Twenty years ago, at the University of Chicago, when I announced that I would be going "downstate Illinois" to look at "American culture," the reaction was nearly unanimous: "what? America? culture? downstate Illinois?" David Schneider's American Kinship (1980 [1968]) had just been published. Still, in corridors, bars and such places, the gut reaction of my anthropological community, at least when we were not quite playing at anthropology, was that there couldn't be any culture to America, and that, should there be one, it would certainly not be found in any downstate Illinoises. Happily, this reaction was not consequential. When my professors assumed the mantle of anthropology they agreed that all this could be argued and they let me go. Ever since I have been telling in all sorts of forums, that one cannot take a practical step in the United States that is not sensitive to, and thereby reproductive of, America. (1)
Fifteen years later, I decided that it was time to expand my comparative perspectives and, for many reasons, landed on Ireland. The reaction was quite unanimous this time: "Ireland? great! my grand-father came from County Clare! I went to visit once there and we had such a great time! You are interested in the Irish character? Let me tell you all about it and then you must go on to the West, there you will find the real Ireland." From colleagues, to friends and students in the United States, to the Irish I met in Dublin, the chorus spoke with one voice: there is an Ireland; there is an Irish culture and it is to found in the Western counties. In consequence, I settled in a new suburbs of Dublin, rented a semi-detached house, rarely visited pubs and spent time listening to people worrying about mortgages and the cost of food or private education. I hoped that I would thus find more about the forces that point to the West as the reality of the East, and may hide what people all over Ireland also have to deal with.
Still, I sometimes wondered whether I could just as well have stayed in New Jersey. In fact, to live in the suburbs of Dublin is not at all the same thing as living in the suburbs of New York. It may be the case that, in suburbs, whether of Dublin or New York City, people have to deal with close variations on "modernity." But the people of Dublin also have to deal with "Ireland"--an altogether cantankerous woman (mother? mistress?) as various poets of Irishness identify her. "America," even when represented as a woman in New York Bay, is something else altogether, and anthropologists must investigate the difference--but this is a matter for a different paper.
When I started looking around me in Dublin, I realized that something else than "Ireland" concerned my neighbors. It is something, a thing of some kind, that no one who now works in the geographical space of Western Eurasia, (2) can now ignore: "Europe." The nature of this "Europe" is no easy matter to ascertain. Much of it is quite concrete. There are dramatic performances (voting for the European Parliament); regulations and their justifications (subsidies for farmers, or the rate of maximum taxation); new tools and constraints in the construction of ordinary everyday life ("do I need a work permit to get a job in England? how do I preserve health insurance?"--questions that an 18 year old woman from the rural parts of Southern France can ask herself as she seizes opportunities that were not quite open to her parents). These practices have in fact made for further complexity since they are most concretely the products of the evolution of a "Common Market," the common name of a "European Economic Community," that transformed itself into the "European Community," and now is popularly known simply as "Europe." This Europe has its "European Parliament," a flag originally designed by a broader body, the "European Council," which, until recently, did not include any of the nations attached to the Soviet Union. The EC, in a complex way, is a "fiction" of Europe. It is now also an overwhelming social "fact"--in the Durkheimian sense--that is still in the process of being made--in the constructivist sense.
One aspect of this social fact is a set of discourses both affirming and denying the "reality" of Europe for certain purposes. Quite common, both on the local and central stages, in conversations with my neighbors in Dublin or when reading the Irish, British or French press, are statements to the effect that "Europe" is only a matter of interest for businessmen and bureaucrats, that nobody really cares whether something or somebody is European or not. In such conversations, the talk then proceeds to a reaffirmation of the reality or "Ireland," "Wales," "Scotland," "England," "France" and such more or less traditional symbols on a stage that the people of Western Eurasia would probably consider a "world" (universal) stage.
There is also however a set of discourse asserting the reality of Europe as a cultural entity of some sort. This is an intellectual discourse, or more precisely a conversation, which has built something that balances in the interpretive realm what politicians and bureaucrats have been doing "in Brussels." This conversation is interesting to anthropologists not only because of its existence as a curiosity. It is also interesting because its central theme is the central theme of anthropology: given the evidence for the local specification of practices that generate a phenomenological experience of "difference" when one moves from one locality to the next, what is one to do next about it? For anthropology, the problem is an academic one and concerns the proper understanding of "culture" as it relates to human beings in any locality. For the people with whom we will be concerned, as it has been for philosophers and other political thinkers since at least the 18th century, the concern is with the institutional expression of this difference, its affirmation on some broader stage, and its rationalization. The concern is with "nationalism."
There is not much reason to rehearse the arguments for the mythical association of the ideas, rituals, and practices of nationality with the people of Western Eurasia. They appear to have, if not invented, at least developed them into what Yeats once qualified, when writing about the 1916 uprising in Dublin ([1921] 1962), terribly beautiful theater: On its stage peuples (the French is most evocative here) forge, express, and defend collective identities grounded in a unique substance and a common position in a current history. (3) Since the French and American revolutions, this ideology has been a constituent aspect of everyday life in every part of Western Eurasia. Through the process of decolonization, it appears to have spread to the whole world, and perhaps to have thus escaped Europe. In any event, at the height of classical European nationalism--say in June 1914--, from Co. Clare on the West Coast of Ireland, and for a long way eastward, "nationality" was a matter of local concern. As the people of the centers knew, in Paris, London, or Berlin, one could never be sure that the people of the periphery would draw the practical consequences of the identity earlier dramatic performances of nationality was supposed to have built for them. Thus, everywhere, even in the remotest of villages, one had become accountable to the many apparatuses of centralized states administering local communities, imposing--violently if necessary--languages and educational systems presenting models for what was supposed to be one's identity. Most concretely perhaps, one had become accountable to being conscripted into a huge army to be flung at another. In the process people who may never had any consciousness of their participation in wider systems were projected unto an international stage where they were expected to complete positive and negative identifications with various fatherlands, one of them "theirs," and the others not. (4)
One does not have to be a Marxist to recognize that this association of people with national identities was made by human hands; that it is a cultural, rather than natural, product. Hobsbawn (1990) demonstrated clearly how this was done and how it may already be changing. Marx himself may simply have been the most articulate of the many who resisted the ideology of nationalism in a process that reveals another aspect of European culture. In the background of 19th century Europe many did work for a supra-national Europe, for various "Internationales." Many more simply escaped across the Atlantic to a land where they hoped they would indeed be free from various tyrants who may have become all the more hegemonic that they were less personally identifiable--as "Presidents of the Republic" replaced kings and emperors.
There are good reasons to associate the specific shape of this resistance with the same Europe which fashioned itself into a mosaic which many are now attempting to destroy. Marxism itself is a product of European cultural processes--and this brings us back to the question of how this affirmation is to be taken. The first step in this exploration being the recognition that we, as anthropologists and intellectuals, participate in this process, and that our statement about Europe will always be incorporated into the collective text.
Herzfeld (1987) recently reminded us that, at its earlier stages, anthropology cannot be quite distinguished from the activities which were used to affirm not only the reality, but also the ultimate moral legitimacy, of "differences" in racial, ethnic, historical, groups. In this search, intellectuals abandoned in more or less literal journeys the comforts of their urban homes, spend time in some local areas of a land putatively "theirs," and came back with the proclamation that they had found the "real" which it then became their task to affirm politically, diplomatically, and perhaps militarily, on some international stage. The pattern for this process is clear in Ireland (Varenne 1989). Its outline is visible in any other area where an attempt is being made to establish the kind of legitimate political presence that the claim to the status of "nation" can give to a people.
Every time later professional anthropologists have demonstrated the integration of unique, historically developed pattern, that is a "culture," they have indeed contributed to the legitimization of a more or less local call to self-determination. In fact, rather few have legitimized established nations in this fashion. More typical in recent years has been work localities within larger political entities, with an emphasis on hegemonic relationships between the local and the central. Whether this work allows for easy cooptation by those who want to construct the local into a nation depends on the way the relationship is presented. Often of course, the central and the local are handled rhetorically as if they were two distinct units (individuals writ large?), one of whom imposes itself on the other. Within a democratic discourse, such relationships are patently illegitimate. All individuals (local provinces, regions, etc.) are to be free on a neutral field.
Another version of the anthropological discourse is more interactional and stresses how localities, regions, and nations, define each other within broader systems of meaning and practice. It deemphasizes local integration of distinct substances. It focuses rather on joint construction and other-determination. From this perspective, recognition has primacy over self-determination. De-colonization is driven by processes internal to the colonial power as it redefines itself in conjunction with its colonies. Both are now part of each other's histories and the twain cannot be separated.
These things are eminently debatable in the context of professional anthropology. They are the subject of much more consequential debate in the fields where nations, proto-nations, empires, and "markets" encounter each other. On these fields, it makes much difference whether one conceives of Europe as a unity in the process of self-determination, or rather as gestalt figure made inevitable given other transformations in the world systems. The anthropological and political conversations are driven by the same mechanisms and they can perhaps help each other become more informed of certain of their implications. From the point of view of professional anthropology, there is certainly nothing "wrong" here that should lead us to abandon the quest for further systematic understanding of the human condition. We must however understand that, when we stand as observers of people, particularly of intellectuals who are at work attempting to inscribe something that has never been quite said yet, we are indeed looking at ourselves. (5)
Let us, then, look at ourselves in the work of the intellectuals who have produced major expressions of "Europe." They are people like Benda, de Rougemont, Monnet, etc., who are involved in a kind of applied anthropology where theoretical ideologies encounter historical happenstance.
It is easy to caricature the structure of the nationalistic ideology. One can state it as a recipe so perhaps as to preserve its processual characteristic:
For the past 200 years, even when the local conditions would seem to make the attempt a rather difficult one, when the calls to nationhood is made up according to the recipe, there is a good chance that the struggle will succeed if it can get some foreign help. There is something fascinating about the claims to nationhood of so many of the administrative areas that followed the collapse of empires, starting with the Austrian empire and moving on to the British or Russian empires. As centers lose their grip, smaller and smaller groups attempt to cook themselves into something that can claim the rights and privileges attached by other nations to the status of nation.
There is something equally fascinating--or is it frightening?--in seeing how some people in Western Eurasia are attempting to cook Europe itself into a nation of sorts. This effort can be traced to various moments. For the ideological reasons that give legitimacy to what can be traced through complex roots to a distant past, one can quote a 1306 project for the administrative unification of Christendom (geographically co-extensive then with Europe). (6) Many others such projects followed over the centuries.
It is only since the Second World War however that intellectual activity has had to keep pace with an administrative evolution which shows promise of inscribing in institutional history what had until then always been dismissed as impractical dreams. The beginning of the search for a representation of Europe can thus be dated to a 1946 conference in Geneva where Benda and de Rougemont (7)--who were and remained the prime movers of the effort--met with intellectuals like Karl Jaspers, Georg Lukacs, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl and others, to talk about "l'esprit européen." Both the speeches and the following discussion were published (Benda et al., 1946) and this constitutes a fascinating document that catches a moment in the attempt to make something, the time for which seems to have come but which does not yet have a very clear outline.
A few years before the war, Benda had writen something that he must have felt was still another in a long list of utopian calls (1933). It may thus not be surprising that, in his introductory remarks, he struck the sober note: "a consciousness of Europe has never existed" (1946: 9). Indeed the only history of Europe that could be written would be one that would be titled "A history of the Europeans in their will not to make Europe" (1946: 15). As he sees it, every time historical conditions made it possible for a consciousness of Europe to realize itself institutionally, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, the result was a further boost for the institutionalization of various parts of Europe as independent units. From the earliest, philosophers, kings, bourgeois and others who could speak at the center of the arena talked about what social philosophers eventually expressed as "national" units. Resistance to nationalism was always a fringe phenomenon. When this resistance moved closer to the center--as it started doing in the 18th century--the talk was made to center around "men" and "human nature." (8) It was absolutely generalized and no serious thinker stopped to consider the possibility that there might be "Europeans."
For Benda, this failure is a major problem: None of "us" (he mentions the French, German, Italian, English, Scandinavian, Russian) talk about ourselves as "Europeans." There is no European consciousness of itself, no European will. (9) Europe has to arise out of Europe as, he claims, France arose out of France and Germany out of Germany.
In the conference, Benda was distinctly in the minority. The other participants just assumed the existence of Europe and worked at determining what Europe was and in what ways it was distinct from various neighbors. In this setting these neighbors seem to have been mostly Russia and America, the two which are still built up as the relevant ones in more recent discussions--though they are now being joined by "the Arab world," "Japan," the Third World, etc.. In his contribution to the conference, Merleau-Ponty answers Benda by arguing that while Europe may not have a representation of itself, while in fact such a representation might be dangerous since it would define itself against neighbors, there is an "Europe en acte," ideological acts in fact, "un comportement typiquement Européen, et qui serait à peu près le suivant: une relation entre l'homme et la nature, d'abord qui n'est pas confusion, une distinction du moi et du monde; correlativement, l'idée de l'objectivité ou de la verité" (in Benda et al., 1946: 74-5). (10) This idea is developed by de Rougemont in a little book significantly titled The meaning of Europe (1963). For de Rougemont, it makes no doubt that there is something specific about Europe, something good (nationalism oblige), something that must be preserved, antagonistically against the relevant others if necessary but, eventually, for the good of whole world as an earth-wide federation is created, on European grounds of course. After all, as he claims unapologetically, "Europe discovered the whole of the earth, and nobody ever came and discovered Europe" (1963: 12).
The most fascinating part of this book may be the beginning when de Rougemont, in a process which anthropologists who have read Lévi-Strauss (or is it Malinowski?) will recognize, tells two myths of the origin of Europe as justification for his claim for the historical grounding of a substance. First, there is the Greek myth of Europa, the Tyrian princess who was abducted by Zeus and produced the beginning of the Westward movement which culminated with the settling of America. And then there is the Jewish myth of Noah's sons in which the Christian Church Fathers saw God giving Japheth "Europe and arms with the promise of boundless expansion" (1963: 19). From there de Rougemont goes on to tell us what Europe has been, what it is, and what it can be if it makes the self that is already there into an institution of some sort on the inter-national scene.
In his great compendium of the texts which reveal how Europe was conceived (1961), de Rougemont is content with just telling the myths. He does not move to abstract the "pattern" of these myths--perhaps because so many of them are self-analytical. Still, he stops just at the edge of the nationalistic affirmation of Europe as a substance. The image of Europe that emerges might be analogized to the image of the Americas as a setting for the affirmation of individuality, that is as a place without culture that is thus particularly open to the building of new cultures. Americans, Margaret Mead once wrote, "are all third generation" ([1942] 1965: Chapter III). They are not "native." Perhaps the same thing could be said of Europeans. In the myth of origin it says that the Greek goddess Europa was not a native of Europe either. She was born in Asia. Europe was the land given to her children. On that land were built separate nations with absolute rights over those that are its subjects (citizens).
A small group of intellectuals who have put themselves at the extreme right of political ideologies have gone further. They do claim unabashedly that there is an actual substantial "difference" to Europe, one that is grounded--not too surprisingly given the history of European nationalisms--on a myth of original common history (though a different one from those de Rougemont cited). For them, the "really" European becomes the Indo-European ideology of the three functions as sketched by Dumézil, an ideology of duty, strength and tolerance of multiplicity which Judeo-Christian, monotheistic (or mono-ideological), civilizations have attempted, unsuccessfully, to smother. They delight in finding evidence of the survival of pre-Christian myths and rituals in the modern world. They like the "pagan" Santa Claus, they like Soviet ritualism where the social world seems always to be divided into three orders: The Communist party in charge of ideological purity (the first "priestly" function), the army in charge of defense (the second "warrior" function), and the workers in charge of concrete survival (the third function); they give their children names drawn from Germanic mythology. They are particularly angry at Hitler for having used some of these ideas in such a way as to insure the imperial success of two versions of the anti-European Judeo-Christian civilization: The theistic "Protestant" version in the United States, and the atheistic "Communist" version in Russia. They seem to suspect that these two are hiding a deep agreement of purpose under the guise of a life threatening conflict, the purpose of keeping Europe militarily occupied so that it cannot organize itself into a threat to either empire. And they now fear the rise of the third major ideology to emerge out of the Bible: Islam.
The strong version of this argument has only been articulated intellectually--in France particularly--by a minuscule group, the "Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne," G.R.E.C.E. for short (obviously, the name derived from the acronym). This group emerged briefly in the late 70s and then sank back into obscurity. Most French, and most Europeans, are unaware of its existence. The insistence on the need to reject Christianity in all its forms, including conservative Catholicity, insures that the group will remain a fringe event. Still, its argument is the most internally consistent with the fundamental myth of nationalism: the myth of the ethnic roots which, in Europe, served France, Germany, Italy, etc., and may still serve all those that want to ritualize a perceived difference as a State of some sort. It is the myth that has presided over the break-down of colonialist empires, the Myth of the "auto-determination" which may also be the Myth of anthropology: The myth that a "culture" is always the culture of a particular people attached to a particular land, and that it must be preserved in the name of their rights.
The last clause in the preceding sentence highlights the problem: The myth of nationalism is not simply about origins and characteristics, it also includes a prescription for its own incorporation in historical institutions. It is an interpretative model of behavior. It is also a model for behavior--to use Geertz's summary of the properties of culture ([1966] 1973). For a reminder let us look briefly at one unabashed statement of what is involved here:
La philosophie européenne que je defends est celle de l'autoaffirmation d'un peuple, de sa recherche de la puissance et du rayonnement, de sa specificité et de son homogénéité culturelle, de la reconquète de ses racines. (Faye 1985: 13) (11)
Faye was writing here as a member of the G.R.E.C.E. and for him the reference to a "quest for power" is not empty. Power, will, struggle, these are key terms in all theories of nationalism. Nations, as we in fact know, do not peacefully emerge like some flower in early spring. As Patrick Pearse knew well, nations are baptized in blood.
Whether "Europe" is primarily (Indo-)European, whether it is fundamentally Judeo-Christian, whether it is best characterized by the pattern of the philosophical arguments that developed from the Renaissance through the 18th and even the 19th century, whether one should rather look to the more local manifestations of character, ethos, or anything else, Europeans--that is people who assume the mantle of Europe--can read history and construct something that makes some sense. How much sense it does make remains a matter of discussions that are having practical consequences. For nationalism, particularly in that part of the world where it originated and was first inscribed in history, is not only an academic question for social scientists wondering about its applicability as a model of or for human behavior, in Europe or anywhere else. It is also a political question among those who wonder whether they should struggle for the further institutionalization of Europe. Many have resisted and continue to resist (12) both in the name of the old nations whose symbolic grounding would be devalued, and in the name of various universalisms and humanisms. There may be little discussion of the Irishness of Ireland or the Frenchness of France, for the exact definition of either one makes less and less difference. By contrast, the Europeanness of Europe, what and who it is supposed to identify with it, geographically and ideologically, is still up for grabs because it makes a lot of difference.
As mentioned earlier, there were disputes at the beginning of the modern construction of Europe. Forty years later, the argument continues. Another French intellectual, Edgar Morin (1987), tries to clarify his position as one who opposed the economic and political construction of Europe through the 1950's and 1960's in the name of resistance to capitalism, and of construction of socialism. Still, he maintains that it is difficult to see Europe from Europe and that it is only through his travels in the United States that he finally understood what others had been talking about. Above all he remains afraid of what certain kinds of European affirmation could bring, and he builds his whole argument around the denial of a European substance:
Il faut abandonner toute Europe une, claire, distincte, harmonieuse, réfuter toute idée d'une essence ou substance européenne première qui précède la division et l'antagonisme. [...] C'est effectivement dans l'éclatement de la Chrétienté qu'ont put émerger ces réalités originellement européenne que sont les Etats-Nations, l'humanisme et la science, et c'est dans les divisions et antagonismes entre Etats-Nations que va se propager et s'imposer la notion d'Europe. (1987: 27) (13)
In order for Europe not to become Europe the way Germany became Germany, there cannot have been a Europe, though there may be one in the future--as long as it does not institutionalize itself into anything like what nations were made to be. There is a question of faith here, though a very particular kind of faith:
[La foi nouvelle] subit en elle la présence du Néant. Le recours à une pensée qui affronte courageusement le Néant, voilà le message vivant du nihilisme, ultime produit de l'aventure de l'esprit européen, voilà l'ultime consèquence de la perte des fondements, terme final de la recherche éperdue d'une Certitude première. (1987: 192) (14)
Thus ends Morin's attempt to "Think Europe." Europe must be created out of Nothingness into Nothingness--the capital letters are central here. No irony is permitted.
Morin, of course, has not escaped nationalism. He still speaks of "l'esprit européen" as of a particular set of understandings, a characteristic ideology. And so he remains puzzled, like de Rougemont and all the others professional thinkers we have looked at, by the fact that something, Europe, that has some level of historical existence, has in fact never had the particular kind of existence that traditional nations have had. The kind of existence that it does appear to have gained is that of a common "market," a soulless place where merchants exploit their customers. (15)
It is not surprising that no intellectual would see beauty in administrative regulations and custom agreements. Only Jean Monnet would title a little book on the European Community for Coal and Steel "The United States of Europe have begun" (1955). Morin fails to see that this may be the only practical form that a non-imperialistic Europe can take. What Monnet fails to see is that a "Europe" reduced to a market is indeed nothing. Thus the first major success and the first major failure in the construction of Europe took place with the first five years of the movement we are tracing: in 1951, politicians in France and Germany could agree to give up separate control over their coal and steel industries. In 1954, they refused to meld their armies as the plan for a European Defense Community that would have created a joint command structure for French and German troups mostly was defeated by the French Parliament. Discussions have continued on the matter of a joint defense, along with discussions of a joint currency, but they have yet to produce something. As come fear, "Europe" may remain a place for a self-satisfied comfortable middle-class quite content to leave the thinking, and the dirty work, including the fighting, to others--America and Africa particularly.
The positive side of this absence of the major symbols of a triumphant European nationalism, is that it leaves room for the constituent nations of Europe to continue to symbolize themselves as different and independent on a universal stage. Several of the writers we mentioned saw the construction of Europe not as the autodetermination of a people so much as of a step in the construction of pan-human world where the universal values developed in Europe could finally institutionalize themselves fully. This may in fact be typical of French intellectuals whose ideology Dumont summarized in the following terms:
Côté français, je suis homme par nature et français par accident. Comme dans la philosophie des Lumières en général, la nation comme telle n'a pas de statut ontologique: à ce plan il n'y a rien, qu'un grand vide, entre l'individu et l'espèce, et la nation est simplement la plus vaste approximation empirique de l'humanité qui me soit accessible au plan de la vie réelle. (1983: 129). (16)
The symbolic "absence" of Europe may thus satisty the French, more perhaps than it may satisfy the Germans, particularly if Dumont is right in his contrastive analysis of German ideology, an ideology that stresses the fundamentally social (cultural) constitution of the individual (1991).
The issue is not however one that the people of Western Eurasia can struggle with in a vacuum. There has always been, in the consciousness of Europe a recognition of various others. The new problem for Europe is that many of these others are getting to construct Europe in ways that cannot be ignored. Another quote from Benda may serve to outline the issue:
Nous parlons couramment d'un romancier américain, un Hemingway, un Faulkner, un Miller, nous ne parlons pas d'un romancier «européen», mais d'un romancier français, anglais, russe. Les Américains, eux, parlent d'un romancier européen, ils assurent qu'il y a pour eux quelque chose de commun (que d'ailleurs ils ne définissent pas) entre les littérateurs de nos diverses nations par opposition aux leurs; mais ce qui importerait pour notre sujet, ce serait que ce soit nous qui parlions d'un littérateur européen. Or, nous ne le faisons pas. (my emphasis. 1946: 21) (17)
Benda, like all who write from Europe about the place of America, distinguish what "they" do--which "is not important"--from what "we" do. America is not European.
In practice, Europe has had two inescapable Others: Russia, which may really belong to an orientalist Asia, and America, which was born out of Europe but whose cultural evolution has made it distinct. For me, the case of America is indeed the more interesting because, by all accounts America was constructed by Europeans taking to its shores what, in the nationalistic European literature, are generally listed as European traits: the stress on the separate constitution of the individual, the division of the self from the world which allows for scientific development and the capitalistic exploitation of the land, restless expansionism, etc. Indeed, whether one traces European roots to nomadic tribes in Caucasia whose language the whole world may now be speaking as "English," or to various Semitic people from whom Euro-Americans may have inherited a religion, an alphabet, and perhaps their greatness as sea-going traders, one is confronted to a recurring theme that is taking them to the stars: "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish, the birds and every living thing" (Genesis 1,28), "Go forth to every part of the world, and proclaim the Good News to the whole creation" (Mark 16,15).
This expansion did not stop at the Atlantic Ocean, but something has apparently happened in the crossing of this ocean that people on either side persist in constructing as a fundamental divide. There is no evidence however that this divide existed from the beginning. Not quite surprisingly, one of the projects for the construction of Europe de Rougemont quotes is one by William Penn who, after having organized his Sylvania in an American territory, eventually returned to Europe with a project that was neither the first not the last but which was filed away as just another of what would later be qualified as an "American" utopia. (18)
Penn's project is, however, in a different position from these others because it was developed out of a successful experience with institutionalizing something that appeared to resolve what those Europeans who crossed the Atlantic for ideological reasons disliked about the states of their birth: the very problem of nationalism. Penn did not talk about his American utopia as a "melting pot." One had to wait another 100 years for Crèvecoeur's triumphal affirmation that there was at least one place on the earth where Europeans could meet and transcend what were altogether insignificant differences.
If we were to continue talking like Benda or de Rougemont, we might talk of America as the Europe which Europeans lacked the will to make. Or perhaps the will was always there, but not the occasion. Certainly, those who, like Penn, willed Europe found it easier to build it across what was becoming a narrower and narrower ocean. And that may have been easier because there remains a powerful argument to be made for the self-determination of local units, that is for a nationalism that American ideology challenges.
Still, the successful making of America, and its entry on the European stage, made something which, by the end of WWII, could not be ignored any further: there, on the back of tanks and other military and industrial hardware, were people altogether indifferent to the very divisions that had appeared so real to those who had played their life on the Western Eurasian stage. William Penn was dismissed, and so was Woodrow Wilson, but Franklin Roosevelt, as he divided Europe with Stalin and installed America as protector of the Western "Atlantic" part, had to be dealt with. It may not be insignificant that the first institutionalization of Europe coincided with the first military occupation of Europe by non-Europeans. Indeed, every time the future shape of Europe is discussed it is with a possible "United States" in mind. (19)
I cannot trace how America has been dealt with by Europeans over the past 50 years. It is important, however, to take into account the reverse process. America is present in Europe--as an army, as a popular culture (in music and life style products), but also as an ideology constituting the legitimacy of various types of nationalisms and defining the stages where the claims can be made. For America, Europe is both the "old country" of nostalgic remembrances, and the source of all the ills that plague the United States and possibly the earth. In some contexts at least Europe finds itself in the position of the West of Ireland and must deal with pressures to look more like itself than it ever did. In other contexts, Europe has to deal with the relative success of those who fight "Euro-centrism" in the United States for every step in this struggle does involve a definition of Europe. One can read such an instant classic in this struggle as Said's book on orientalism to see how this construction proceeds--in ways that one not so different as those that were used to construct an "Orient" for Europeans. Typically, Said opens his book with a quote from a "French journalist" and then, in a breath-taking short-cut writes "He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention" (my emphasis, 1978: 1). By a stroke of his pen he does to the various nations of Western Eurasia what he accuses "Europe" of having done to the people of the Middle East and thereby performs something which the various writers I have quoted would see as American cultural hegemony in the act.
Lives in Europe
The issue here is not the historical validity of any of these claims. The issue is that they are being made on all sorts of stages, with all sorts of practical consequences. The intellectual conversations among philosophers and politicians that shaped nationalism in the 18th and 19th century were no mere idle talk even if they were not always immediately transformed into the speech acts which started wars and signed peace treaties. These conversations produced a context where the president of France, when making certain official televised pronouncements, can do so framed not only by the flag of France, but also by that of Europe. One can notice the ever-expanding normalization of travel to countries that are identified as less and less "foreign." In still not quite a popular stage, one can notice the flowering of European flags over the gas stations that service superhighways. Given the centrality of language, it is interesting to note the development of an ideographic script on the dash boards of cars, or on highway signs, with the concomitant downplaying of alphabet based signs. Such signs must always be in particular language, or in a particular order of messages if the sign is printed in several languages.
These are not mere curiosities. They are the concrete statements that historical persons have to make in the current context. They are fundamentally "cultural" acts in the transformative sense emphasized by Lévi-Strauss ([1947] 1969). They may or may not be the signs that would allows us (anthropologists and natives of any part of the world) to state that there is a European culture--in the American sense of "culture." This identification is, above all, a political problem since it concerns the type of legitimacy to be claimed by the institutional unit. Over the past several hundred years at least, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, England, Spain, Portugal, have had their claim to difference and independence internationally recognized as legitimate. In the process, it is as if they acquired a "surfeit" of culture. By contrast, Europe is undercoded. We cannot even say of Europe that is a "new nation" as it was said of the decolonized states, and as it might be used to understand the United States (Lipset 1963). To say of America that it was "conceived in liberty" by the agency of a people who formed a union is not simply to fall pray to an extended metaphor of biological reproduction. It expresses, reveals and inscribes something that was and remains fundamental to America. It is also fundamental to "France" that it did not begin, even though it took many kings and emperors many centuries to build. European nations are "eternal" quasi "metaphysical beings" (Benda 1932: 41). Europe itself--except for the small minority of speakers who are simply trying to displace the discourse of nationalism to a new stage--is neither new nor old and it thus presents a singular problem for the collective imagination of humanity.
Thoreau's quip about the relevance of the State in his everyday life may apply here too: "[Europe] does not concern me much and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it" ([1854] 1965). There is little evidence that the major political issues that have called for a response by all local centers in the last ten years, say the reunification of Germany, the breakdown of the Russian empire, or the troubles in Northern Ireland, have produced any response specifically symbolized as a "European" one. The institutions that would allow for this to happen have precisely not been put in place. At the national level, this is equivalent to the almost complete absence of awareness of Europe in the suburbs of Dublin where I spent 10 months. Europe was just not there in any way even remotely approaching the way America is there in the suburbs of New York.
Eventually, personal identification is not the main issue. Whether the people of Dublin ever identify passionately with Europe, whether they are ever given institutional spaces to perform this identification, it still remains that something major is being built that has now significantly transformed the stage on which private lives inscribe themselves. It may be that the local presence of Europe is mostly felt through the skeptical grumbling of people who do not quite recognize what has actually been achieved for what they expected. Still, we cannot ignore these grumblings and must take them for what they are: evidence that new constraints and possibilities have appeared while old ones are disappearing. The intellectuals who are giving voice to the many versions of these grumblings are only some of those who are participating in the making, building, constructing, perhaps even creating or inventing (the architectural or artistic metaphors may not be misplaced here) of Europe. The very success of the EC must make of their contribution to the conversation a concern for anthropology. We have here a large scale experiment in the culturing (cultivation?) of history which will certainly stretch our understanding of what human beings can do, and thus of what culture is all about.
1. I am talking here of "culture" in a way related to Williams' understanding of "hegemony" (1977). Williams, as a Marxist attempting to free marxism of an accumulated baggage of vulgar materialism, was attempting to account for the many ways in which symbolic activities are always embodied in concrete practices. For the non-Marxist who are fascinated by symbolism, poetry, ritual, and any other cooking of biological nature, the danger has always been idealism, and Williams--by reminding us that symbols are indeed concrete performances by some people for other people--is doing necessary work. Still, the word "hegemony" itself, by having been used mostly for the illegitimate authority of one group (class) over others, has gained a negative connotation that is dangerous in itself. All "culture" is the product of human activity. That is, it is the product of particular people who make something for other people who may not have directly participated in the initial process to take into account. There is nothing inherently illegitimate here.
2. I explain elsewhere (1986) the analytical usefulness of distinguishing geographically or administratively bounded spaces from cultural patterns that may be dominant there.
3. When talking about the "New States" which Europe spawned around the world, Geertz talks about these two poles as "essentialism" and "epochalism" ([1971] 1973:240-241), and may have missed the way in which the language of nationalism is itself a cultural language with very specific roots. Schneider can help us clarify these roots if we follow his argument that "nationalism" has a lot in common with "kinship" as a (European more than American) cultural system (1969): all the metaphors that build "nationalism" are centered on common descent ("blood") and a shared condition ("code for conduct").
4. Whether they did or not is another matter: World War I was interpreted very differently by the peasants/workers turned soldiers of, say, France, Russia, or Ireland.
5. "Inscription" is a word I borrow from the deconstructionist tradition and which I hope to use without the attending philosophical baggage. Here, inscription refers to the historical activity of making something that leaves a trace (in memory, on paper, in laws and regulations, on the ground, etc.) that future action must take into account.
6. All the details about the history of the building of Europe as a distinct geo-political area come from de Rougemont's fascinating "chronique des prises de conscience successives de notre unité de culture, des temps homériques à nos jours" (1961: 7). Note the use of the first person plural pronoun, and its association with "unité de culture."
7. De Rougemont, best known in the United States for this writings on the cultural history of love ([1939] 1956, [1961] 1963), wrote abundantly about the possibility of Europe and, for many years, was the President of the European Cultural Center in Geneva. His role may be best evoked by a quip from Morin who writes that "L'idée de fédération européenne ne fleurit que dans la banlieue de Genève, avec la prédiction de Denis de Rougemont" (1987: 139).
8. Hobsbawn illustrates this in his account of French revolutionary discourse (1990: 18ff).
9. I emphasize this notion of "will" because it plays a major role in Benda's writings about the source of nationality and plays a comparatively small role in the more traditional American handling of nationality. A notion of will to power may be implicit in the newer writing about the deliberate making of nations, and the "hegemony" of certain forms. Such authors appear, when talking about this aspect of nationalism, that their reader will join in their moral judgment of such acts of will. Benda however belonged to another generation when to refer to "will" was positive indeed.
10. "A typically European comportment that would be more or less characterized by a relationship between man and nature that does not confuse them, by the distinction between the self and the world; correlatively, by the idea of objectivity or truth" (my translation).
11 "The European philosophy I defend is that of the self-determination of a people, of its search for power and expression, of its specificity and cultural homogeneity, of the reclaiming of its roots" (my translation).
12. This resistance is certainly much weaker than it used to be, particularly with the collapse of the old socialist orders which, for various tactical reasons having to do with the position of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, became the staunchest supporters of "national independence." The remaining resistance may now be mostly expressed in the ironic skepticism of those who claim that "Europe" only has to do with the mass marketing of consumer goods (Enzensberger 1988).
13. "One must abandon any clear, distinct, harmonious Europe. One must refute any idea of a primordial European essence or substance that would have precedence over division and antagonism. [...] It is in the bursting of Christiandom that these originally European realities that are the Nation-States could emerge, along with humanism and science. It in the divisions and antagonisms between Nation-States that the notion of Europe propagated and imposed itself" (my translation).
14. "[The new faith] carries in itself the presence of Nothingness. The use of a thought which faces courageously Nothingness, here is the living message of nihilism, ultimate product of the adventure of the European spirit, here is the ultimate consequence of the loss of foundations, end point of the desperate search for a primordial certainty" (my translation).
15. In French, as in English, the adjective "common" which is officially supposed to refer to "community" has also a pejorative connotation that associates what it qualifies with the uncouth, the basely material, the uneducated lower classes, and, by extension to thebourgeois.
16. "From the French point of view, I am a man by nature and French by accident. As in enlightenment in general, the nation has no ontological status: at this level there is nothing, a big emptiness between the individual and the species. The nation is simply the largest empirical approximation of humanity that I can have access to in real life" (my translation).
17. "We speak commonly of an american novelist, a Hemingway, a Faulkner, a Miller, we do not speak of an "European" novelist, but of a French, English, Russian novelist. Americans do speak of a European novelist. They affirm that there is for them something common (that they do not quite specify) among the literary authors from our diverse nations by opposition to theirs; but what would be importnat for what we are dealing with, is that we ourselves spoke of a European literary author. In fact, we do not." (my translation)
18. For a summary of this project and its place within contemporary ones, see de Rougemont (1961: 100-105).
19. Note that the experiences of Europeans in South America, or Australia, is not so much dismissed as irrelevant as it is radically ignored. They are neither Self not Other.
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