Discourses and Counter-discourses on Europe

From the Enlightenment to the EU

Manuela Ceretta, Barbara Curli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367173708
• eBook ISBN: 9781317265139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The European Union plays an increasingly central role in global relations from migration to trade to institutional financial solvency. The formation and continuation of these relations – their narratives and discourses - are rooted in social, political, and economic historical relations emerging at the founding of European states and then substantially augmented in the Post-WWII era. Any rethinking of our European narratives requires a contextualized analysis of the formation of hegemonic discourses.

The book contributes to the ongoing process of "rethinking" the European project, identity, and institutions, brought about by the end of the Cold war and the current economic and political crisis. Starting from the principle that the present European crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis of its hegemonic discourse, the aim of the volume is to rescue the complexity, the richness, the ambiguity of the discourses on Europe as opposed to the present simplification. The multidisciplinary approach and the long-term perspective permits illuminating scope over multiple discourses, historical periods, and different "languages", including that of the European institutions.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European integration, European History, and more broadly international relations.

Part I
Thinking and regretting Europe

Introduction to Part I

Thinking and regretting Europe

The first part of this book examines the founding moment of modern Europe, the period which, foreshadowed by the Enlightenment, ran from the French Revolution to its most visible European outcome: the Congress of Vienna.

All three essays tackle the problem of the use of history in the contemporary rhetoric and historiography on Europe. All too often this has involved an approach that tends to see history, in particular the history of the Enlightenment, as a sort of a highroad towards European integration, and which is based a posteriori on a simplistic canon and an undeviating story free of exceptions and stumbling blocks. It is also a strategy that ignores periods and viewpoints deemed unhelpful to the progress of the European project. The three essays are thus an attempt to contribute to a reconsideration of the European project by reinterpreting certain distinct moments in the history of the continent.

The word ‘thinking’ is used in the title above because this first part of the volume focuses on the crucial period of European history in which the first great discourse on Europe emerged, namely the years spanning from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth.

While the current political debate tends to depict the Enlightenment as the cradle of Europe and, conversely, characterizes the counter-Enlightenment (a much less studied movement) as the origin of anti-Europeanism, the first essay reveals how such theories are in fact anti-historical. Through a careful re-examination of the sources, Patrizia Delpiano’s contribution explains how, even though Voltaire or Montesquieu did consider the salient features of European society and the constituent elements of Europe, on the whole the Enlightenment did not actually launch a discourse about Europe. Such a debate was instead constructed a posteriori by a historiography ideologically influenced by the post-1945 European project and its lofty vocation, but it was a debate that never actually took place at the time: Europe was not a hot topic even for the Enlightenment thinkers who dedicated some thought to it, nor were there shared positions about the continent. What instead prevailed in the eighteenth century was a plurality of voices and visions, which do not fit with traditional Orientalist or postcolonial theories about the birth of a European sense of superiority. Instead they provide arguments supporting the idea that discourses on Europe (and on other parts of the world) represented an important chapter in the development of a new way of writing history.

Thus the debate on Europe was not baptised by the Enlightenment nor indeed by its detractors. The task was instead left to the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna, tackled by Manuela Ceretta and Giuseppe Sciara in the second and third chapters. Ceretta investigates the ideological rationale and polemical motivations underlying the counter-revolutionaries’ appeal to medieval and Catholic Europe of Charlemagne, while Sciara analyses how discourses on Europe were used instrumentally during the Restoration in order to deal with the internal poltiical struggle. The debates on Europe that developed after 1789 were moulded by a political and historical context in which intellectuals, writers and political actors began to be ever more aware of the strict correlation between domestic politics and foreign policy.

As this European moment progressed, a new way of thinking about the continent closely linked to the concept imposed itself, of which the notion of regret became one of the key cognitive elements, hence the second keyword of our title. When the counter-revolutionaries began to attack the nation in the name of Europe and to fight the Revolution in the name of God, Europe began to be regretted for something that no longer existed (e.g. peace, social order) and which in fact had never existed. This manufactured nostalgia became a myth, a memory that would play an important polemical-rhetorical role and serve concrete political objectives. It was no coincidence that discourses on Europe intensified in the moments of greatest crisis, between the First and Second Restorations, when the clash between the old and new France was most ferocious, or following the revolts of the 1820s, when struggles for liberty or for national independence broke out in the east and west of the continent.

Thus the notion of Europe was built on crisis or, more accurately, on a combination of crisis and fear. This is of course an old theme: both Marc Bloch in 1935 and Lucien Febvre in 1944–1945 argued convincingly that these concepts are of key importance to understanding Europe, its hesitations and fragilities. So why listen again to the voices that animated counter-revolutionary circles and refocus on Restoration France? Perhaps, because doing so helps to dismantle, in Febvre’s words, ‘this seductive image of a completed Europe that has become the true home of the Europeans’ and to remind us, in the middle of our own difficult moment, that while crisis and trepidation have been an integral part of European identity, they have also nurtured transformations and visions of change.

1
Thinking Europe in the age of Enlightenment

Philosophes and antiphilosophes between universalism and fragmentation

Patrizia Delpiano

Introduction

When talking of the ‘House of Europe’, the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, recently said that it is ‘the greatest achievement of our European civilisation since the Enlightenment’.¹ While there are many European leaders who invoke the Enlightenment movement, seeing it more or less explicitly as one of the founding moments of Europe, there are, on the other side, not a few politicians ready to support a ‘Christian Padania, a new Vandea’ against ‘a Europe without God […], daughter of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution’,² as a representative of Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord) party put it. It is a well known fact that historical discourse is an integral part of political debate, but our concern here is rather to highlight how pro- and anti-Europeans alike, albeit with different objectives, make reference to the century of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, thereby establishing close links between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.³ In other words, this chapter takes into account the ideas of eighteenth century philosophes and anti-philosophes as a tool to unveil how much some of today’s discourses on Europe have a tendency to oversimplify its history considering the past a sort of unstoppable and unavoidable path towards the European Union.

These are discourses and counter-discourses that are to be found not only in the political sphere, but also in the historiographical debate. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall favoured a rapprochement between Eastern and Western Europe that encouraged research into the links between the past and the present, an investigation further stimulated by the birth of the European Union. During the 1990s and the first years of the new century – in the wake of undisguised pro-Europeanist enthusiasm – studies of the idea of Europe and its historical construction in the early modern age multiplied. Thus there emerged renewed enquiries into the links, more or less direct, between certain philosophes and the European Union and/or Europe (the two terms are not always kept separate).⁴ Indicative of that period are the words used by the historian Krzystof Pomian, director of the Scientific Committee of the Museum of Europe in Brussels, who was prepared to recall Christian traditions in the European Constitution ‘on one crucial condition: add immediately that the Europe of today, while having many Christian foundations, was built by the Enlightenment’.⁵ These correlations abound and, in some cases, relate to the origins of anti-Europeanism, whose matrices are brought back into the fold of anti-Enlightenment and anti-Revolutionary culture,⁶ although resistance to Europe in reality involves a diversity of political orientations.

So is the European Union the daughter – for better or for worse – of the Enlightenment, while anti-Europeanism drinks from the wells of antiphilosophie? This discourse and counter-discourse are examined here by giving voice to men of the eighteenth century: the French Enlightenment thinkers (or the philosophes, to use the eighteenth-century term), in particular Montesquieu and Voltaire (given that nowadays their names recur persistently), and the antiphilosophes, who organized a vigorous opposition to the Enlightenment movement throughout Europe. The chapter is divided into three sections: the image of Europe in the culture of the Enlightenment is analysed (section 1) in particular as related to the specific features that, according to the Enlightenment thinkers, characterized Europe as compared to other civilizations (section 2); the last section is devoted to the antiphilosophique culture and to the link between the Enlightenment and Europe through the eyes of opponents of the Enlightenment, a theme underinvestigated so far by historiography.

For both philosophes and antiphilosophes – who looked suspiciously at the interest philosophes had in other cultures, especially China and the Turkish empire – the idea of an non-compact Europe, of a world divided by deep internal fractures, prevailed. Accordingly in reading their writings one inevitably ends up demolishing every rhetorical, linear and simplistic interpretation of the construction process of the ‘House of Europe’. Indeed, this seems to be a good time to do so: with the fading of Europeanist ardour, the current political crisis of the European Union has cooled the passions of even the most fervent historians, making the subject less intense and thus also less conditioned by visions of a teleological character.⁷

To be sure, some of the values that appear to guide the European Union today can be ascribed to Enlightenment culture, from secularism to freedom of thought and of the press. Establishing close anachronistic-type relations between the past and the present is, however, an entirely different matter. A historian of the early modern period will, for example, read with some embarrassment the declaration that ‘the eighteenth-century ideal of unifying Europe politically and in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: rescuing Europe from its rhetoric
• PART I Thinking and regretting Europe
• PART II The burden of rhetoric: inside the European institutions
• PART III Communicating Europe
• Index