MARKHA G. VALENTAsecurity—rather than risk seeking for itself and the world truly new forms of life and
being. Just consider the current Dutch government’s pending draconian expulsion of
26,000 long-time resident illegal immigrants; or German Christian Democrats’ funda-
mental refusal to imagine Turkey as a member of Europe; or, more generally, the lack of
vision that marks European leadership across the board and has stymied all attempts to
respond creatively and with daring to Europe’s own problems, as well as those of the
world: from the framing of a visionary European constitution, to Bosnia and Iraq, to
Israel and Palestine, to the American behemoth’s unilateralism. European political leaders
have boldly asserted that the challenge facing Europe is to become the most powerful
economy in the world within the next decade. But the true challenge, in fact, is to imagine
Europe’s role and identity in the world after the end of Eurocentrism—and the failure is
remarkable. Instead, what we are offered is simply a new, shrunken provincialism, as
fearful of the postmodern rupture of territorialism as of Islam and multiculturalism. It
salvages what is to be salvaged of Europe’s modern heritage, but cowers from going be-
yond it—beyond the regional and the economic, the rational and the secular, the fortified
bounds of its imaginary territory.
In this sense, it is the continuing resonance of Europe’s bestial implosion half a
century ago that today spurs Europe’s continued resistance to engaging fully the most
fundamental challenges it faces. These challenges are kept at a perpetual pitch of urgency
by precisely the forces on which Europe today is depending for stability and succor—
those of capitalist economics and territorialist politics. In running from the past, Europe
in effect keeps that past continually before it. Its current security and stability can only be
imagined as a precarious eye in the storm, an oasis between the actual past and a potential
future of the instability, irrationality, and danger that dervishly orbit the circled wagons
of the present, of Fortress Europe today. Under such conditions, under such an imaginary,
the trick is to make that present, and that Europe, extend as far and as long as possible;
to snatch security from the jaws of an unstable future and a threatening world. The
tragedy of such a vision is that it erases the future to the point that the new—the post-
modern, the Islamic—can only be conceived as a return of the past, and the imagination
needed to engage it as the present-future is effectively suppressed.
The problem is a fundamental discrepancy between the West’s self-image and actual-
ity—the problem of how to assert fundamental assumptions, standpoints, and intentions
while accounting for their continued disruption, contradiction, and even failure in prac-
tice. So the former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard argues that, while Europe has
historically played a much greater role than the rest of the world in generating war and
carnage, it now can give the world ‘‘the assurance... that wars will no longer originate
in Europe.’’ Not only does the Union respect human rights, but this is the first great
economic power to have ‘‘been born without force.’’^39 The Second World War as an
inalienable primary impulse to the Union utterly disappears here—as, more generally,
does the crucial fact of colonialism and its contribution to Europe’s material, social, intel-
PAGE 464464.................16224$ CH23 10-13-06 12:36:14 PS