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A NEW
WORLD ORDER
Part 2: Europe's 3D
vision
By Pepe Escobar
Part 1: The South strikes back
SAO PAULO - A new idea of Europe is
at the center of frenetic realignments currently
evolving on the world stage. The European Union is fully
engaged in the complex process of forging itself as an
alternative political and social model for the rest of
the world. But the EU still grapples with the fact that
from 193 nation-states in the world today, 125 were its
former colonies. And the EU still has not come up with a
meaningful project to offer to most of these former
colonies.
Neo-conservatives in the Bush
administration love so-called "new Europe" (pliable,
money-hungry, former communist, Eastern European states,
plus starry-eyed opportunists like Spanish Prime
Minister Jose Maria Aznar). They dismiss "old Europe"
(whose core, France and Germany, is nothing else but the
core of the European Union). But as many political
scientists have stressed, the dismissal barely masks
extreme unease. What really worries the
neo-conservatives and selected parts of the American
establishment is how Germany, for instance, and Russia
(whose destiny is inextricably linked with Europe) are
increasingly giving full force again to their national
development projects - away from the American model.
The EU as a whole does not have a national
development project: it is shaping a continental and
even global project that it would like to sell to the
world. American neo-conservatives may dismiss "old
Europe" at their own peril. There has been virtually no
serious discussion in American corporate media on why
France and Germany went against the Bush doctrine. But
in Europe three key themes have been at the center of
the debate as far as the Franco-German coalition is
concerned - an entente cordiale revitalized by the whole
Iraqi episode.
The three themes are the
widespread European popular opposition to the war on
Iraq and the unilateralist hegemony of the US; the
meaning of this evolving, elusive "European identity";
and the current debate over the EU constitution. Nothing
better illustrates what's at stake than a text published
simultaneously on May 31 by the French daily Liberation
and the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
written by two towering intellects of the European
Union: Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas.
Derrida (b El Biar, Algeria, 1930) is arguably
the leading living French philosopher: his ideas also
exert tremendous influence in leading American
universities. Habermas (b Dusseldorf, 1929) is part of
the second generation of the legendary Frankfurt School,
which has congregated thinkers of the Critical Theory
like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse.
Since the 1930s, the Frankfurt School has conceptualized
many developments in modern and post-modern history by
stressing that the capitalist system was "closed" and
without any possibility of "concrete negation": the only
challenge to it would come from fringe social groups
(today personified by the globalization movement) and
from the peoples of the Third World (the former colonies
with which the EU still does not know how to deal).
Asia Times Online has learned that Habermas
himself invited other European intellectuals to write
manifestoes in their country's newspapers, to be
published on the same day, May 31: that was the case
with Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Fernando
Savater in Spain, and the philosopher and Stanford
University professor Richard Rorty in the US.
Derrida and Habermas start with "two dates which
we should nor forget": the day European newspapers
published "new Europe's" declaration of loyalty to
Bush's war at the end of January; and February 15, the
day of massive anti-war protests in most European
capitals. Derrida and Habermas say that "the
simultaneity of these magnificent protests, the largest
since the end of the Second World War, maybe will enter
the history books as marking the birth of the European
public sphere". One wonders when and if one day there
will be an "Asian public sphere".
To configure a
new form of future global politics, Derrida and Habermas
stress that Europe "must show its weight to
counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the US".
But where will this "attractive and even contagious
vision" come from? It can only be born from a current
"sense of perplexity" and "it must be articulated in the
febrile cacophony of a public sphere of multiple
voices". And indeed there's a lot of debate going on now
all over Europe, from universities and parliaments to
the streets.
Derrida and Habermas say that
"Christianity and capitalism, natural science and
technology, Roman law and the Napoleonic code, the urban
and civilian form of life, democracy and human rights,
the secularization of state and society, these conquests
are no more an European privilege. The 'West', in the
quality of a spiritual profile, includes more than only
Europe." This should connect to "the desire of a
multilateral and juridically regulated international
order and the hope of effective global politics in the
framework of a reformed UN".
Derrida and
Habermas also make a crucial point: "The constellation
that allowed privileged Western Europeans to develop
such a mentality under the shadow of the Cold War has
disintegrated since 1989-90. But February 15 shows that
the mentality itself has survived its original context.
This also explains why 'old Europe' considers itself
challenged by the energetic hegemonic policy of the
allied superpower. And why so many in Europe who salute
the fall of Saddam as a liberation reject the character
contrary to international law of the unilateral,
preemptive invasion, justified in such a confusing and
insufficient manner." Both philosophers barely disguise
their irony when they add that "in our longitudes, it's
hard to imagine a president that starts his daily
activities with a public prayer and ties his political
decisions full of consequences to a divine mission".
Neo-conservatives could learn a thing or two
from Derrida and Habermas: "Each of the great European
nations lived the flowering of imperial power and, what
is more important in our context, had to assimilate the
experience of the loss of an empire: with increasing
distancing from imperial domination and colonial
history, European powers also got the chance of taking a
reflexive distance from themselves. Thus they were able
to learn to perceive themselves, from the perspective of
the vanquished, in the dubious role of victors which
would have to be accountable for an authoritarian
modernization. This might have nurtured a refusal of
eurocentrism, and stimulated the hope for a truly global
politics."
Will the neo-conservatives listen to
"old Europe"? Hardly. Another towering intellect,
Italian Toni Negri, co-author with Michael Hardt of
Empire, says that he relies on John Dewey - an
American author - to, in Negri's words, "stimulate the
conscience of necessary reforms to fight Bush's
brutalizing philosophy". For the best European minds -
and for much of its public opinion -
neo-conservative-inspired American unilateralism is just
another brand of terrorism. And if the world is forced
to choose between barbarism and barbarism, it's up to
Europe to offer an alternative.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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