Re: Europe's 3D vision (fwd)

While many of us welcome the development of a grassroots movement to check
imperialism, including U.S. imperialism, somehow, I just can't get excited
at the prospect that Habermas, Derrida, (and Negri) should be the "heralds"
of that movement.........then again, it's just Pepe Escobar's
opinion...........

Alan Spector




----- Original Message -----
From: "Boris Stremlin" <bstremli@binghamton.edu>
To: "WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK" <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 5:24 PM
Subject: 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.)
>
>
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