We, the People of Europe? by Balibar Étienne Swenson James

Author:Balibar, Étienne, Swenson, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

Difficult Europe:

Democracy under Construction

Ladies and Gentlemen, esteemed colleagues,

It is a great and moving honor for me to find myself here among you, in one of the most ancient universities of Europe. I thank you for your invitation, and in particular thank your president, Professor Antonio Pedro Pita, whose friendship was able to overcome all the obstacles that stood in the way of this meeting. And I believe it is in this way, at least as far as what is in our power is concerned, that we will gradually be able to give the idea of European citizenship a content that is not merely bureaucratic.

Europe is precisely what I want to speak about in this closing address that you so graciously asked of me: its difficulty, its borders, and its announced citizenship. Not merely because these themes are imposed upon any encounter between intellectuals of different countries in this time and place (although I do not forget that Portugal is currently assuming the presidency of the European Union and that circumstances have given this responsibility a particular seriousness). More important for me today, the questions raised by European unification, and the tensions it serves to reveal, form a particularly privileged object for political philosophy. You decided to consecrate this last congress of the twentieth century to an examination of the “general trends in philosophy” in the years to come. In my field, I see no way to do this without seeking to analyze a few of the problems opened by the conjuncture we have entered, a conjuncture that requires us not to renounce the conceptual equipment we have inherited from a long past but to rethink it and to put it to the test.

Closing lecture at the fourth Congress of the Association of Professors of Philosophy of Portugal, University of Coimbra, February 11, 2000. The themes of this lecture were developed in my seminar on L’Europa difficile, held at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples (cosponsored by the group Immaginare L’Europa), January 31-February 4, 2000.

The question of citizenship has been at the heart of political philosophy since its origins, and it is no accident that the renewal of debates concerning it, as they lead to reexaminations of categories such as community and sovereignty, the universality of rights, the relations between citizenship and nationality, and the political function of social conflict, should also lead to a renaissance of political philosophy—not in opposition to historical or sociological approaches, or to individual and collective ethics, but in a unity that truly reconstitutes the totality of practical philosophy. Politics virtually occupies there what Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, called an “architectonic” function.1 My seminar this year in Paris is devoted to the theme “Europe: From Myth to Politics,” and I have just held a seminar at the Istituto per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples on “L’Europa difficile,” so today I will try to summarize for you some of the themes and provisional results worked out together with the students who participated in these meetings.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.