manfred Weber suddenly spoke up and claimed to have used the now disputed phrase “very often in the last two years.”39 However, all these attempts to normalise the deci­sion have failed to address the real problem. Precisely as they tried to obscure the link to the issue of migration and saturated the notion of the European way of life with an infinite set of positive determinations, they ultimately revealed the truly obscene, almost ‘auto-erotic’, core of the idea – condensed in the es­sentially dispensable “our”. 
Who, then, is the “we” of the “our”? In its initial phase, the gesture was a clear case of reverse imitation – since, in 2015, at least two years before Weber, it was Viktor Orbán who declared: “What is at stake today is Europe and the European way of life, the survival or extinction of European values and nations – or, to be more precise, their transformation beyond all recognition.”40 Being the political pioneer of this idea, Orbán, of course, could not resist welcoming the decision of the new President, a “lady of substance” with “a bold mentality […] who un­derstands what is happening in Central Europe.”41 
38 Quoted from Anabelle Timsit, “Your questions about the new EU job for ‘protect­ing our European way of life,’ answered”, Quartz, 3 October 2019. Available at https:// qz.com/1721178/the-eu-job-for-protecting-our-european-way-of-life-explained/ (accessed 20 October 2019). 
39 Quoted from Cristina Abellan Matamoros, “Was von der Leyen the first to use the contro­versial ‘European way of life’ phrase?”, Euronews, 15 September 2019. Available at https:// www.euronews.com/2019/09/13/was-von-der-leyen-the-first-to-use-the-controversial-eu-ropean-way-of-life-phrase (accessed 20 October 2019). 
40 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s presentation at the 26th Bálványos Summer Open Univer­sity and Student Camp”, 15 July 2015. “Exclusive interview with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for Hungarian Television”, 1 August 2019. 
living in a parallel universe: from brussels to orbán, and on 
Now, if the President of the Commission were Hungarian, rather than a German lady, we would not have called that position “protecting the European way of life”; instead we’d have called it “Commissioner for protecting Christian culture”. No doubt this would have brought the sky down. Even the term “way of life” is too much for some.42 
While, on the surface, pointing out the further step that needed to be taken, the satisfaction was unmistakable. The European rose may not smell so sweet as the Christian rose, but a rose is a rose, and our way of life is our way of life, whatever the predicate. And yet, at some level, Orbán’s triumph may be premature. When speaking at the EPP Congress in Zagreb – with Fidesz members not attending – von der Leyen joined some of her centrist-current colleagues in attempting to narrow the range of those who legitimately use this phrase. 
I am proud to have Vice-President Margaritis Schinas from Greece in my team. He will promote our “European way of life.” There has been much debate on the title – our European Way of Life – as if there was any doubt about what our way of life is. We will never let the nationalists and the populists, who want to divide and destroy the European Union, hijack what our European way of life means.43 
The fact that it was precisely one of “the nationalists” who had embraced the phrase some years ago may, at first sight, seem to support the argument put forward by the President of the Commission. However, considering the intensity of the insistence on reclaiming the phrase that the allegedly purely European Europeans had previously not thought about using in the first place, the sit­uation reveals itself to be far more obscure. The case here is rather a case of reclaiming what had been imitated, of re-appropriating what had never been of one’s own, of reversing the reverse imitation. The Central (or Eastern) 235 Europeans might be the ones who noticed the need for the European way of life to be protected; the original imitators may serve as legitimate defenders of Europe against the people who lack even the will to imitate in the first place, but the decision on what Europe was, is, and will be – this decision should re­
42 “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the Kossuth Radio programme ‘Good Morning Hungary’”, 15 September 2019. 
43 “Speech by President-elect Ursula von der Leyen at the 2019 EPP Congress in Zagreb”, 20 November 2019. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ speech_19_6315 (accessed 22 November 2019). 
main the privilege of the founders. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this seemingly absurd and extremely paradoxical procedure is taking place in the void at the very core of the European idea: once Europe was left with little normalising to do, once Europe was left with few mimics striving to imitate the normality it represented, it could only have turned inwards, and start to imitate itself. The process of auto-imitation, led by empty-shelled politicians inhabiting the timeless universe of their own private Europe – this process, precisely, will be the endgame of Europe. 

Notes on Contributors 
Timothy Appleton is a lecturer at the Universidad Camilo José Cela in Madrid and co-editor of the journal #lacanemancipa. He is also co-editor of Lacan en las Lógicas de la Emancipación (Málaga: Miguel Gómez), 2018, co-author of Derrotas y Derivas (Madrid: Arena Libros), 2018, and author of ‘Escupir en la iglesia’ – Un sí de izquierdas al Brexit (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo), 2020. 
Rok Benčin is a research fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Philosophy, and an assistant professor at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School. His publications focus on the relationships between on­tology, aesthetics, and politics in contemporary philosophy via authors such as Adorno, Deleuze, Ranciere, and Badiou. His recent publications include “Rethinking Representa­tion in Ontology and Aesthetics via Badiou and Ranciere” in Theory, Culture & Society (Vol. 36, No. 5, 2019) and “Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in Adorno and Badiou” in Badi­ou and the German Tradition of Philosophy (ed. Jan Völker, Bloomsbury 2019). 
Aleš Bunta is a research fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Philosophy, and a Lecturer at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School. He is the author of numerous articles and three books in Slovene: To Annihilate Nothing? (Analecta 2007), The Magnetism of Stupidity: Plato, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Alan Ford (Analecta 2010; Croatian translation: Ljevak 2012), and A-cogito (Analecta 2016). 
Marina Gržinić is a philosopher and theoretician from Ljubljana, Slovenia. She works as a professor and research adviser. She is a research adviser at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Philosophy. Since 2003, she is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. She publish­es extensively and lectures worldwide. A selection of her recently published books in­clude: Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (co-author, 2014); as editor: Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence (2018). 
Peter Klepec is a research adviser at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Philosophy.Hismainareasofresearch are French contemporary philosophy, German Idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and cri­tique of ideology. He has published two books in Slovene: On the Emergence of the Subject, 2004, and Capitalism and Perversion, 1. Profitable Passions, 2008. 
Tomaž Mastnak works on the history of social and political thought. His current work focuses on liberalism/fascism/neoliberalism. His latest book is Črna internacionala: Vojna, veliki biznis in vpeljava neoliberalizma[Black International: War, Big Business, and the Introduction of Neoliberalism] (Ljubljana, 2919). He is currently a research schol­ar at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies. 
Boštjan Nedoh is a research fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana. He has published extensively on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Italian biopolitical theory, contemporary continental phi­losophy, and political theology. His articles have appeared in journals such as Angelaki, Paragraph, Journal for Cultural Research and Law, Culture and the Humanities. He is the co-editor of Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and the author of Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019). 
Rado Riha isaprofessor of philosophyattheResearch Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Philosophy. He is editor of Politik der Wahrheit (together with Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere), Turia + Kant, Vienna (1997); his publications include The Second Copernican Turn in Kant’s Philosophy, Založba ZRC (2012), and Kant in Lacanscher Absicht: Die kopernikanische Wende und das Reale, Turia 
+ Kant, Vienna 2018. 
Jelica Šumič Riha is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and professor of philosophy at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Politik der Wahrheit(together with Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, and Rado Riha), Turia + Kant, Vienna (1997). She is the editor of Universel, singulier, sujet, Kimé, Paris (2000), Eternity and Change: Philosophy in the Worldless Times, Založba ZRC (2012), and A Politica e a psicanalise, Lume Editor, Sao Paulo (2019). 
Tadej Troha is a research fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Philosophy, and a guest lecturer at the Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His re­search interests include Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, modernist literature, environmental philosophy, and political philosophy. 
notes on contrubutors 

Povzetki | Abstracts 
Tomaž Mastnak Europa: The Politics of Mythology 
Keywords: Europe, Europa, mythology, Phoenicians, Semitism, anti-Semitism, colonialism, West/East, Europe/Asia 
Once the myth of Europa is seen as the European foundational myth, questions regarding the origin and meaning of the myth of Europa and of the word Europa itself become ques­tions of the origins and meaning of Europe. These questions, involving the large issues of cultural heritage and racial descent, can thus become of central importance for the con­struction of “European civilization”. The myth of Europa functions as a prism through which we see world history. At the same time, the way one wants to see world history – and Europe’s place therein – and the value one attaches to “European civilization” deter­mine interpretations of the myth of Europa and of the name Europa. The article surveys the nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates among historians of Classical antiquity and mythologists over the origins of Europa and Europe, with a special focus on the pre­sumed or denied Semitic origins of the mythical figure Europa and of “European culture” or “civilization”, as well as on the frontiers of Europe. The politics of those debates were articulated in the context of the advancement of colonialism and anti-Semitism, the rise of Nazism, and two world wars. 
Tomaž Mastnak Evropa: Politika mitologije 
Ključne besede: Evropa, mit o Evropi, mitologija, Feničani, semitizem, antisemitizem, kolonializem, Vzhod/Zahod, Evropa/Azija 
Ko je mit o Evropi sprejet kot evropski utemeljitveni mit, postanejo vprašanja o izvoru in pomenu mita o Evropi in imena Evropa vprašanja o izvoru in pomenu Evrope. Ta vpraša­nja, ki nosijo s sabo velike teme o kulturni dediščini in rasnem izvoru, lahko zato posta­nejo ključnega pomena pri konstruiranju »evropske civilizacije«. Mit o Evropi deluje kot prizma, skozi katero gledamo svetovno zgodovino. Velja pa tudi, da svetovna zgodovina, kakor jo želimo videti, mesto, ki ga v njej dodelimo Evropi, in vrednotenje »evropske civilizacije«, ki ga sprejemamo, določajo interpretacije mita o Evropi in imena Evropa. Ta članek obravnava razprave med zgodovinarji antičnega sveta in mitologi v 19. in 20. stoletju, ki so se vrtele okrog izvora Evrope kot kulturno-politične entitete in kot mitskega lika, in se pri tem osredotoča na vprašanja morebitnega semitskega izvora mitske Evrope in »evropske kulture« oziroma »civilizacije« ter na meje Evrope. Politične motivacije in cilji tistih razprav so se artikulirali v kontekstu širjenja kolonializma in antisemitizma, vzpona nacizma in dveh svetovnih vojn. 
Rok Benčin Ideas and their Destinies: Enlightenment, Communism, Europe 
Key words: idea of Europe, Enlightenment, political subject, progress, populism, Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas 
This article addresses the discussions on the idea of Europe in the aftermath of the series of crises that have hit the project of European integration over the last decade. It does so via problematising the ambivalent structure of political ideas more generally, with emphasis on the tension between the gradual continuity of progress and the dis­continuity implied by emancipatory political subjectivation. The article analyses this tension first in Kant’s writings on the Enlightenment (and the contemporary calls for a return to the legacy of Enlightenment) and then in Badiou’s text on the idea of com­munism. These analyses open the perspectives from which the discussions of Europe are finally examined: beyond serving as a reservoir of values used for proposing insti­tutional reforms and launching new narratives, how does the idea of Europe feature as a stake in processes of political subjectivation? 
Rok Benčin Ideje in njihove usode: razsvetljenstvo, komunizem, Evropa 
Ključne besede: ideja Evrope, razsvetljenstvo, politični subjekt, napredek, populizem, Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas 
Članek se ukvarja z razpravami o ideji Evrope po desetletju niza kriz, ki je zajel projekt evropske integracije. Tega se loti skozi problematizacijo ambivalentne strukture političnih idej v bolj splošnem smislu, pri čemer izpostavi napetost med postopno kontinuiteto na­predka in diskontinuiteto, ki jo implicira emancipatorna politična subjektivacija. Članek to napetost obravnava najprej v Kantovih spisih o razsvetljenstvu (in v sodobnih pozivih po povratku k dediščini razsvetljenstva) in nato v Badioujevem spisu o ideji komunizma. Te analize odprejo vidike, s katerih naposled obravnavam razprave o Evropi: na kakšen način ideja Evrope onstran trezorja vrednot, ki usmerja predloge institucionalnih reform in napaja nove narative, nastopa tudi kot zastavek v procesih politične subjektivacije? 
Aleš Bunta Nietzsche’s Passage from Germany to Europe: The Three ‘Deaths’ of the Higher Cultural Unity 
Keywords: Nietzsche, German unity, Europe, critique of idealism, addressing of philosophy 
Nietzsche’s early philosophy was particularly addressed to the Germans. This does not imply that the themes themselves that were discussed by Nietzsche at that period were not universal. It is certain, nonetheless, that Nietzsche saw each of these universal themes as internally related to what he, at that time, considered the central scope of his intellectual efforts – and that was, to envisage and propagate the Ideal of the “German unity in the highest sense”. So, Nietzsche’s early themes like – ‘the Greeks’, critique of historicism, Schopenhauer and Wagner – were effectively addressed at two recipients at once: firstly, as universal topics of philosophy, they were addressed at everyone, and secondly, as the key components of the Ideal of the higher German unity, they were also addressed to the Germans in particular. However, by the time that Nietzsche started writing Human, All Too Human, this entire structure collapsed: Nietzsche had abandoned the Ideal of the German higher unity, and furthermore, his entire philosophy had taken the course of a radical critique of Idealism. Subsequently, Nietzsche also appears having found him­self a new ‘audience’ at whom to address his philosophy: This new ‘audience’ at whom Nietzsche commenced addressing his philosophy, were “the Europeans”. However, the central problem of Nietzsche’s addressing of “the Europeans” consisted of the fact that “the Europeans” at whom Nietzsche’s philosophy had been readdressed, had yet to ap­pear in order to recover Nietzsche’s message. Or, more precisely, Nietzsche’s addressal at the Europeans had to convey a message that would have itself accelerated their arrival. 
Aleš Bunta Nietzschejev prehod od Nemčije k Evropi: tri ‘smrti’ višje kulturne enotnosti 
Ključne besede: Nietzsche, nemška enotnost, Evropa, kritika idealizma, naslavljanje filo­zofije 
Nietzschejeva zgodnja filozofija je bila posebej naslovljena na Nemce. To ne pomeni, da teme, o katerih je Nietzsche razpravljal v tistem času, niso bile univerzalne. Kljub temu, pa je gotovo, da je Nietzsche sleherno izmed teh univerzalnih tem motril v povezavi s tistim, kar je v tistem času dojemal kot centralno nalogo vseh svojih intelektualnih priza­devanj – in sicer, z njegovo vizijo in propagiranjem Ideala »nemške enotnosti v najvišjem pomenu«. Nietzschejeve zgodnje teme kot so – ‘Grki’, kritika historicizma, Schopenhauer in Wagner –, so bile torej sočasno naslovljene na dva naslovnika: prvič, kot univerzal­ne filozofske teme, so bile naslovljene na vse, in drugič, kot ključne komponente Ideala Nemške višje enotnosti, so bile te teme naslovljene prav posebej na Nemce. Vendar pa je v času, ko je Nietzsche začel s pisanjem dela Človeško, prečloveško, ta struktura že v celoti razpadla: Nietzsche je opustil Ideal Nemške višje enotnosti, poleg tega, pa je njegova ce­lotna filozofija zavzela smer radikalne kritike Idealizma. Posledično, si je Nietzsche našel tudi novo ‘publiko’, na katero je začel naslavljati svojo filozofijo. To novo publiko na ka­tero je Nietzsche prenaslovil svojo filozofijo, so predstavljali »Evropejci«. Glavni problem Nietzschejevega naslavljanja na »Evropejce« pa je bil v tem, da bi se ti »Evropejci«, na katere je Nietzsche prenaslovil svojo filozofijo, morali šele pojaviti, da bi lahko prevzeli Nietzschejevo sporočilo. Oziroma natančneje, Nietzschejeva naslovitev »Evropejcev« bi morala poslati sporočilo, ki bi, samo po sebi, pospešilo njihov prihod. 
Marina Gržinić Mauhler The Idea of Europe 
Key words: racism, racialization, posthuman, racist-state, capital, labour 
Today the EU as the fortress Europe is a regime that produces an accelerated legally sanc­tioned system of restrictions, discriminations and economic dispossessions; a space of intensified racialization that has at its core structural racism. Racialization refers to a process by which certain groups of people are singled out for unique treatment on the ba­sis of real or imagined physical characteristics. Mostly it targets activities of those termed as (ethnic) minorities. It transforms societies into racialized societies. This process is today going so far that we have a process of racialization being imputed, without any “race” prerogatives but serving as a measure of class discrimination, subjugation, and finally dispossession. The EU is providing the grounds for not only a state of exception but for a racial-State, giving a free hand to detention, segregation and discrimination under the veil of the protection of nation-State citizens and even the protection of ref­ugees from “themselves,” from their “drive” to try to illegally enter fortress Europe and therefore probably being in a situation to die. These processes of invigorated control of borders, expulsion of refugees, etc., are judicially, economically and, last but not least, discursively and representationally (as different semio-technological regimes), ratified, legislated, and normativized. Today it is central to draw a genealogy of racism that paral­lels capitalism’s historical transformations and historicization. 
Marina Gržinić Mauhler Ideja Evrope 
Ključne besede: rasizem, rasizacija, postčloveško, rasistična država, kapital, delovna sila 
Evropska unija kot trdnjava Evrope je režim, ki ustvarja pospešen sistem zakonskih sankcij za omejevanje, diskriminacijo in gospodarsko razlastitev; to je prostor intenzivne rasizacije, ki sloni na strukturnem rasizmu. Rasizacija se nanaša na postopek, s kate­rim se določene skupine ljudi loči na podlagi resničnih ali namišljenih fizičnih lastno­sti. Večinoma je usmerjena v dejavnosti tistih, ki jih označujejo kot (etnične) manjšine. Družbe spreminja v rasizirane družbe. Ta proces danes sega tako daleč, da se nam vsilju­je proces rasizacije celo brez kakršnih koli »rasnih« značilnosti, ampak služi kot merilo za razredno diskriminacijo, podrejanje in na koncu razlastitev. EU zagotavlja pogoje ne le za izredna stanja pač pa tudi za rasno državo in ustvarja proste cone za pridržanja, segregacije in diskriminacije pod krinko zaščite državljanov posameznih evropskih naci­onalnih držav in celo zaščite beguncev pred njimi »samimi« in njihovimi »obsesijami«, ko skušajo ilegalno vstopiti v trdnjavo Evropo in bodo zato verjetno v smrtni nevarnosti. Ti procesi okrepljenega nadzora meja, izgona beguncev itd., so pravno, ekonomsko in nenazadnje diskurzivno in reprezentativno (kot različni semiotično tehnološki režimi), ratificirani, zakonsko urejeni in normativizirani. Zato je danes osrednja naloga sestaviti genealogijo rasizma, ki pa teče vzporedno z zgodovinskimi preobrazbami kapitalizma. 
Peter Klepec Crisis, Europe 
Keywords: crisis, Europe, EU, identity, neoliberalism 
There is an ubiquitous belief that Europe is going through some kind of crisis. This is not something new, since Europe—or better, what counts as Europe—seems to be in a state of crisis by definition. What does it mean to claim that, and is the term “crisis” appro­priate here? Which crisis and a crisis of what exactly? The trouble is that both words, i.e. “Europe” and “crisis”, are fuzzy, and that everything depends on, first, how we define them, and second, how they interrelate. The paper shows how those who continue to use the notoriously slippery term “crisis” to describe the predicaments of today’s Europe use it in a very specific way. There is a choice here: either we try to find more appropriate theoretical terms, or we continue to use the term “crisis” backed by our hidden optimistic belief in the future of Europe (as it is today). In that way the cure for Europe’s ills and woes is Europe itself, for “Where the danger is grows also what can save us.” In other words, the only cure for Europe is the EU, or more EU. The term “crisis” is in such cases but a mask, another name for European neoliberal governance. 
Peter Klepec Kriza, Evropa 
Ključne besede: kriza, Evropa, EU, identiteta, neoliberalizem 
Obstaja vsesplošno prepričanje, da je Evropa v nekakšni krizi. To sicer ni nič novega, saj se zdi, da je Evropa, ali pa tisto, kar šteje kot Evropa, v kriznem stanju že po svoji definici­ji. Kaj to pomeni in ali je termin »kriza« tu sploh na mestu? Za katero krizo gre, oziroma, kaj natanko je v krizi? Zagata je v tem, da sta oba termina, Evropa in kriza, zelo ohlapna, in da je, prvič, vse odvisno od tega, kako ju definiramo, ter, drugič, v kakšnem medseboj­nem razmerju sploh sta. Prispevek poskuša pokazati, da tisti, ki danes uporabljajo izrazi-to izmuzljiv termin kriza za označevanje težavnega položaja, v katerem se nahaja Evropa, tega uporabljajo na nek zelo specifičen način. Obstaja namreč izbira: bodisi skušamo najti ustreznejša teoretska orodja za označbo zagat današnje Evrope, bodisi še naprej uporabljamo termin kriza in se pri tem opremo na svoje skrito optimistično prepričanje 
o prihodnosti Evrope (takšna, kakršna je danes). Na ta način zdravilo za Evropine težave in zagate vidimo v sami Evropi, kajti »kjer nevarnost rase, tam je tudi rešitev«. Drugače rečeno, edino zdravilo za Evropo je EU, ali le še več EU. Termin »kriza« je v tem primeru zgolj maska, drugo ime za evropsko neoliberalno vladanje. 
Rado Riha Europe as a Case of the Idea 
Keywords: Europe, Kant, idea, case of the idea, Europe as a case of the idea 
This article examines the question of whether and to what extent is Europe conceivable as an idea. The idea is understood here in the Kantian sense. While it does not exist as such in the heaven of ideas, yet it can only be conceived and determined in the concrete case and as a concrete case of the idea. But can we also speak of a concrete case of the idea of Europe? It seems to be more or less self-evident that today’s Europe can be rep­resented and understood as an independent political and cultural entity. But could this entity also be understood and determined as a case of the idea of Europe and what would be the conditions for such understanding and determination of this entity? 
Rado Riha Evropa kot primer ideje 
Ključne besede: Evropa, Kant, ideja, primer ideje, Evropa kot primer ideje 
Prispevek se ukvarja z vprašanjem, ali in na kakšen način je mogoče Evropo misliti kot idejo. Idejo razume pri tem v njenem kantovskem pomenu – kot takšna pa ne obstaja v nebesih idej, pač pa jo je mogoče misliti in določiti določiti samo v konkretnem primeru ideje in kot konkretni primer ideje. Ali lahko govorimo tudi o konretnem primeru ideje Evrope? Da lahko današnjo Evropo mislimo in prikazujemo kot samostojnom politično in kulturno tvorbo se bolj ali manj nekaj samoumevnega. Toda, ali bi bilo mogoče to tvorbo razumeti in določiti tudi kot primer ideje Evrope, in, kakšni bi bili pogoji možnosti za takšno razumevanje in določanje te tvorbe? 
Timothy Appleton Brexit and the Tautology of Being 
Keywords: Brexit, Theresa May, Badiou, Ranciere, Laclau, Mouffe, event, populism, sovereignty, patriotism 
How should we understand theoretically the former Prime Minister of Britain Theresa May’s phrase “Brexit means Brexit”? This paper argues that we must start from the category of the Event, as theorised in the work of Alain Badiou. Insofar as an Event in Badiou’s sense involves a decision as to whether a singular multiple belongs to itself – what I here call the “tautology of being” – it seems that Theresa May’s statement does indeed designate such an Event. This would also, from a Badiouian perspective, make it politically emancipatory. Badiou himself would of course not accept such a conclu­sion, given that Brexit was convoked by the British State, thereby disqualifying it from being considered a singularity. However, I argue that if we are able to separate Badiou’s “social ontology” from his philosophical ontology, Brexit might still be considered an Event in the above sense. I support this argument with reference to the work of Jacques Ranciere, who I feel completes such a separation of theoretical realms. Nevertheless, I add that we still need elements of the Badiouian theoretical edifice in order to think new forms of sovereignty and patriotism today, of which Brexit would be an example. Another lack in Ranciere is that he refuses to use the word populism, which seems to me to be a good term to describe the ideology of a political subject qua singularity.Should we therefore turn to the arch-populists Laclau and Mouffe, and their category of hegem­ony, to think Brexit? I think not, since, as I argue, hegemony does not allow us to think a political singularity, of the Brexit type. Nevertheless, I believe we should insist that Brexit be considered a “populist” emancipatory Event. 
Timothy Appleton Brexit in tavtologija biti? 
Ključne besede: Brexit, Theresa May, Badiou, Ranciere, Laclau, Mouffe, dogodek, populizem, suverenost, domoljubje 
Kako naj teoretsko razumemo izjavo nekdanje britanske premierke Therese May, da »Brexit pomeni Brexit«? Da bi v pričujočem besedilu odgovorili na to vprašanje, mo-ramo izhajati iz kategorije dogodka, kot je bila teoretizirana v delu Alaina Badiouja. V kolikor dogodek v Badioujevem pomenu zahteva odločitev o tem, ali neko posebno mnoštvo pripada samemu sebi, kar smo tu poimenovali »tavtologija biti«, se zdi, da izjava Tereze May res označuje tak dogodek. To bi tudi iz badioujevske perspektive po­menilo, da gre za politično emancipatorno izjavo. Sam Badiou takega sklepa seveda ne bi sprejel, saj k brexitu poziva britanska država, s čimer je vnaprej izključeno, da bi brexit šteli kot singularnost. Vendar pa sam trdim, da bi brexit še vedno lahko veljal za dogodek v gornjem pomenu, če bi lahko ločili Badioujevo »socialno ontologijo« od njegove filozofske ontologije. Ta argument razvijam v nadaljevanju, sklicujoč se pri tem na delo Jacquesa Rancierea, za katerega menim, da izpelje omenjeno ločitev teoretskih področij. Vseeno pa dodajam, da še vedno potrebujemo elemente Badioujeve teorije, da bi lahko danes mislili nove oblike suverenosti in domoljubja, katerih primer bi lahko bil brexit. Drugo pomanjkljivost Rancierovega pristopa vidimo v tem, da zavrača uporabo izraza populizem, ki se nam, nasprotno, zdi ustrezen izraz za opis ideologije političnega subjekta kot singularnosti. Bi se torej morali obrniti k arhipopulistom, Laclau in Mou­ffe, ter njuni kategoriji hegemoniji, da bi lahko mislili brexit? Menimo, da nam tega ni treba storiti, saj hegemonija, kot tu trdimo, ne omogoča misliti politično singularnost, kakršen je brexit. Vseeno pa menimo, da bi morali vztrajati, da je treba v brexitu videti »populistični« emancipatorni dogodek. 
Boštjan Nedoh A State of Refugees? Agamben and the Future of Europe 
Keywords: nation-state, citizenship, refugees, subjective destitution, repression, return of the repressed, extraterritoriality, other space, Europe 
In the article, the author continues his recent discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s proposal to rethink anew Western political philosophy on the basis of the figure of refugee. In this first part, the article critically overviews Agamben’s criticism of biopolitical concepts of human rights, citizenship and the nation-state through the lens of Freudian-Lacanian theory of repression. If, as Agamben maintains, bare life is a “vanishing presupposition” in the constitution of the citizenship and the nation-state, it can be regarded also as primal repressed signifier in Freudian sense, which is then represented by the signifier “citizen” in the symbolic political-juridical order of the nation-state. In turn, refugees or stateless people in general, appear on the scene as the “return of the repressed” in­sofar as they embody the affective substitute of the primal repressed signifier. Against the background of this preliminary critical overview, the article proceeds further by ex­amining Agamben’s idea of “aterritoriality” or “extraterritoriality” of the state as corre­sponding to the political community founded upon the figure of the refugee. It is in this deterritorialized or “curved” topological space that the subjective destitution of the na­tion may occur by way of untying the biopolitical nexus state-nation-territory. The article concludes by proposing such a subjective destitution of European nations to be the mode in which Europe could and should re-constitute itself. 
Boštjan Nedoh Država beguncev? Agamben in prihodnost Evrope 
Ključne besede: nacionalna država, državljanstvo, begunci, subjektivna destitucija, potlačitev, vrnitev potlačenega, zunaj-teritorialnost, drugi prostor, Evropa 
Avtor v članku nadaljuje nedavno začeto razpravo o predlogu Giorgia Agambena, da je zahodno politično filozofijo treba na novo premisliti s stališča figure begunca. V prvem delu avtor kritično povzame Agambenovo kritiko biopolitičnih konceptov človekovih pravic, državljanstva in nacionalne države, in sicer tako, da te koncepte postavi v per-spektivo freudovsko-lacanovske teorije potlačitve. Če velja, kot trdi Agamben, da je golo življenje »izginevajoča predpostavka« v konstituciji državljanstva in nacionalne države, potem ga lahko razumemo tudi kot prvotno potlačeni označevalec v Freudovem smislu, ki ga označevalec »državljan« reprezentira v pravno-političnem redu nacionalne države. V tem kontekstu se begunci oziroma ljudje brez statusa (stateless) pojavijo na prizorišču prav kot »vrnitev potlačenega«, saj utelešajo afektivni nadomestek prvotno potlačenega označevalca. Izhajajoč iz tega preliminarnega pregleda, članek v drugem delu analizira Agambenovo idejo »ateritorialnosti« oziroma »zunaj-teritorialnosti« države, ki ustreza na figuri begunca utemeljeni politični skupnosti. Prav v temu deteritorializiranemu ozi­roma ukrivljenemu topološkemu prostoru lahko pride do subjektivne destitucije nacije, in sicer na način razveze biopolitičnega vozla država-nacija-teritorij. Članek sklene s pre­dlogom, da se Evropa lahko oziroma mora rekonstituirati prav skozi tako artikulirano subjektivno destitucijo Evropskih nacij. 
Jelica Šumič Riha Borderland and the Non-Citizen Politics 
Keywords: borders, lituraterre, idea of Europe, non-citizens, fantasy 
In critical border studies Europe is often compared to a border-zone, border-land, bor-der-space or even-border-scape. This article sets out from Balibar’s concepts of hetero­geneity and ubiquity of borders today in order to explore Europe as a borderland, i.e. a zone of transition and mobility without territorial fixity. Lacan’s concept of “lituraterre” helps us to consider the making and unmaking Europian borders through the erratic movements of migrants. 
Jelica Šumič Riha Mejno območje in politika nedržavljanov 
Ključne besede: meje, lituraterre, ideja Evrope, nedržavljani, fantazma 
Kritične mejne študije Evropo pogosto primerjajo z mejnim območjem, mejnim oze­mljem, mejnim prostorom ali celo mejno pokrajno. Pripujoči članek izhaja iz Balibarjevih konceptov heterogenosti in vsepričujočnost mej danes, da bi raziskala Evropo kot mejno območje, to je, kot območje prehodov in mobilnosti, ki ne pozna ozemeljske fiksnosti. Lacanov koncept »lituraterre« omogoča misliti nastajanje in odpravljanje evropskih meja s pomočjo eratičnih gibanj migratov. 
Tadej Troha Living in a Parallel Universe: From Brussels to Orbán, and On 
Keywords: Europe, Viktor Orbán, nationalism, democracy, elections, common sense 
The European Union, as a political project epitomising the idea of the end of history, has put a great deal of effort into completing the processes of enlargement, integration, and democratisation, but has thus far failed to find a technical solution that would con­vincingly link the “by” and “of” the European people. In this paper we discuss sever­al recent developments in European politics that provide evidence that this deficiency has reached a critical point. First, the failure of the Spitzenkandidaten model in the 2019 European elections; second, Viktor Orbán’s political interventions aimed at restoring the power of the nation-states within the EU; third, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to create a new post in her administration dedicated to “protect­ing our European way of life.” Drawing on the idea of “imitation” and “reverse imitation” developed by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, we argue that the European Union has recently entered its end phase, the stage of auto-imitation. 
Tadej Troha Življenje v paralelnem univerzumu: od Bruslja k Orbánu – in dalje 
Ključne besede: Evropa, Madžarska, Viktor Orbán, nacionalizem, demokracija, volitve, zdravi razum 
Evropska Unija kot politični projekt, ki uteleša idejo konca zgodovine, je vložila števil­ne napore v sklenitev procesov širitve, integracije in demokratizacije, a doslej ni uspela odkriti tehnične rešitve, ki bi vzpostavila prepričljivo povezavo med ljudstvom, ki pode­ljuje oblast, in ljudstvom, ki oblast izvaja. V prispevku analiziramo nekatere nedavne dogodke in premike v evropski politiki, ki pričajo o tem, da je omenjena nezadostnost dosegla kritično točko. Prvič, neuspeh modela »spitzekandidatov« na evropskih volitvah leta 2019; drugič, politične intervencije Viktorja Orbána, ki merijo k ponovni vzpostavitvi moči nacionalnih držav znotraj EU; tretjič, odločitev predsednice Evropske komisije, da v svoji administraciji ustvari novo mesto, namenjeno »zaščiti našega evropskega načina življenja«. V navezavi na ideje Ivana Krasteva in Stephena Holmesa o »imitaciji« in »obr­njeni imitaciji« trdimo, da je Evropska unija v zadnjem obdobju vstopila v svojo zaključ­no fazo, fazo avtoimitacije. 
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Opombe in reference se tiskajo kot opombe pod črto. V besedilu naj bodo opombe označene z dvignjenimi indeksi. Citiranje naj sledi spodnjemu zgledu: 
1. 
Gilles-Gaston Granger, Pour la connaissance philo­sophique, Odile Jacob, Pariz 1988, str. 57. 

2. 
Cf. Charles Taylor, “Rationality”, v: M. Hollis, 

S. Lukes (ur.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1983, str. 87–105. 

3. 
Granger, op. cit., str. 31. 

4. 
Ibid., str. 49. 

5. 
Friedrich Rapp, “Observational Data and Scientific Progress”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Oxford, 11 (2/1980), str. 153. 


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Citations should be presented as follows: 
1. 
Gilles-Gaston Granger, Pour la connaissance philo­sophique, Odile Jacob, Paris 1988, p. 123. 

2. 
Cf. Charles Taylor, “Rationality”, in: M. Hollis, 

S. Lukes (Eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1983, pp. 87–105. 

3. 
Granger, op. cit., p. 31. 

4. 
Ibid., p. 49. 

5. 
Friedrich Rapp, “Observational Data and Scientific Progress”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Oxford, 11 (2/1980), p. 153. 


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Communism,Europe alešBunta,Nietzsche’sPassagefromGermanytoEurope: 
TheThree ‘Deaths’ oftheHigherCulturalUnity MarinagržinićMauhler,TheIdeaofEurope peterklepec,Crisis,Europe RadoRiha,EuropaalsFallderIdee 
CollectiveSubjectivitybetweenpopulismandanti-populism timothyappleton,BrexitandtheTautologyofBeing BoštjanNedoh,AStateofRefugees?Agambenand theFutureofEurope JelicaŠumičRiha,Europe’sBorderlandandthe Non-CitizenPolitics tadejtroha,LivinginaParallelUniverse:FromBrussels toOrbán,andOn