Introduction
A sense of historical and political exhaustion haunts Europe.2 After five centuries of providing the solutions for the world, Europe seems incapable of solving its own problems. There pervades a feeling that there are no alternatives to the current critical state of affairs, that the fabric of social cohesion and post-WWII social contract that linked gains in productivity to gains in salaries and social protection is gone forever, and that the resulting increase in social inequality, rather than delivering higher economic growth, is indeed plunging Europe into stagnation. European social cohesion is degenerating before our eyes, sliding into European civil war by some Fatum (overpowering necessity) from which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) saw modern European reason being liberated.
This is all the more puzzling if we consider that at least some of these seemingly intractable problems are somewhat similar to problems that non-European countries have confronted in recent years with some measure of success. More puzzling yet is that these countries, in addressing their problems, have drawn on European ideas and experiences. But they have reinterpreted them in new ways, by twisting and reconfiguring some of their components and mixing them with other components derived from non-European sources, while engaging in a kind of intellectual and institutional bricolage focused on concrete results rather than on orthodox models and dogmas.
The sense of exhaustion is compounded with a sense of miniaturization. Europe seems to be shrinking, while the non-European world seems to be expanding. New actors have emerged on the global scene, such as China, post-Soviet Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa,3 while Europe appears less and less relevant. Moreover, in a rather paradoxical way, as the European Union (EU) expanded the distinctiveness of Europe’s presence and profile in world affairs became diluted. When the Western European countries were less dependent on Brussels’s directives and were viewed as independent actors, they projected a vision of Europe as a benevolent and peace-loving actor in international affairs, a profile clearly contrasting with the one projected by the United States. In contrast, when in our time the president of France, following slavishly on the steps of the United States, enthusiastically embraces the decision to bomb Libya and Syria, he is not only inducing the suicide of the French left but also wrapping up the soul of Europe in the diploma of the Peace Nobel prize awarded to the EU in 2012 and setting it on fire.
In addressing this epochal Geist, I start from two ideas that are far from being consensual.4 First, Europe, no matter how extraordinary its accomplishments in the past, has little, if anything, to teach the world. Second, Europe has extreme difficulty in learning from non-European experiences, namely from the global South.
This chapter is organized in three parts. First, I analyze the above-mentioned assumptions, historically contextualizing the decline of Europe. Second, I develop the conditions for mutual learning, including the readiness to learn from the global South and the acceptance that the future world will be a post-European one. Finally, I present the world as a global school and illustrate some of the classes of unlearning and learning that might be taken.
Europe in the World
Europe’s period as an imperial and global power ended in 1945. Devastated by the war, it benefited from the helping hand of the United States, then the overwhelming world power. Once the latter started to decline in the 1970s, instead of trying to carve out a new autonomous trajectory, Europe tied its fate to that of the United States by developing a partnership with it which over the years has become more and more unequal.5 In the meantime, the peripheral countries of the global South, many of which were European colonies at the end of WWII, became independent and, in one way or another, tried to find their own ways of making history in a post-European world. Progress took the form of a bumpy road, since Europe and its superior ally, the United States, questioned and challenged any attempt at delinking from the capitalist world system; meanwhile, the Soviet Union (and its allies) refused to accept any alternative to capitalism other than the one it was itself trying to develop. The Non-Aligned Movement (starting with the Bandung Conference in 1955, convened by Presidents Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Sukarno (Indonesia), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Josip Broz Tito (former Yugoslavia)),6 was the first manifestation of a historical intent to carve out a path beyond the double and self-contradictory vision Europe offered of itself to the world, now liberal and capitalist, now Marxist and socialist, both of them highly exclusionary and demanding unconditional loyalty. This dichotomization of global affairs, dramatically illustrated by the Cold War (at times very hot indeed, as in the Korean War or the wars in Southern Africa7), posed intractable political dilemmas to the new political elites of the global South, both at the national and regional level and at the level of the United Nations, even if for those most distanced from the Western culture capitalism and communism were two twin traps laid out by the same “white man’s” supremacy.
Several attempts at making history with some measure of autonomy followed in the subsequent decades, from the Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian and Latin American Peoples held in Havana in 19668 to the BRICS alliance mentioned above. Interestingly enough, the political and social innovations that came with it were based for the most part on European ideas, but they were processed in different ways; they were, in a sense, re-appropriated and hybridized, mixed with non-Western ideas, in a bricolage of ideas and practices. A lot can be learned from this historical experience.
But here enters the second premise I am putting forward: the idea that Europe has extreme difficulty in learning from the non-European experiences, namely those from the global South. Even if such experiences bear witness to the immensely rich historical diversity of the world, Europe is seemingly incapable of reflecting productively upon it and of using it to solve its own problems. The main reason for this difficulty lies in an entrenched colonialist prejudice that has outlived historical colonialism for many decades. For five centuries Europe saw itself as holding the key to the problems of an ever-expanding and inherently problematical world. Colonialism, evangelization, neocolonialism, imperialism, development, globalization, foreign aid, human rights, rule of law and humanitarian assistance have been some of the keys to the Eurocentric solutions for the problems of the world. Being dependent on such solutions, the non-European world was bound to adopt them, either voluntarily or by force, in this lying its subalternity vis-à-vis Europe. But, in the process, it also gave rise to much economic, social and political innovation, some of which consisted in new ways of rendering European conceptions and of combining them with non-European ones in response to specific contexts. There is therefore room for much global learning. However, the colonialist prejudice writ large is making it extremely difficult for Europe to learn from the experiences of the world.
How could Europe possibly benefit from world experiences that relate to the problems that Europe is facing, some of them supposedly solved long ago? There is one window of opportunity which has emerged in recent decades, and to which the 2008 financial, economic, political and ecological crisis has given a new visibility. What if Europe, rather than being the solution for the problems of the world, were itself the problem? Is Europe so unique as having to rely solely on its own experience to solve its problems? Or is Europe, on the contrary, part of a much wider world from whose experience it could benefit?9 The question does not imply that Europe needs to take lessons but rather engage in a new conversation with the world, a process of reciprocal learning based on more horizontal relations and mutual respect for differences. For better or worse, for a long time Europe did teach lessons to the world, as I mentioned above. One might be tempted to think that now it is time for the non-European world, the global South, to teach lessons to Europe. Then Europe teaching the world; now the world teaching Europe. I think, however, that an invalid metaphor does not get better by being inverted. In my view it is rather the time for a post-colonial, post-imperial conversation between Europe and the vast non-European world. Rather than inverted teaching, we need mutual learning. Since no one has a magical solution for the problems of the world, no absolute knowledge from which such a solution could derive, a new conversation of the world is the only alternative to the continuation of imperial domination and global civil war we seem to be entering. However, for Europe to engage in a new relationship with non-European countries and its “inner South,” it is imperative that other histories are brought into the world conversation, histories and memories of the peoples subjected to Eurocentric modern domination which were silenced made invisible or irrelevant by the Eurocentric historical metanarrative which granted itself the false designation of “world history.” As Trouillot has rightly emphasized, what we know about the global South are references produced by “North Atlantic universals.” North Atlantic universals are particulars that have gained a degree of universality, chunks of human history that have become historical standards (2002: 221–222). North Atlantic universals so defined are not merely descriptive or referential. They do not describe the world; they merely offer situated visions of the world, which I have called localized globalisms.
Before I develop these ideas, it should be noted that the formulation of these questions presupposes that a new vision of Europe is both possible and necessary. Why do we need a new vision? What should it look like? By asking these questions we are assuming, as a hypothesis, at least, that the old vision is not valid anymore, nor is it working as it should. Of course, we are also assuming that we have a clear and consensual idea of what the old vision looked like. None of these assumptions can be taken for granted. It seems to me that the sense of uneasiness that haunts Europe today derives from this radical uncertainty. Europeans are being led to aspire to a new vision of Europe, even if they don’t exactly know why, nor how exactly such a vision will differ from the old vision whose profile they at best only vaguely grasp.
There are other uncertainties and paradoxes which I am not going to address here except for a brief reference to one of them. It concerns the question of what counts as Europe. How many Europes are there? Is it made up of 51 countries or of the 27 EU countries?10 What does it mean to be European? We should bear in mind that there is no official definition of what “European” means, at least for cultural policies. The break-up of the Soviet Union, of Yugoslavia, the reunification of Germany, and the large-scale movement of migrants, workers and refugees throughout Europe have added complexity to the very idea of Europe and European identity, as new identities and new borderlands are juxtaposed and multiple layers of “insider” or “outsider” statuses develop. Immigration offices and customs commissions may also develop their own ideas about Europe and European identity. For this reason, some authors (e.g., Shore, 1993) claim that talk about “the European identity” is premature. Just as there is not “one Europe” but instead a plurality of historically specific and competing definitions of Europe (Seton-Watson, 1985; Wallace, 1990), so there are rival and contrasting “European identities,” depending on where the boundaries of Europe are drawn and how the nature of “European- ness” is perceived, a problem identified very early on (Kundera, 1984; Dahrendorf et al., 1989). In mentioning these complexities and uncertainties, I want draw attention both to the fact that the idea of a new vision of Europe is intimately linked with the idea of the multiple and often contradictory boundaries of Europe and to a global South that is present inside Europe, much of which is part of the non-occidentalist West I have been referring to it (Santos, 2009).
Learning from the Global South
In this section I will try to answer two questions. Under what conditions would such mutual learning be possible? What would be the main areas of such global learning?
Given Europe’s imperial and historical past, the first condition for mutual learning is the readiness to learn from the global South, from the experiences of the immense regions of the world that were once subjected to European rule. Learning from the South invokes geography(ies) and cartography(ies). However, in the sense used here, the South is a metaphor for the systematic suffering inflicted upon large populations by Western-centric colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy (Santos, 1995: 506–519; 2014: 215). As should be clear, this suffering is not exclusively Europe’s doing. On the other hand, historically, Europeans have also fought against colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. The metaphor is about measures, scales and weights, about dominant and subaltern, majority and minority movements and trends. They tell us that Europe was for centuries a very strong center that ruled the world by creating subordinate peripheries or margins. Continuing with the metaphor, there is a South because there was and still is a North. Learning from the South means learning from the peripheries, from the margins. It is not easy because, viewed from the center, the South is either too closely dependent on the North to be able to be different in any relevant way or, on the contrary, so far apart that its reality is incommensurable with that of the center. In either case, the periphery has nothing to teach the center.
The first condition of learning from the South is to clarify what kind of South or Souths are to be engaged in the conversation. This clarification presupposes the willingness to consider a new cartography of Europe. We are reminded of the famous phrase used by the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859) in the first decades of the nineteenth century: “Asien beginnt an der Landstraße”, that is to say, Asia begins on the Landstraße. In the nineteenth century, the area around the Landstraße (the name of the street11) located on the outskirts of Vienna was occupied by immigrants from the Balkans. Then as now, the distinction between the Balkans and Europe was clear, as if the Balkan countries were not part of Europe.
The specification of what the South means is particularly complex in the case of Europe. The South that confronts Europe as the other is both outside and inside Europe. The South outside Europe comprises the countries which are the source of raw materials to be explored by North-based multinational corporations; countries whose natural disasters elicit European humanitarian aid; countries which are unable to sustain their populations, thus giving rise to the problem of immigration that afflicts Europe; countries which breed terrorists that must be fought with the utmost severity. The South inside Europe bespeaks the immigrants, the Roma people, the children of immigrants, some of whom have lived in Europe for generations and even hold European passports but nevertheless are not viewed as “Europeans like the others.” They become particularly visible during riots and their protests highlight their othe...
