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EUROPE (IN THEORY)
By Roberto M. Dainotto DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3927-4
Chapter One
The Discovery of Europe SOME CRITICAL POINTS
From a work of criticism, we expect today concrete results, or, at least, demonstrable theses and viable hypotheses. Yet when the word appears in the dictionary of European philosophy, "criticism" means rather an investigation concerning the limits of knowledge-concerning that which, precisely, is not possible to hypothesize or maintain.-GIORGIO AGAMBEN, Stanze
In his relentless (and relentlessly cited) Clash of Civilizations, the very man Henry Kissinger once commended as "one of the West's most eminent political scientists" (qtd. in J. Bhabha 597n17) confidently argued that "Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin" (Huntington 158). For us in the humanities-still afflicted perhaps by some "realism of uncertainty" (Newman)-the absolute certainty with which Huntington could draw such a neat map of Europe was, to say the least, enviable. Putting an end to the hairsplitting sophistries of Brussels bureaucrats and academic theorists who kept chewing over the "old problems of boundaries" (Slack and Innes 3) and "what is meant by the term 'Europe'" (Brugmans 11), Huntington almost gave us the specific coordinates to trace the boundaries of Christian and Western Europe: it was as if Santiago de Campostela in the northwest and the Virgin Mary's House of Ephesus in the southeast could provide a definite and unquestionable geographical body to Europe.
Such a clerical map was at once the confirmation of Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen's notion that continents were but cultural constructs and the outdoing of "metageography" itself. Is not a continent, the skeptical metageographers would have asked, "one of the main continuous bodies of land on the earth's surface" (the definition, after all, is as authoritative as the Oxford English Dictionary)? But, if so, rather than a continent, Europe would only be "a small heading of the Asiatic continent, ... a western appendix of Asia" (Valéry 24 and 38; see also Rougemont 33; and Derrida, Other Heading 11-17). It looks as if the term continent, as applied to Europe despite the land continuum of Eurasia, embodies only some European fantasies, and no more: the fantasy of a Europe that wants to imagine itself different, that wants to separate itself from Asia; the fantasy, moreover, of a Europe that wants to think itself as a geographical, natural, and factual unity. But then again, where does Europe end? On the Adriatic? In Yugoslavia? Turkey? Or perhaps even Russia? One can see why Lewis and Wigen, writing only one year before the Clash, thought that "there are many reasons to believe that the ... continental scheme ... obscures more than it reveals" (2-3). But where Lewis and Wigen saw difficulties, Huntington only saw the certainties of (political) science. Ipse dixit! Centuries of beating about the bush of Europe and its borders had been ended with the straightforward ways that have always marked the "practical science" of the "Geheimrat" (Hardt and Negri 33-34)-what Immanuel Kant called the "political moralist, i.e., one who forges a morality ... to influence the current ruling power ... even at the expense of the people, and, where possible, of the entire world" ("Perpetual Peace" 128-29). Too bad that such practical science did not believe its business to be overly concerned with the limits of that morality. Too bad it had to do away with all complexities of a definition of Europe. Too bad it aimed instead at producing readily usable, if fundamentalist, civilizational hypotheses that the current power could immediately translate into "momentary commands" (Kant, "Perpetual Peace" 129).
What does the fortune of the clash theory tell us about cultural production today? If what we expect of theory is a set of readily usable hypotheses that can be promptly translated into political action, Huntington's book has proven a sign of the times: "We have become all too practical. Fear of the impotence of theory supplies a pretext for bowing to the almighty production process" (Adorno 44). Between one cavalier theory of Europe and another of the West, the Clash has crowned an age in which all that has been asked from an increasingly scientific, practical, and Sokalized academia was not criticism and complications, but usable theses by the pound. The humanities have quickly succumbed; criticism-"questioning, upsetting and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged" (Said, Humanism 28)-disbanded as an unnecessary complication, while the practical sciences have become hegemonic in all cultural discussions.
In all fairness (and to avoid some unnecessary clash of the disciplines here), quite a good number of social scientists have seen little science and lots of cultural prejudice in Huntington's confessional view of world geography in which alternatives are homogenous and civilizational borders as unmovable as the mountain that never went to Muhammad. The civilizational thesis has accordingly been castigated as a "one-sided conjecture" (Wilson 255), and one, moreover, that "does not survive historical scrutiny" (Amartya 16). To which one must add, still, that Huntington did not really discover the civilizational boundaries of Europe, but adopted them ready-made, like Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal, from an age-long cultural tradition of European thought in the process of discovering itself as European. The chapter that begins here would like to trace a brief and critical history of such a "discovery of Europe."
Before the incipit of this story brings us back to another conflict of civilizations (in the beginning were the Persian Wars), let me offer an apology and a preface first. The apology concerns the telegraphic brevity, undoubtedly fraught with many simplifications, with which this opening chapter attempts to outline the story-after all, "no history could be written" (Pagden, introduction 1)-of the discovery of Europe from 500 BC to the early 1700s. Although the real concern of this book is with the emergence of an idea of dialectical and self-sufficient Europe in the late eighteenth century, I find that a brief outline of what precedes such surfacing is altogether necessary to my later argument. Not because I believe a history of the idea of Europe should or could be offered here: such history is impossible not in Anthony Pagden's sense-too much has been written already (the same argument in Lützeler)-but in the sense that history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests in Provincializing Europe, is the very thought that produces Europe as its own "sovereign, theoretical subject" (27). Writing a history of Europe, or of the idea of Europe, means, then, tautologically, to write a history of the European idea of history.
I will try to enter the logic of this tautology later in this book. Before doing that, however, what I would like to accomplish here is to reconstruct the repertoire of ideas and commonplaces, and analyze some critical points, that the eighteenth-century theorists of Europe will find available to them, ready to use and argue in their definitions of either Europe or, mutatis mutandis, "Universal History." As a preface, I would like to justify the title of this chapter by saying that Europe, too, had to be discovered. Not only in the sense that at different times in their histories, also Africa (Northrup), Islam (B. Lewis; Abu-Lughod), Japan (Keene), and the by now ubiquitous American tourist (Rahv) had to discover firsthand the "old continent" they only knew from literature or legend. More important than that, Europe had to discover itself as Europe-that is, to find unity in the plurality of all its imperial, national, local, cultural, and civilizational differences. When did Europe begin to see itself as one?
E Pluribus Unum: Theories of Beginnings
Sometimes it can seem hopeless. How do you mould a single European people out of the lumpen masses scattered across the continent? European citizens ... still insist on speaking different languages, they read different papers, worship at the shrines of different celebrities, chortle at different television programmes. But there is one exception.... -CHARLEMAGNE, "The Players Do Better Than the Politicians in Making Europe Loved"
In a chapter of his The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, programmatically titled "The Discovery of Europe," John Hale begins: "When in 1623 Francis Bacon threw off the phrase 'we Europeans,' he was assuming that his readers knew where 'Europeans' were, who they were, and what, in spite of national differences, they shared. This was a phrase, and an assumption, that could not have been used with such confidence a century and a half before" (3). For Hale, therefore, it was between 1450 and 1620 "that the word Europe first became part of common linguistic usage and the continent itself was given a securely map-based frame of reference, a set of images that established its identity in pictorial terms, and a triumphal ideology that overrode its internal contradictions" (3).
Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, instead, follows Marc Bloch's idea of the Middle Ages as the "childhood of Europe" (Bloch, Feudal 442) and sees Europe becoming one already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when a militarily hegemonic Frankish center (Germany, France, North Italy) begins conquering, colonizing, and "Europeanizing" the rest of the "continent" (Britain, Flanders, the Low Countries, Iberia, Southern Italy). Such colonization changed a previously "highly compartmentalized world" into one where religion, economy, and systems of education were shared by all, so that, eventually, a "cultural homogenization of Europe" was achieved under Frankish rule: "By 1300 Europe existed as an identifiable cultural entity. It could be described in more than one way, but some common features of its cultural face are the saints, names, coins, charters, and educational practices.... By the late medieval period Europe's names and cults were more uniform than they had ever been; Europe's rulers everywhere minted coins and depended upon chanceries; Europe's bureaucrats shared a common experience of higher education. This is the Europeanization of Europe" (Bartlett 291).
Adopting a similar line of reasoning, but implicitly refuting the Frankish beginnings of Europe, Norman Davies's Europe: A History dates a "birth of Europe" back to the period of "barbarian" migrations, invasions, and conquests that penetrated the Roman Empire from around 330 (date of the founding of Constantinople) to 800 AD. For Davies, Europe was (and still ought to be) an ethnic melting pot, the product of centuries-long racial dispersals and mixings-a cosmopolitan project, that is, forgotten by a later age of nationalism:
By the eighth century, therefore, the ethnic settlement of the Peninsula [Celts, Slovenes, Huns, Goths, Jewish, Afro- and Indo-European "Romans"] was beginning to achieve a lasting pattern. The eighth century, indeed, was the point when important social crystallizations occurred. Yet five more major migrations [Vikings, Magyars, Mongols, Moors, and Turks] had to happen before all the basic population of the future Europe was complete. Europe was conceived from the most diverse elements, and her birth was painfully protracted. (238)
Enrique Dussel, who has other continents in mind, goes forward to 1492, "date of the 'birth' of modernity," to trace back an origin of Europe "as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity" ("Eurocentrism" 66). Only through a confrontation with its colonial Other, not through Bartlett's internal forms of colonialism or Davies's migrations, can Dussel's Europe emerge as an identity. And while Helmut Reinicke (iii) maintains the same colonial beginning of Europe in the year 1492, Bernard Lewis, in The Muslim Discovery of Europe, goes back to another confrontation (and another Other) to find Europe born on the day Charles Martel faced the Muslim armies in Poitiers. The year was 732: "It was indeed on this occasion that the very notion of Europe as an entity which could be threatened or saved appeared for the first time" (18).
M. E. Yapp, on the other hand, convinced that Poitiers is ideologically still a Christian, rather than a European, coming together, does not agree with Lewis in the least: "The emergence of the concept of Europe required ... the waning of the power of the idea of Christendom. For that process we must look at a much later period". Europe emerges then for Yapp with a much (much!) later "secular shift" (142)-when the religious threat of Islam wanes and, in 1714, the treaty of Utrecht remains the last testament to Europe as a "Christian Republic." After 1714, in other words, with the secular "emergence of Britain as the leading naval and military power in Europe" (O'Brien 65), Yapp's true and secular Europe began.
While some venture as far back as the homo abilis (Cunliffe; Phillips) to find the beginnings of Europe, others see the latter as a yet unfinished project, a still "hopeless goal" best left to Beckham to bend into conceptual and cultural unity under the auspices of the European Football Federation: "Over the past decade [in the 1990s] European football teams have turned into [the only] living, breathing embodiment of European integration" (Charlemagne, "Players" 55).
Rather than attempting the impossible task of determining which one is the true beginning of a self-consciousness of Europe, we would better ask ourselves, simply: Why so much ado about beginnings in the first place? The fact is that beginnings, as Edward Said once wrote, are always disingenuous: one begins from A not because there is some irrefutable reason to do so, but only because "the beginning A leads to B" (Beginnings 6). It is quite likely, in this sense, that Hale begins in 1450 (A) only to argue, as the undoubtedly Eurocentric reviewer does not miss a chance to remark, the universal value (B) of the Renaissance's "stunning achievements that shaped (for better and for worse, but mainly for better) the future not only of Europe but of the whole world" (Nauert 1087). Bartlett and Davies (like Geary) begin with medieval conquest (A) only to dispel the myth (B) of all ethnonationalisms, whose "idea of exclusive national homelands is a modern fantasy" (Davies 217). And Bernard Lewis suggests the battle of Poitiers as a beginning of Europe (A) with the clear intent to theorize (B) the original and fundamental importance of Muslim-Christian rivalries-the clash of civilizations-in the shaping of Europe and the West.
To paraphrase Denis Donoghue's "America in Theory", you think you are reading about the beginning of Europe-in the Renaissance, at Poitiers, in 1450 or 1492-and you suddenly find yourself within a systematic theory hinging on the word Europe and all its supposed meanings. It is in this first sense that, as the title of the present book maintains, Europe is in theory: speaking of Europe means-implicitly or explicitly, consciously or not-creating a theory not only of Europe itself but of a whole series of other things, such as culture (Hale), modernity (Dussel), nationalism (Bartlett), secularization (Yapp), and so on.
Assuming the game of beginnings is then not entirely naive, let me begin my story from the Persian Wars (500-449 BC), when the Greek states first reunited as "Europe" in order to confront the threat of Darius's Persian Empire. It is a good date, after all, to start understanding the very secular and military origin of the east/west antithesis that still informs, as a rhetorical unconscious, more recent civilizational clash theories. It brings us back to an old Europe, no doubt, but one that may still bear on the ways a new one is imagined.
Old Europe
Today, the center of gravity is shifting. -DONALD RUMSFELD, press briefing, January 23, 2003
I'm looking for a permanent center of gravity. -FRANCO BATTIATO, "Centro di gravitè permeneate"
(Continues...)
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