Hostility towards Israel and other signs of an inability to reflect on oneself. The crisis we must withstand

There is something epoch-making about the attitude Europe has adopted towards Israel. Something that goes beyond the political circumstances of the moment and even the tragic events of the war. For the aversion towards the Jewish state is, in fact, an expression of intolerance towards a fundamental part of our very own civilisation. Israel is the last, cumbersome witness to a lineage from which Europe would like to free itself, almost as if its own history were a guilt to be atoned for. This is the final chapter in a process that was already evident some twenty years ago, when it was decided to remove any reference to Judeo-Christian roots from the draft European Constitution. This was not merely an exercise in secularism, but a symptom of a broader inability to conceive of oneself, to recognise one’s origins and, therefore, to envisage a destiny. The issue, of course, is not about nostalgia for a glorious past, but rather the very meaning of identity, which is not a collection of customs to be preserved like museum pieces, but a historical force, a power that asserts itself through conflict, assimilation and transformation.

Europe and crisis are, ultimately, two names for the same phenomenon. Europe was born of fracture, of contradiction, of the tireless work of dissolution that thought exerts upon every established certainty. Its vocation has never been to preserve a form intact, but to expose it continually to the force of the negative, to that corrosion through which the spirit – that is, the human phenomenon in its entirety – transcends what is given and pushes beyond it. This is the boundless power of European philosophy: the capacity to call everything into question, including itself, without for that reason renouncing the will to assert itself. A living, irreducible contradiction that has held together Athens and Jerusalem, Rome and Christianity, Enlightenment reason and Romantic irrationality. Not the pacified unity of sameness, but the restless unity of that which remains distinct, the ceaseless tension that makes movement possible.

Today, this extraordinary dissolving energy – which for centuries enabled Europe to dominate the world intellectually precisely because it never ceased to transcend itself – seems to have solidified into its opposite. Thought has become administration; contradiction has been consigned to procedure so as to avoid any risk. And instead of a civilisation capable of producing new forms, we find ourselves faced with a bureaucratic spectre that outlives its own power, busily guarding jealously an existence whose meaning it can no longer articulate. Its impotence is not merely political, but ontological. Unable to generate renewing movement, it can only rigidly regulate its own survival, until its inevitable demise (that which does not move dies).

After all, if Europe chooses to be a purely technical entity, its defeat is a foregone conclusion. In the technological sphere, it has been overtaken by more efficient and unscrupulous powers; as for the military sphere, there is no point even discussing it. In politics – that is, in the realm of decision-making – it is entirely inept because it lacks the capacity to decide. Above all, what once made it incomparable—the overwhelming power of its culture, or rather its identity—is now being diluted by the triumphalism of an unhinged multiculturalism that, instead of integrating, dilutes and dissolves Europe itself first and foremost. What remains risks becoming nothing more than a sterile ‘green’ bureaucracy full of well-intentioned but ultimately futile gestures.

However, it is naïve to imagine that a millennia-old identity would allow itself to be erased without a fight. Europe will not quietly slip away on the night when, to quote Hegel, ‘all cows are black’. It will not slide, without putting up a fight, into the undifferentiated mass – that dustbin of history into which civilisations that no longer have the energy to assert themselves end up. The more one seeks to liquidate it, the more violent the response may be. At times it will manifest itself in grotesque outbursts, spiteful caricatures of lost grandeur; at other times it will take more organised forms, far less easy to dismiss. To dismiss these reactions – as is done on a daily basis when observing the new forms that political dissatisfaction with the European Union is taking – does not eliminate their causes but, on the contrary, accelerates their emergence.

It is to be hoped, then, that Europe will enter an even deeper crisis than the one it is currently experiencing, that it will sink into its own current ineptitude, so that it may reactively revive itself before the monitor tracking its vital signs shows an irretrievably flat line.