Struggle and peace, Europe’s two hearts

In 2003, two European philosophers, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, revealed a joint piece in Germany’s and France’s main newspapers. In it, they criticised the American invasion of Iraq and known as on Europeans to ‘assume a reflexive distance from themselves’, specifically their imperialism and colonialism. By criticising American neo-imperialism, Habermas and Derrida as a substitute needed to think about a post-imperial Europe and fulfil ‘the Kantian hope for a world home coverage’.

Habermas’s and Derrida’s criticism of Bush’s imperialism was justified; and their suggestion that Europe may lead the world in direction of a post-imperial future was a pleasant thought. At the moment, nonetheless, confronted with Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, the query is whether or not such a post-imperial world could be achieved via the signifies that the 2 philosophers proposed. 

The Europe they imagined was a Europe of dialogue, of dialog and embrace of variations. That is, actually, a dignified thought. The issue is that it’s powerless when one is confronted with evil.

Europe’s conception of itself after World Struggle II centered on the self-evidence of peace. It requested how the territory of peace might be enlarged, however not how peace must be defended. It was interested in the concept of eradicating borders for the circulation of the nice (as an ethical idea, not solely items as an financial idea), however not strengthen borders in opposition to evil.

It relativised the query of evil, pondering that every one evil could be reintegrated, just by the attractiveness of the nice. This fashioned Europe’s (primarily Germany’s and France’s) long-lasting affair with Russia. On this relationship, Europe took Goethe’s Faust actually by testing the concept one could make a cope with the satan. However it forgot how the story ends.

Postwar Europe and a few of its key intellectuals, together with Habermas and Derrida, additionally forgot about a number of the most essential origins of the European undertaking. These weren’t concerning the ‘free market’, ‘financial integration’, and even eradicating borders. Quite, it was about confronting the concept of empire with the concept of the republic.

The postwar philosophers formulated effectively how imperial (and to some extent post-imperial) nations may overcome their very own imperial instincts. However they remained blind to what non-imperial societies have to do when confronted with neo-imperial aggression. 

But the origins of the European thought comprise a response to exactly that query.  

Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi – writer of the prophetic e book Pan-Europa, revealed in 1923 – has been praised as a visionary “precursor” to postwar Europe, however his main arguments are largely forgotten. These touched upon the large query: how can republics defend themselves in opposition to obsessive empires (at the moment Germany and Russia), particularly when these republics are smaller and weaker? 

Coudenhove-Kalergi’s reply was clear: solely by making a confederation of republics, a safety union – not solely an financial or political union – that might be far more troublesome to assault than atomized nation states. It might be a union that sought a steadiness between the advantages of peace and the necessity to defend it. A steadiness between agora and agon.

Agora and agon

There are two moral methods on which Europe has been constructed: two methods of figuring out attitudes in direction of the opposite.

One is the ethics of the agora. It presumes an ethics of alternate. Within the agora, we give away one thing to get greater than we had. We alternate items, objects, concepts, tales and experiences. The agora is a positive-sum sport: everybody wins, although some attempt to win greater than others.

The opposite moral system is that of agon. Agon is a battlefield. We enter agon to not alternate, however to struggle. We dream of successful however are additionally ready to lose – together with to lose ourselves, even within the literal sense of dying for an awesome trigger. This isn’t the logic of a positive-sum sport; there could be no “win-win”, as a result of one of many sides will definitely lose.

Europe has constructed itself as a mixture of agora and agon. It bears the picture of each the knight and the bourgeois. Europe’s cultural legacy is unthinkable with out the ethics of agon: whether or not it’s medieval novels with their cult of chivalry and loyalty, or early fashionable dramas whose characters stand die for his or her rules and passions. However Europe can be unthinkable with out the tradition of the agora, of dialog, compromise, of softness, of Voltairean mœurs doux. 

The European cultural canon additionally comprises criticism of each agora and agon – when these go too far. It contains assaults on the knightly tradition and of the cult of warfare (from Cervantes to Remarque), in addition to on the bourgeois tradition of ‘alternate’ (from Molière to Balzac).

Each these moral methods comprise profound human values. However, taken to their extremes, they’re harmful and must be balanced by the opposite.

The ethics of the agon train us to see all people as potential adversaries, and to contemplate all interplay as a latent struggle. This will result in warfare of all in opposition to all. What Hobbes describes in Leviathan as a ‘state of nature’ is definitely a extremely refined stage of social growth that absolutized warrior ethics and thought of some other as a risk.

Radical agora ethics, quite the opposite, absolutise alternate and compromise. Right here, alternate and dialogue are the last word reply to all questions. Struggle and battle are thought-about penalties of human madness and the one cause folks struggle is that they didn’t have the possibility to speak sufficient to one another. If the agora logic is utilized universally and infinitely, we’d lose a way of the place to cease in our ardour for alternate. We can not and shouldn’t speak to a killer in the mean time he’s about to kill us; and we can not and shouldn’t ‘alternate’ the lives of our family members or fellow residents for one thing else.

Fact and justice thus emerge as a steadiness between our readiness to alternate and our understanding that some issues are unexchangeable and irreplaceable. For instance, human lives.

Why Habermas and Derrida had been proper – and unsuitable

Regardless of their philosophical disagreements, Habermas and Derrida shared one thing essential. This was the concept agora ought to change agon, and consign it to oblivion. 

Habermas locations his religion in an infinite area of communication by which everybody must be able to adapt their positions when confronted with new rational arguments. Derrida constructed his philosophy on the concept western metaphysics is a dictatorship of presence, of the irreplaceable voice of a metaphysical father, and that the one method to counteract it’s with the concept of infinite replacements and reinterpretations. That is accomplished by what he known as écriture.

Fact and justice thus emerge as a steadiness between our readiness to alternate and our understanding that some issues are unexchangeable and irreplaceable. For instance, human lives

Whereas Habermas tries to make sure the growth of cause, Derrida was within the persistence of what escapes cause’s management. But each believed that an everlasting technique of alternate and alternative is the reply to the spiritual and metaphysical dogmatism of earlier epochs. They each tried to undermine the irreplaceable.

The issue they did not see is that agora is unimaginable with out agon. You can not have infinite dialogue inside a city-state except you construct a fortress defending your metropolis in opposition to would-be destroyers. The Europe of Habermas and Derrida was constructed on the naive perception that every one enemies had been  gone and safety was nothing to fret about. They most popular to disregard the chance that our enemies will solely go away after they’ve killed our youngsters. 

The hypocrisy inherent within the conception of Europe as a continent of ‘everlasting peace’ and ‘infinite agora’ is that it has solely been made potential beneath the safety umbrella of NATO. Habermas and Derrida had been proper to denounce the inhumane avatars of American imperialism, however they had been unsuitable to reject America as Europe’s key companion and alter ego. 

Whereas Europe was constructing welfare states, America was constructing a safety framework, offering the circumstances beneath which Europe may proceed to be a social paradise. America was not from Mars, and Europe from Venus, as Robert Kagan believed; America simply stuffed the hole of agon (i.e. the partitions of defence) that Europe had left, believing an excessive amount of within the self-evidence of peace and the self-reproduction of agoras. 

Why 2023 is totally different from 2003

If our purpose is to construct a extra simply post-imperialist world, you will need to level to the parallels between the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, Syria in 2015, and Ukraine once more in 2022. But there’s a essential distinction. 

The warfare in 2003 was the results of a democracy dishonest itself, hiding its imperialism behind an alluring democratic rhetoric. It was partially attributable to the truth that the ‘western’ world nonetheless felt robust, so robust that it thought it may danger doing no matter it needed – a direct path to tyranny. 2003 was the results of an anachronistic self-confidence – borne of the concept of ‘the tip of historical past’ –not figuring out react to the shock of 2001.

Twenty years on, we live in a special actuality. Democracy is now not turning into empire; it’s being attacked by empire. This empire and its authoritarian allies see that democracies are weak and unprotected. That they’ve misplaced the spirit of agon. That they mock the knightly tradition of the previous. And that they’ll subsequently be attacked and finally destroyed.

The continued Russian warfare on Ukraine is an assault on Europe. Russia is at warfare with Europe. It’s time to settle for this truth totally and draw all the mandatory conclusions. The agora just isn’t sufficient. There are occasions when it’s good to defend it. When it’s good to revive the agon, as a component of your identification. 

It’s not since you need warfare. It’s as a result of typically warfare involves you. With a view to defend your peace, you will need to turn out to be a warrior – or not less than align with the warrior as a lot as you possibly can. 

Generally it’s not sufficient to keep away from evil. Generally it’s good to confront it, head to head.

🤝 Printed in collaboration with Eurozine. 👉 Learn this text on Eurozine