ABSTRACT
I This book is intended as a contribution to the ongoing process of rethinking the European project and to the debate on its ‘constitutive’ foundations brought about by a series of historical events and geopolitical changes which have occurred in these past thirty years. It assumes that the present European crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis of its hegemonic discourse, and that the more hegemonic such a discourse has become, the more it has turned flat and impoverished: the rhetoric on Europe is an integral part of its present crisis. The volume deals with the manifold discursive dimensions of Europe’s history and identity by adopting a multidisciplinary approach and taking a long-term perspective from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Its aim is to rescue the complexity, the richness, and the ambiguity of the discourses on Europe from their present simplification. The end of the Cold War marked a systemic turning point in European history, and once again raised – albeit in a novel manner – the issue of Europe’s ‘borders’. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, a newly ‘unbound’ Europe1 was compelled to question not only its geographical and geopolitical frontiers, but also its political, economic, and cultural boundaries. At the same time, such events prompted a redefinition of the institutional construction of the European Community, which had begun before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Single European Act of 1986 and the launching of the single market project, in fact, had opened a new phase of structural transformation in the continent’s economy and initiated a process (which will be carried on by subsequent treaties) of unprecedented enlargement of the policy-making competences of the Community with direct effects on the lives of European citizens. These changes redefined – at both the national and supranational level – the question of the state and its role in regulating the economy, that were now to be recast on a European scale.2 The birth of the EU at Maastricht, the establishment of monetary union (also as a consequence of the events of 1989), and the process of Eastern enlargement which culminated in 2004-2007 were important phases in the redefinition of boundaries and institutional re-foundation. This was a long, ambitious, and in many ways successful project. However, the onset of the current economic crisis, massive migratory waves, and new security and strategic issues (e.g. the rise of ISIS) represent a challenge for the
institutions and the arrangements put in place after 1989. In fact, these issues appear increasingly to strain the resilience of those arrangements. The extent to which institutions like the European Central Bank or the Schengen rules are adequate responses to the challenges and threats to today’s Europe is an open question. What is certain, however, is that the present dramatic circumstances have highlighted two important elements: first, the weaknesses in the mechanisms of integration; second, the change that has occurred within the European public sphere in just over a decade. Some great themes (e.g. ‘European values’, ‘Europe’s cultural and religious roots’, ‘a European constitution’, the notion of ‘citizenship’) debated until a few years ago by eminently institutional actors have rapidly become part of the everyday conversations of millions of European citizens, acquiring a new urgency. The rigours of the economic crisis and the perceived inadequacy of institutional responses have for the first time raised the possibility of exit by a member country from the Monetary Union (the so-called ‘Grexit’); while the perception of Europe as an area unable to address questions related to democracy, security and growth has actually engendered the decision by a member state to ‘withdraw from the Union’ (the so-called ‘Brexit’) – as provided for by art. 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. All these events have opened a stimulating new chapter in European studies, raising once again ‘the very old subject of European identity’ – as Jacques Derrida noted in L’Autre Cap, written in 1991 in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its incisive English translation, The Other Heading (1992), meant simultaneously the search for a direction for the continent and for some new ‘heading’:
The very old subject of European identity indeed has the venerable air of an old, exhausted theme. But perhaps this ‘subject’ retains a virgin body. Would not its name mask something that does not yet have a face? We ask ourselves in hope, in fear and trembling, what this face is going to resemble.3
