European Guilt: The Rhetoric of Apology

This essay is an exploration into the concept of a New Europe, or more precisely, the concept of a Post-national Europe: Europe in the Age of Apology. I shall try to formulate a genealogy of the European apology yet not in terms of its limits or of its ends but rather in terms of its origins. The current European victimology identifies something like a painful legacy that emerges from a repressed and silent past, a past full of crime and unjustice. Therefore, the ‘culture of apology’ cannot be explained from within, by way of the Eurocentric slogan, ‘Europe is the Bible and the Greeks’ (Emmanuel Levinas). Quite the opposite: a proper genealogical reconstruction of the concept of apology must be articulated outside of European universalism: “I shall seek to show the universalism of the powerful has been a partial and distorted universalism, one that I am calling ‘European universalism’. (…) The struggle between European universalism and universal universalism is the central ideological struggle of the contemporary world.