Such a Europe-wide discourse, of course, would have to link up with already-existing attitudes, as a stimulus for a process of self-understanding. Two facts would seem to contradict this bold assumption. Haven’t the most significant historical achievements of Europe forfeited their identity-forming power precisely through the fact of their worldwide success? And what could hold together a region characterized more than any other by the ongoing rivalries between self-conscious nations?
Insofar as Christianity and capitalism, natural science and technology, Roman law and the Code Napoléon, the bourgeois-urban form of life, democracy and human rights, the secularization of state and society have spread across other continents, these legacies no longer constitute a proprium. The Western mind, rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, certainly has its characteristic features. But the nations of Europe also share this mental habitus, characterized by individualism, rationalism, and activism, with the United States, Canada, and Australia. The ‘West’ as a spiritual form encompasses more than just Europe. Moreover, Europe is composed of nation-states that delimit one another polemically. National consciousness, formed by national languages, national literatures, and national histories, has long operated as an explosive force.
However, in reaction to the destructive power of this nationalism, values and habits have also developed which have given contemporary Europe, in its incomparably rich cultural diversity, its own face. This is how Europe at large presents itself to non-Europeans. A culture which for centuries has been beset more than any other culture by conflicts between town and country, sacred and secular authorities, by the competition between faith and knowledge, the struggle between states and antagonistic classes, has had to painfully learn how differences can be communicated, contradictions institutionalized, and tensions stabilized. The acknowledgement of differences – the reciprocal acknowledgement of the Other in her otherness – can also become a feature of a common identity.
The pacification of class conflicts within the welfare state, and the self-limitation of state sovereignty in the framework of the EU, are only the most recent examples of this. In the third quarter of the twentieth century, Europe on this side of the Iron Curtain experienced its ‘golden age,’ as Eric Hobsbawm has called it. Since then, features of a common political mentality have taken shape, so that others often recognize us as Europeans rather than as Germans or French – and that happens not just in Hong Kong, but even in Tel Aviv. And isn’t it true? In European societies, secularization is relatively developed. Citizens here regard transgressions of the border between politics and religion with suspicion. Europeans have a relatively large amount of trust in the organizational and steering capacities of the state, while remaining sceptical toward the achievements of markets. They possess a keen sense of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’; they have no naively optimistic expectations about technological progress. They maintain a preference for the welfare state’s guarantees of social security and for regulations on the basis of solidarity. The threshold of tolerance for the use of force against persons is relatively low. The desire for a multilateral and legally regulated international order is connected with the hope for an effective global domestic policy, within the framework of a reformed United Nations.
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