ABSTRACT
When examining the “meanings of Europe”, it seems worthwhile to pay attention to those periods when such meanings have been more intensely debated than in others. For, while raising questions about the meaning or meanings of something inevitably suggests that this “something” is somehow already at hand—in terms of a given, albeit, further explicable entity—it is often at the same time a response to some kind of urgency. And one of the lessons that can be drawn from periods of intense debates around historical “somethings” like “Europe” is that, more often than not, such debates occur especially when those somethings are precisely not perfectly at hand—because they are only anticipated or wished for, rather than already fully present, pending, rather than completely confirmed or decided upon, or jeopardized, rather than safely established and consolidated. In other words, if interrogations about the meanings of something take this something as always already a given entity, they concomitantly suggest that this “entity” might not quite differ so fundamentally from, precisely, a mere and rather indefinite “something”, and thus raise questions not only about meaning(s), but about the very “givenness” of that supposed entity.
