Europe's Permanent Crisis

This paper argues in favour of historicisation as a critical strategy through which the self understanding of Europe could be deconstructed as a teleological idea. I approach the “Old Continent” as a conceptual problem of the affirmation of universalism while at the same time exploring the oscillation between the attempts to affirm unconditional universalism and the missionary exclusivity of the white man. The history of Europe shows that the principle of freedom remains definitely abstract as long as some form of resistance does not enable it to become concrete. There have been various visions of the European unification, all of which have been associated either with violence or a patronising attitude implying a certain kind of power “from above”. I claim that a critical self-understanding is crucial for Europe which simultaneously appears as a problem and a solution. The current crisis is a process containing a moment of indecisiveness regarding both of these aspects.