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CONTENTS
Tatjana Schmalz: What about a "Europe of Fatherlands"? Europe's youth at a crossroads
Tobias Köllner: Nationalism, Identity and Religion: Comparative Observations on Russia and East Germany
Erhard Jürke: Out of the Rift into the Unknown - A Survey of the BREXIT Process
Werner Müller-Pelzer: A new Jacobinism (book review)
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EDITORIAL
This eleventh edition of impEct has a single theme for the first time: Europe. In view of the current political situation, this choice hardly seems to call for justification. And yet: there can hardly be a political-philosophical concept where more diverse information can be expected than with this one. In the call for contributions for this issue of impEct, I therefore pointed out that it seemed important to me to differentiate between the European Union and Europe and to focus on this very Europe. To explain this, I formulated the following questions:
- What is to be made of the thesis that Europe is something other than the European Union?
- What should we make of the fact that the EU has declared itself a global player since 2000, but apparently cannot fall back on a mission that unites its citizens? And if this assumption is wrong: What then would be the EU's mission?
- If the EU is the center of power, what could be the European backing that would guarantee Europe's independence in the future?
- Do you have a deep, affective relationship with Europe, with one or more European countries? If so, how does this affective relationship manifest itself?
- How would you describe your experiences when you return to Europe after a longer stay on other continents? Is there anything that you subjectively perceive as typically European?
- What would you wish for to make Europe (not the EU) more attractive, more credible, more present in people's lives?
I had set the topic "high" because it cannot be assigned to any common scientific discipline. "We Europeans" is easy to say, but the noise of day-to-day political disputes often prevents us from trying to find out what unites us in this phrase.
The result is four very different contributions.
Tatjana Schmalz, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, begins with an essay from the perspective of the generation of 20-30-year-olds who, exactly 20 years after the Lisbon Agenda, the EU's presumptuous emergence as a global player, continue to question its final form and finality. If the EU continues to fail to provide an answer, the circle of those who are prepared to call the whole enterprise into question is likely to grow. The implications of an increasing delegitimization of the EU among part of the intellectual elite should not be taken lightly. The author addresses considerations from the "right-wing camp" that are reacting to this situation.
Tobias Köllner, University of Witten/Herdecke, uses the case of Russia and East Germany to examine the extent to which religions and religious denominations play a role as political factors in the redefinition of the national alongside ethnic references. Since the EU elites had tied together the program of "ever closer unity" with political cosmopolitanism, with the disavowal of nations and with globalism into a package, it is not surprising that the dissolution of social ties by the "markets" is answered with a recourse to national traditions. However, the religious "sediment" moved in the process comes into play in a very specific way because, depending on the country, religious "set pieces" can only fulfill a political function according to the respective social and historical context. This is probably also true for other European countries.
Erhard Jürke, Fachhochschule Dortmund, provides an insight into the British Brexit debate that has rarely been received with such differentiation in Germany. Against premature simplifications, he recalls the British "exception", which (like the so-called French "exception" and the so-called German "Sonderweg") requires in-depth consideration. The more or less clever behavior of Brexit supporters and opponents should certainly not be neglected in the analysis. However, the mutual alienation with regard to the imagined identity in the UK and the EU is fundamental: The strong affective attachment of many Britons to past greatness and national sovereignty contrasts with an identity of a united Europe that is propagated by the EU elites, but which is affectively weak, if not resented, by Europeans. This can result in a mixed situation in which policy is made more on the basis of feelings than empirical data.
In his review of Aleida Assmann's book "The European Dream",Werner Müller-Pelzer, Fachhochschule Dortmund, criticizes the narrow and flawed scientific basis on which the author builds her so-called culture of remembrance. For Assmann, the extermination of the Jews is supposed to function as a negative founding myth of Europe and, together with other crimes against humanity, permeate the everyday lives of younger generations throughout Europe. Basically, the author has nothing more to say about Europe. A modern Jacobinism becomes recognizable here, which replaces the critical examination of validity claims with an attitude of empathetic obedience, introduces a kind of civil religion and aims at an institutionally anchored change in the identity and mentality of Europeans. So far, such politically convenient, top-down imposed concepts of identity, which do not even distinguish between the EU and Europe, have not been successful with European citizens.
The political earthquake triggered by COVID-19 will - I suspect - provide ample opportunity to debate the questions recently formulated by the English historian Paul Stock: "[...] the key questions for policymakers - and Europeans - are 'what kind of Europe do we want to create?' and 'what kind of Europeans do we want to be?"[1]
Finally, a bibliographical note!
In fall 2020 Werner Müller-Pelzer will publish: Regenerating Europe. On the Emergence of Collective Atmospheres, Freiburg / Munich: Karl Alber-Verlag, 2020.
Content: What is Europe as opposed to the EU? Some believe that this question has been answered by the fact that Europe and the EU have merged into the "European project". However, this construct serves the EU as a global player, but does not answer the question: Which European do I want to be? Europe as an affective space is buried under the political interests and philosophical errors of the past. The New Phenomenology offers the terminology to reflect on the European type of civilization of living together and to discover common European atmospheres, for example when growing into an unknown European language and culture during an arranged study semester in another European country. The so-called MONTAIGNE program is intended to enable European students to acquire a competence for situations in Europe via the secondary epigenesis of the person, i.e. based on the pre-personal, atmospherically determined body experience, instead of being put off to a utopia.
[1] Paul Stock (2017): "What is Europe? Place, idea, action", in: Amin, Ash and Lewis, Philip, (eds.) European Union and disunion: reflections on European identity. British Academy, London, UK, pp. 23-28 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/78396/1/Stock_What%20is%20Europe_2017.pdf (LSE Research online).