The term “European values” poses a problem. The term pertains to Europe and its borders. The question of Europe’s borders can be answered either positivistically or politically. The positivistic answer is the geographic one, which places Europe between the Atlantic and the Ural Mountains. The political answer focuses on political culture, the sum of the written and unwritten laws that influence political decision-making processes. The geographic Europe does not have a common political culture. If we speak, nonetheless, of a shared political culture with regard to European integration, then we mean Western political culture.
It is important to distinguish between the terms “Europe” and “the West.” To quote Viennese historian Gerald Stourzh, “Europe (alone) is not the West. The West extends beyond Europe. But Europe also extends beyond the West.”
It is indisputable that the major Anglo-Saxon-influenced democracies of North America, Australia, and New Zealand are part of the West. Major parts of Europe are not. The West: that was originally that portion of Christianity that had its spiritual center in Rome until the Reformation. When we in the Europe of the EU talk about “European identity,” then we are referring, whether we are aware of it or not, to the identity of the European Occident.
This identity can be grasped with our senses. One need only think of the great epochs in the history of sacral and secular architecture, the fine arts, and music. Europeans have so much in common culturally that it would make no sense at all to write a purely national history of art. But the commonalities are not limited to the arts. There are common legal traditions, from church law to the reception of Roman law to the jus publicum europaeum after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Europeans have also gone through the same emancipation processes: from humanism and the Reformation to the Enlightenment to the development of the rule of law and democracy. Finally, there is the integrating force of commemorating the murderous consequences of hatred toward foreigners and minorities, of nationalism and racism – with the Holocaust as its most extreme culmination.
An enlightened European sense of community can only be based both on an awareness of what has, for better or worse, united Europe for more than a millennium, and on the memory of what has separated Europeans for centuries. Roughly forty years after the end of the Third Reich, the “historians’ quarrel” [Historikerstreit] about the singularity of the Nazi murder of the Jews was fought out in the “old” Federal Republic of Germany. In this context, Jürgen Habermas made the following, oft-quoted statement in 1986: “The unreserved opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the major intellectual accomplishment of the postwar era, of which my generation in particular can be proud.”* Unreserved opening to the political culture of the West: This phrase also includes an answer to the question regarding the political boundaries of Europe and thus the limits to the “enlargability” of the European Union. As a political community of shared values, the EU can only include countries that have unreservedly opened up to the political culture of the West. Countries that do not wish to adopt this culture therefore reject the EU as a community of shared values and cannot become members.
* Habermas, “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung. Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung,” first published in Die Zeit (July 11, 1986). Published in English as “A Kind of Settlement of Damages: The Apologetic Tendencies in German History Writing” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, ed. and trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 34-44.
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