Europe's 3D vision (fwd)

Habermas, Derrida (and Negri) as heralds of a new Europe as leader of the
counterhegemonic bloc (from Asiatimes).

--
 Global Economy
A NEW WORLD ORDER
Part 2: Europe's 3D vision
By Pepe Escobar

Part 1: The South strikes back

SAO PAULO - A new idea of Europe is at the center of
frenetic realignments currently evolving on the world
stage. The European Union is fully engaged in the
complex process of forging itself as an alternative
political and social model for the rest of the world.
But the EU still grapples with the fact that from 193
nation-states in the world today, 125 were its former
colonies. And the EU still has not come up with a
meaningful project to offer to most of these former
colonies.

Neo-conservatives in the Bush administration love
so-called "new Europe" (pliable, money-hungry, former
communist, Eastern European states, plus starry-eyed
opportunists like Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar). They dismiss "old Europe" (whose core, France
and Germany, is nothing else but the core of the
European Union). But as many political scientists have
stressed, the dismissal barely masks extreme unease.
What really worries the neo-conservatives and selected
parts of the American establishment is how Germany,
for instance, and Russia (whose destiny is
inextricably linked with Europe) are increasingly
giving full force again to their national development
projects - away from the American model.

The EU as a whole does not have a national development
project: it is shaping a continental and even global
project that it would like to sell to the world.
American neo-conservatives may dismiss "old Europe" at
their own peril. There has been virtually no serious
discussion in American corporate media on why France
and Germany went against the Bush doctrine. But in
Europe three key themes have been at the center of the
debate as far as the Franco-German coalition is
concerned - an entente cordiale revitalized by the
whole Iraqi episode.

The three themes are the widespread European popular
opposition to the war on Iraq and the unilateralist
hegemony of the US; the meaning of this evolving,
elusive "European identity"; and the current debate
over the EU constitution. Nothing better illustrates
what's at stake than a text published simultaneously
on May 31 by the French daily Liberation and the
German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, written
by two towering intellects of the European Union:
Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas.

Derrida (b El Biar, Algeria, 1930) is arguably the
leading living French philosopher: his ideas also
exert tremendous influence in leading American
universities. Habermas (b Dusseldorf, 1929) is part of
the second generation of the legendary Frankfurt
School, which has congregated thinkers of the Critical
Theory like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert
Marcuse. Since the 1930s, the Frankfurt School has
conceptualized many developments in modern and
post-modern history by stressing that the capitalist
system was "closed" and without any possibility of
"concrete negation": the only challenge to it would
come from fringe social groups (today personified by
the globalization movement) and from the peoples of
the Third World (the former colonies with which the EU
still does not know how to deal).

Asia Times Online has learned that Habermas himself
invited other European intellectuals to write
manifestoes in their country's newspapers, to be
published on the same day, May 31: that was the case
with Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Fernando
Savater in Spain, and the philosopher and Stanford
University professor Richard Rorty in the US.

Derrida and Habermas start with "two dates which we
should nor forget": the day European newspapers
published "new Europe's" declaration of loyalty to
Bush's war at the end of January; and February 15, the
day of massive anti-war protests in most European
capitals. Derrida and Habermas say that "the
simultaneity of these magnificent protests, the
largest since the end of the Second World War, maybe
will enter the history books as marking the birth of
the European public sphere". One wonders when and if
one day there will be an "Asian public sphere".

To configure a new form of future global politics,
Derrida and Habermas stress that Europe "must show its
weight to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism
of the US". But where will this "attractive and even
contagious vision" come from? It can only be born from
a current "sense of perplexity" and "it must be
articulated in the febrile cacophony of a public
sphere of multiple voices". And indeed there's a lot
of debate going on now all over Europe, from
universities and parliaments to the streets.

Derrida and Habermas say that "Christianity and
capitalism, natural science and technology, Roman law
and the Napoleonic code, the urban and civilian form
of life, democracy and human rights, the
secularization of state and society, these conquests
are no more an European privilege. The 'West', in the
quality of a spiritual profile, includes more than
only Europe." This should connect to "the desire of a
multilateral and juridically regulated international
order and the hope of effective global politics in the
framework of a reformed UN".

Derrida and Habermas also make a crucial point: "The
constellation that allowed privileged Western
Europeans to develop such a mentality under the shadow
of the Cold War has disintegrated since 1989-90. But
February 15 shows that the mentality itself has
survived its original context. This also explains why
'old Europe' considers itself challenged by the
energetic hegemonic policy of the allied superpower.
And why so many in Europe who salute the fall of
Saddam as a liberation reject the character contrary
to international law of the unilateral, preemptive
invasion, justified in such a confusing and
insufficient manner." Both philosophers barely
disguise their irony when they add that "in our
longitudes, it's hard to imagine a president that
starts his daily activities with a public prayer and
ties his political decisions full of consequences to a
divine mission".

Neo-conservatives could learn a thing or two from
Derrida and Habermas: "Each of the great European
nations lived the flowering of imperial power and,
what is more important in our context, had to
assimilate the experience of the loss of an empire:
with increasing distancing from imperial domination
and colonial history, European powers also got the
chance of taking a reflexive distance from themselves.
Thus they were able to learn to perceive themselves,
from the perspective of the vanquished, in the dubious
role of victors which would have to be accountable for
an authoritarian modernization. This might have
nurtured a refusal of eurocentrism, and stimulated the
hope for a truly global politics."

Will the neo-conservatives listen to "old Europe"?
Hardly. Another towering intellect, Italian Toni
Negri, co-author with Michael Hardt of Empire, says
that he relies on John Dewey - an American author -
to, in Negri's words, "stimulate the conscience of
necessary reforms to fight Bush's brutalizing
philosophy". For the best European minds - and for
much of its public opinion - neo-conservative-inspired
American unilateralism is just another brand of
terrorism. And if the world is forced to choose
between barbarism and barbarism, it's up to Europe to
offer an alternative.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com