On the European Question

Over the course of its history, Europe has posed a number of famous questions. It has had, or confronted, a number of problems. Or has it? Were these answers Europe was looking for or solutions it sought to bring about? Attending to the “Jewish Question,” in contrast to which he claims all the others fade, Jean-Claude Milner has argued that the translation of a question into a problem, and the subsequent search for a solution, an infamous “final solution,” reveals a massive historical, and enduring, failure. In attending to his work, I examine some of the other solutions offered by Europe in its questions (the colonial question, the eastern question, the woman question, etc.) in order to propose that Europe itself might have to be treated as a question, but also, and finally, that by virtue of its singular capacity to constitute the other -- numerous others -- as “questions” Europe constitutes, finally, a problem of its own.