Five ways of deconstructing Europe

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Five ways of deconstructing Europe

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DOI: 10.1177/0047244113508361jes.sagepub.com

Five ways of deconstructing Europe

Ian AlmondSchool of Foreign Service, Georgetown University (Qatar)

AbstractIn this essay, previous attempts to dismantle the idea of Europe as a self-contained space are briefly examined. Five strategies for deconstructing the idea of Europe are considered: re-origination, re-configuration, provincialization/de-universalization, fissuring through internal Othering and strategies of commonality. Each of these strategies, be they philosophical, philological, historical or geographical, tries to undermine the notion of ‘Europe’ as a self-contained space, either by alienating its origins, splitting it into alternative topographies, reducing it to just another language game, revealing its internal differences or showing how many of its features spill over into adjacent cultural spaces. The essay ends with some thoughts on what the consequences of a deconstructed Europe might be.

Keywordsdeconstruction, de-centring, origins, postcolonial, Europe

‘That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed’ …

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ …

‘What the hell are you getting so upset about?’ he asked her ... ‘I thought you didn’t believe in God.’

‘I don’t’, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. ‘But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean, stupid God you make Him out to be.’

(Heller, 2010: 179−80)

Corresponding author:Ian Almond, Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service − Qatar, Education City, PO Box 23689, Doha, Qatar. Email: [email protected]

508361 JES44110.1177/0047244113508361AlmondJournal of European Studiesresearch-article2013

at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on July 17, 2014jes.sagepub.comDownloaded from


Almond 51

I start with this ironic moment of religious unbelief from Catch-22 not to make some kind of analogy between a commitment to God and a commitment to Europe, however tempt-ing that may be. The idea, rather, is to illustrate an initial point: that just because some-thing is an illusion, doesn’t mean it’s not true. Although many Europeans are aware that ‘Europe’ doesn’t exist in the same way less liminally challenged spaces such as ‘Iceland’ or ‘Denmark’ or ‘France’ exist, the ‘Europe’ they don’t believe in is a relatively Christian, Enlightened, more or less civilized place, distinct from words like ‘Africa’ and ‘Asia’. It’s not the origin-less, sprawling, repressive fantasy some people make it out to be.

This essay is not about whether Turkey should join the European Union. The differ-ence between ‘Europe’ and ‘the European Union’ − basically, between a purported his-torical/cultural continuity of shared values and a single-market, free-trade zone administered by economic, neoliberal elites – is so insurmountable as to hopelessly com-plicate a very brief essay. I am not unaware that one of these signifiers is constantly used to invoke – or more accurately, deny – access to the other; but although the ramifications of my essay directly surround this issue, the specific economic, judicial and party politi-cal frameworks surrounding Turkey’s possible entry into the European Union must remain a topic for another day.

Nor is this essay going to deliver a mini-history of the word ‘Europe’ − how it came into being, what meanings it had at which times for whom, and why it began to gain, around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the kind of currency it did. Endless books have already dedicated themselves to this task, some of them in an auto-celebratory fash-ion, some of them quite cynically. One of the most obvious ways of deconstructing Europe might well be a thorough historicizing of the word’s evolution – the parties who profited from its circulation, the discourses it legitimized, and so on. Clearly, the modern sense of the term has had a relatively recent history. In 1529, when Suleiman’s Turkish army is marching on Vienna, Luther hardly mentions ‘Europa’ in his text ‘On War Against the Turk’; 150 later, when Ottoman armies march on Austria a second time, the word is all over Leibniz’s two essays on the subject.1 Within the space of 150 years, the word ‘Europe’ went from an occasionally used, poetic term (much like ‘Albion’ for England) to a powerful, fully functioning name. There is no way I can begin to address what happened in between these two moments. For Luther, the religious faith of the approaching army was of paramount importance; for Leibniz, in contrast, writing a cen-tury and a half later, the savagery and ignorance of the ‘Turkish rabble’ was the thing to be stressed (Leibniz, 1984: 606)2 – an enemy of culture, more than an enemy of Christ. Disentangling the various strands of the carpet called ‘Europe’ – as a Christian space, a democratic space, a bastion of liberal capitalism, etc. – is not a task which we will have time to undertake here.

This essay is about the deconstruction of the idea of Europe: how one might do it, how some critics have gone about it, and what consequences (if any) might arise from it. My use of the word ‘deconstruct’, I should say at the outset, is a somewhat conventional one: although the semantic emptying of a word, the unveiling of a certain infinite elusiveness in a term, is a central aspect of Derridean analyses, here ‘deconstructing Europe’ has a much more modest meaning. It covers any approach which tries to radically dismantle the idea of Europe as a largely self-contained space, a ‘cultural and civilizational iden-tity’ (Todorov and Bracher, 2008: 3), with a pre-Christian, Christian and post-Christian



52 Journal of European Studies 44(1)

(secular) history, a time and a place distinct from countries along its African and Asian shores. ‘Deconstructing Europe’, in other words, could involve any number of non-Derridian relatives: de-Christianizing, decentring, de-universalizing, de-sedimenting, even disenchanting (in Weber’s sense – showing how a magical term is nothing more than the sum of a collection of processes). Whatever metaphysical abysses, traces of the signifier or nostalgia for the origin arise over the following pages, they will be a side-effect, not an aim, of this essay.

People started deconstructing the idea of Europe as soon as they felt one was being constructed. Barely nine years after Kant (in 1784) was claiming ‘the political constitu-tion of our continent will probably legislate eventually for all the other continents’ (Kant, 1991), Herder was questioning why Europe should feel itself special at all: ‘Why should the Western corner of our hemisphere alone possess culture?’ (Herder, 2002: 419). In the same decade that Voltaire declared how much progress the ‘spirit of Europe’ had made (1764; Voltaire, 1994: 21), Rousseau criticized those self-same universal Europeans as people who ‘provided they find money to steal and women to corrupt ... are everywhere at home’ (cited in Ascherson, 2012: 20). Montaigne’s famous essay on cannibalism fore-saw, very early on, some of the blindness that might arise from being convinced one was the centre of the world (Montaigne, 1958). No sooner had the word ‘Europa’ begun to circulate, a loose collection of Christian states with a belief in progress, various critics – German Protestants, unhappy French Catholics, suspicious Anglicans – were already trying to chip away at it.

Probably the first and most obvious strategy used in any deconstruction of the word ‘Europe’ would be the re-alienation of its origins – that is, showing how many of the things we consider emblematic of Europe (St Augustine, Leonardo da Vinci,3 the post-modern novel, Romantic poetry, and so on) actually possess some very non-European origins. The word Europa itself is a useful springboard for such an approach, as two of its three disputed genealogies lead us back to the Middle East: either the name of an abducted princess from a city on the coast of Lebanon, or the proto-Semitic root erebu meaning ‘darkness’ or ‘west’ (in Arabic maghrib, in Hebrew ma’ariv) – the latter a dis-puted etymology which, if it possesses any truth, would mean that ‘Europe’ and ‘Arab’ were ultimately the same word (Rougemont, 1966: 27).

This strategy of re-origination has many variations: from the exposure of the already established (that the founder of the Western Christian tradition was an African bishop, for example) to the more speculative – that Dante’s Divine Comedy was inspired by Ibn Arabi (Palacios, 1919), or that rhyme came to Europe through the Arabs (Andrés, 1822).4 One of the most ambitious projects in this category has been Martin Bernal’s three-volume Black Athena (1987−2006), which sees a nineteenth-century European Hellenophilia as essentially occluding significant Near Eastern/African influence on the formation of Ancient Greece. Bernal’s controversial and widely challenged work, which spans linguistic, historical and archaeological disciplines, argues among its central prem-ises that over 60 per cent of Greek words ‘cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European languages’ (Bernal, 2001: 3) − a lacuna Bernal goes on to fill with Egyptian, Phoenician and other Afro-Semitic etymologies.

If the advantage of re-origination is a certain shock value – relocating the Other (an African, a Jew, an Arab) at the very heart of the Same can provide a useful, even catalytic



Almond 53

moment of trauma for the politically comfortable identity – the disadvantage of such an approach is somewhat subtler: it lies in a possibly naïve overestimation of the signifi-cance an origin has for the performance of an identity. This naiveté, a sceptic might argue, has two dimensions: first of all, it assumes the invocation of origins to be the cause and driving force of ideological narratives, and not merely their a posteriori effects. Second (and relatedly), in its conviction of the abiding power of the origin, it overlooks, or badly miscalculates, the historical staying power of subsequent layers of meaning, even when the origin is revealed to be false or illusory. Once a signifier has been set into motion and has acquired, through time, a significant cluster of historical connotations around it, will the removal and replacement of the initial point of that signifying chain have any effect on the meanings which have subsequently crystallized in its wake? Historically, Christian anti-Semites rarely seem to have been troubled by Jesus’ Jewishness, any more than today, in the United States, racist elements in the Republican Party worry over the anti-slavery origins of their movement. Or, to use Bernal’s show-case example: if the name ‘Athens’ really is derived from the Egyptian HtNt (‘Temple of the Goddess Neit’) (Bernal, 1987: 1.51),5 how much effect will this have today on the pervasive, Classical power this city-name continues to exert on Europeans?

The second deconstructive strategy we could almost term ‘re-designation’ or ‘re-configuration’. Topographical in form, such approaches undermine the word ‘Europe’ by proposing alternative configurations of space and culture. The most obvious examples are the notion of a ‘Mediterranean culture’ (popularized, though by no means initiated, by Bourdieu), and the re-description of Europe as a peninsular of Asia (a famil-iar idea most systematically developed by J. G. A. Pocock). Bourdieu’s early work on family practices and concepts of honour in the Kabiyle people of Algeria led him, with gradually increasing emphasis, to see structures of similarity in south-west France, and then later on to concur with studies of other Mediterranean countries such as Spain and Greece. Instead of a frontier line between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean becomes (or is restored to) a sea around which a variety of religious cultures – Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic – shared and continue to share a number of common family structures and char-acteristics (Bourdieu, 1979; Pocock, 2002: 55−70).6 Similarly, the idea of Europe as being nothing more than a north-western offshoot of Eurasia seems to offer, through a simple shift of perspective, a radical rearrangement of topography. The idea is not new: the historian Noblot was calling Europe a peninsular in 1725, while the poet Paul Valéry frequently referred to Europe as an ‘appendix’ to Asia (Rougemont, 1966: 30). What Pocock and his ‘archipelagic’ histories of the British Isles underscore is not merely how Europe belongs to three continents not one (2002: 57), but also the historical inability of Europe ever to properly designate its eastern border.

Such re-configuration implies the re-naming of Europe: either unglamorous, practical names such as ‘Mediterranean’, more exotic terms such as ‘north-west Eurasia’, or per-haps old names from the pre-Christian past for the lands of the West, names at once fresh and ancient, relatively uncontaminated by history – Amentit, Hesperia, Japheth (Rougemont, 1966: 24). Instead of hoping for some fresh vista of alternatives from this tired old word ‘Europa’,7 the second approach refuses from the start to play the game of defining Europe, by trying to imagine a map in which the word ‘Europe’ had never existed (there is something quite Wittgensteinian about this refusal to have our




cartographical intelligence bewitched by a single name). If such a strategy has a problem, it lies in the belief that an alternative configuration will necessarily displace the original. The ability of an individual to respond to two or three names at different times is not an unfamiliar concept: the man who will cheer for his city against another city at a football match will feel Italian when visiting London, but will discover his Europeanness when the word ‘Islam’ or ‘immigrant’ is mentioned in the news report he hears in the car. In a process of identity compartmentalization multi-lingual people will already be familiar with, the provision of alternative topographies – it could be argued – may relativize but will not fundamentally remove the narrative of a European identity.

A third deconstructive strategy might be termed ‘internal Othering’. Moving inti-mately among European writers, thinkers and politicians, such a strategy tries to fracture the signifier ‘Europe’ by showing how such thinkers de-Europeanize and even Orientalize their neighbours within that self-same Europe. Roberto Dainotto’s 2007 work Europe (In Theory) is the most recent example of this approach, where British/French/German perceptions of a lazy Mediterranean South (or PIGS – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) is shown to have played a dialectical part against an industrious assertive North in the construction of European identity. One of the pivotal moments in Dainotto’s book is a passage from Montesquieu ‘explaining’ the Italian temperament:

There is, in Italy, a southern wind, called Sirocco, which passes through the sands of Africa before reaching Italy. It rules that country; it exerts its power over all spirits; it produces a universal weightiness and slowness; Sirocco is the intelligence that presides over all Italian heads. (Montesquieu, De L’esprit de lois 2: 45 quoted in Dainotto, 2007: 73)

Alongside this Africanizing of Italy, the catalogue of such moments of internal fissur-ing could be extended endlessly: Thomas Mann’s Orientalizing of Venice, Nietzsche’s preference for the Southern sensuousness of Naples and his anti-European celebration of Spain and Sicily’s Islamic past, not to mention Samir Amin’s important reminder that the Orthodox Church was considered for many centuries an Oriental institution (Nietzsche, 1990: 196; Amin, 1989: 135). And yet such intra-European ‘Othering’ did not merely take place on a geographical basis. The extent to which radical political movements were also ‘Islamicized’ is worth noting – Luther said the peasant revolutionary Muenzer wanted to be his own Turkish emperor, Kant was only one of many who compared the Anabaptists and their radical communes with Islam, Hegel saw Robespierre as a kind of Mohammed, whilst Schlegel drew a line of Satanic revolt against Catholic Europe which ran from Mecca through Wittenberg and (revolutionary) Paris right up to Ottoman Istanbul (Luther, 1967: 178; Kant, 1900: 267; Hegel, 1957: 358; for Schlegel see Almond, 2010: 100−4). Such an approach attempts to dissolve the word ‘Europe’ by showing how, within the parameters of its own signifying field, elements which contradicted the struc-ture of that field were ejected as foreign and un-European.

The delineation of the various self-differentiating mechanisms at work within that messy, bloated word ‘Europe’ can accomplish a great deal. When a country as central to the narrative of Europe as Italy can be ‘Africanized’ at will, the transparent arbitrariness behind all such games of signification is rendered suddenly opaque. When Europeans use terms such as ‘Africa’ or ‘Orient’ to eject other Europeans, the instrumentality of



Almond 55

such words is suddenly foregrounded – an act which breaks the mimetic illusion that ‘Africa’ or ‘Oriental’ refers to some real place or entity. To show this process repeatedly, as scholars like Dainotto do, erodes the semantic seriousness of the word ‘Europe’.

The strongest objection to such revelations of internal Othering might be that it remains a gesture inside Europe, for Europe. Although the legitimacy of the central sig-nifier is called into question within the group, from the outside the action, if detectable at all, has little or no value. No matter how much Europeanness is questioned within its borders, from the perspective of a Ghanaian asylum-seeker or a Kurdish immigrant, Fortress Europe remains Fortress Europe. In the same way as internal Israeli schisms mean little to a Palestinian refugee, or class/racial tensions within a US platoon are barely visible to an Iraqi at a checkpoint, the various ways within Europe that ‘Europeanness’ is distributed – bestowed upon or taken away from – other Europeans remains of purely academic significance to those locked outside its gates. Moreover, if such internal self-differentiation becomes in itself a definition of what Europe is – as some scholars have claimed (Pocock, 2002: 67; Todorov and Bracher, 2008: 7; Gasche, 2007: 10, 13)8 − then, on the contrary, such a deconstructive strategy actually ends up strengthening the word ‘Europe’ by showing how its internal complexities are themselves so very European.

Another strategy for deconstructing Europe – one gathering increasing momentum in postcolonial scholarship – we might term ‘de-universalization’ or ‘provincialization’, following Chakrabarty’s memorable book, Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000).9 If the power of a word such as ‘Europe’ lies in its claim to be the fons et origo of the modern world, then strategies of provincialization attempt to diminish such power by restoring the continent to the more modest role of Important Region or Significant Player. Such strategies generally display two aspects: the first takes ideas and intellectual tradi-tions commonly held to be European (secularism, modernity, democracy, human rights) and, risking varying degrees of impetuosity and anachronism, discerns them in cultures and epochs remote from modern Europe. In The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk mocks the more reckless, race-to-the-moon versions of these narratives − those who claim, for example, ‘that Ibn Arabi had been the greatest existentialist of all time’ (Pamuk, 1995:73) − although a provisional list of the more careful ones is impressive: elements of the mod-ern nation-state in the Asante empire of pre-colonial West Africa (Davidson, 1992: 59); Turkish precursors to the stream-of-consciousness novel in late Ottoman nineteenth-century texts (Berna Moran10); the fourteenth-century Ibn Khaldun as the first secular historian (Chaudhuri, 1975: 20). South Asia, in particular, has been a rich source of such ‘proto-modernities’, with Sheldon Pollock (2001) discerning early features of modernity in fifteenth/sixteenth-century Sanskrit treatises, whilst Amartya Sen (in a more popular fashion) has argued for the existence of a thoroughly empirical and sceptical intellectual tradition in the Gupta period (from the fifth century onwards) of Indian science and phi-losophy (Sen, 2005: 26). These strategies, for the most part, distinguish themselves from ‘re-origination’ by avoiding the development of hypothetical lines of causality. The aim is not to ‘trump’ Europe, but rather to argue for the independent emergence of ‘truths’ commonly held to be European.

The second aspect of such provincializing strategies belongs to historians of ideas such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Serif Mardin. Neither asserting the wholly independent emergence of Enlightenment ideas in non-European settings nor their unproblematic




adoption, these thinkers re-examine periods where some form of European influence indisputably occurred. Instead of seeing waves of modernity radiating outwards mono-directionally from Europe to the rest of the world, what their specific histories of nine-teenth-century Bengal or early twentieth-century Turkey reveal is a much more sophisticated process – one not of straightforward imitation, but rather a space in which European ideas were incorporated into the development of alternative, culturally specific modernities, distinct from the mere adoption of European ideas. Chakrabarty’s book, as he admits in the opening pages, is not really about Europe, but about the uncritical vocabulary of imitation scholars use to discuss European influence in India. Liberal humanist ideas of compassion for one’s fellow man found points of contact and tension with Bengali notions of shahridyata (literally ‘being with heart’) (Chakrabarty, 2000: 126); and nineteenth-century Bengali nationalist discourse on women’s education took place in close interaction with the idea of kula or male lineage (2000: 228). Similarly, in Istanbul, Serif Mardin shows how the advance of secularization in Kemalist Turkey was not simply a pouring of French laicité into Turkish vessels, but rather a more complex process in which religious institutions and ideas also took part (many of the lawyers who prepared Turkey’s 1926 secular constitution had been teaching Islamic Sharia law a few years earlier) (Mardin, 2006: 266). No tug-of-war with bearded mullahs pulling one way and Westernized, Voltaire-reading secularists pulling the other, but rather a more compli-cated interaction and response to European influence from a number of very different quarters.

Such historical revisions of European influence provincialize Europe by downgrading its status from a disseminator of universality to a region whose early discovery of scien-tific processes gave them the military edge to export its habits and customs around the planet. This ontological demoting of Europe (from origin to influence to factor) is per-haps the closest any of these strategies come to the God analogy suggested at the begin-ning of the essay. The murder of the myth of Europe as the primum mobile of global modernity, it could be argued, allows other countries to breathe again. The violence of such a murder would bring with it, in theory, the abrupt end of an illusion. By disenchant-ing Europe of its magical ubiquity, a certain structure – what Chakrabarty calls the ‘“first in Europe, then elsewhere” structure of global historical time’ (2000: 7) − would recede, leaving in its wake a poly-centred space where other entities might begin the difficult project of re-thinking themselves historically.

In terms of Europe, however, it remains unclear how successful such de-universalizing gestures really are as strategies of deconstruction. The main drawback would seem to be the sudden opacity the word ‘European’ acquires whenever it moves outside Europe; in the re-examination of colonial encounters, in particular, the confluence of British, French and Portuguese forces in an African or Asian setting resurrects and reifies the notion of ‘European’ in the very moment one might hope to deconstruct it. The irony of Europe having to rely on its (invariably colonial) relationship with non-Europe in order to con-tinuously define and perform itself is a familiar one;11 provincializing Europe, in its attempt to re-tribalize Europeans as the only clan that doesn’t know it’s a clan, runs the risk of lending an originally illusory word an external consistency.

Even in the search for non-European, pre-contact notions of modernity, the spectre of Europe seems to re-manifest itself at the very moment of its threatened dissolution. This



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happens primarily through the way such analyses bring with them a pre-understanding (in Heidegger’s sense of Vorverständnis) of what they are looking for, a tacit and utterly unar-ticulated presupposition which unconsciously guides the gaze and structures the analysis. To find structures of state identity in a pre-colonial tribe, or examples of secular histori-cism in the court of the Hafsids, is to keep Europe invisibly at the centre of one’s quest.

The fifth and final strategy we should mention might be termed collaborative strate-gies or ‘strategies of commonality’. Such approaches have a number of characteristics: they are invariably historical in nature; they usually invoke identity on a religious basis; and their target, for the most part, is a Christian Europe. Strategies of commonality attempt to de-Christianize such an idea by showing how certain beliefs, alliances and cultural practices have spilled across geographical and religious boundaries. They distin-guish themselves from strategies of re-configuration in that they do not suggest an alter-native, more accurate space or signifier into which Muslims, Christians and Jews could be incorporated (Bulliet’s argument for ‘Islamo-Christian civilization’ makes little men-tion of the Mediterranean basin as an Islamo-Christian space) (Bulliet, 2004). Strategies of commonality, especially concerning the relations between Muslims and Christians, concentrate on activities and practices which bridge both groups: intermarriage (Bryer, 1981), homosexual love (Brann, 2002), weapons use and manufacture (Bartusis, 1992), superstitious practices (Balivet, 1991), even criminality (Catlos, 2004). Wider approaches emphasize cultural and military collaboration in the formation of entities such as Ottoman Turkey (Kafadar, 1995; Lowry, 2003). Kitsikis (1996) goes so far as to call the first hun-dred years of Ottoman rule a ‘Graeco-Turkish’ empire or Tsarist Russia (Crews, 2006).

The symbolic impact such cross-faith collaborations can have is striking. To take the example of military collaboration: a single glance at a map of Europe where a selection of Muslim−Christian military alliances took place shows a vast array of battlefields where Muslims and Christians fought on the same side throughout the centuries – Tartars and Ukrainians, Byzantines and Turks, Russians and Kurds, Catalans and Arabs (against Castilians and Arabs). One such set of alliances, in particular, should be singled out for attention: the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.

The siege of Vienna is still commemorated as a moment when the armies of Islam threatened to storm the gates of Christendom. In 2004, when Turkish entry into the European Union was being discussed, two out of three Austrians were against it (Traynor, 2004).12 The tremendous symbolic value of this event has remained alive in the political memory of Austria – even the liberal weekly Profil ran an editorial that year entitled ‘The Turks at the Gates of Vienna’. And yet what most Austrians overlook is that, for many Christians in the Balkans, the Austrian Habsburgs were as much of an imperialist power as the Ottomans. When the Ottomans marched on Vienna in 1683, few people today real-ize that over 100,000 Hungarian Protestants marched alongside them. Even the Ottoman army itself was far from being wholly Muslim – as the historian Barker points out, its nationalities and races were legion: apart from the Muslim contingent – Turks, Arabs, Kurds – there were Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, Bulgars, Romanians, Hungarians, Szeklers and a whole host of Western renegades (Barker, 1967: 203). The actual size of the leg-endary army is hard to verify, although estimates seem to average somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 men, including an estimated 12,000 Moldovan/Wallachian (Christian) auxiliaries. The Hungarian army lay much farther to the north, and would




undertake a separate operation for most of the campaign, moving through upper Hungary towards Bratislava in a joint advance with Turkish troops under the command of Kör Huseyin Pasha. If we are to accept the rough figure of 100,000 for the number of Kurutzen and other partisans the Hungarian Protestants had gathered to join them, then one fact becomes clear: well over half of the ‘Turkish’ army marching on Vienna were Christians (Almond, 2009: 174−5).

How successful are such strategies of historical revision? The philosopher Husserl once argued that the idea of Europe was unrelated to the empirical history of Europe (Gasche, 2007: 3). In his 1935 lecture on the ‘Crisis of Europe’, Husserl maintained that before a crisis could take place, some concept or entity first had to be considered ‘pure’. If crises really do require purity as a precondition, and if identity constantly requires the performance of a crisis in order to persist, then the illusion of a ‘pure’ Christian past or a wholly Christian continent almost requires adulteration (the empiri-cal presence of impure elements) in order to sustain it. Perhaps this secret logic is what undermines the success of collaborative strategies – for of all the categories of decon-struction we have considered up to now, strategies of commonality are possibly the oldest, certainly the most widespread. The 1000-year-old convivencia of Muslims, Christians and Jews around the shores of the Mediterranean is no hidden truth or elu-sive reality: their intermingling in literature, marriage, war, food, has been an open secret in modern scholarship for decades. In this sense, our surprise that the idea of a Christian Europe should persist in the face of such empirical obstacles – a lamentation of cognitive dissonance often heard at conferences and symposia − is perhaps naïve; the empirical fact that half the Turkish campaign against Vienna was Christian, that Spain, Sicily and the Ukraine were Muslim for centuries before they were Catholic/Orthodox, that in the time of Dante thousands of Arabs fought for their Christian emperor by the walls of Bologna and Milan (Taylor, 2003: 103−4)13− none of these facts challenge the idea of a Christian Europe in the slightest, for they have no perma-nence or substance in the self-unfolding advance of the idea of Europe. Their role is both ancillary and invisible. When Talal Asad writes that ‘Muslims are present in Europe yet absent from it’, it is precisely this duality he is addressing (2002: 209). Islam is dialectically invisible in Europe, and has to remain so for Europe to take place. Were Muslims to become opaque as living, thinking human beings, the self-differenti-ating movement of Europe itself would stall.

For this reason, it could be argued, strategies of commonality largely fail to persuade those committed to a definite idea of Europe. They fail because such approaches see the problem as an external, epistemological issue (the provision of details, complexities, fresh evidence, etc.) and overlook the inner mechanism of the dedicated European, whose internal mindscape of cathedrals, frescoes, orchestras and libraries persists because of ‘impure’ elements, not merely despite them. To convince such a worldview that Islam is part of Europe by showing endless historical examples of alliances and cultural collaborations is like trying to improve the poor reception of a television by wip-ing its screen with a cloth. Strategies of commonality fail to enter the interiority of the European game, they fail to address why it needs words like ‘Europe’ in the first place; they assume all the important things to do are on the outside – narratives to revise, facts to recheck, new evidence to push forward.14



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This sequence of five possible strategies for deconstructing the idea of Europe (re-origination, re-configuration, ‘internal Othering’, provincialization and commonality) claims to be neither rigorous nor exhaustive. There may well be many more, but these five are the strategies I have most frequently come across in my own attempts to make people imagine a Europe beyond Belgrade, Crete and Gibraltar. Whether these strategies have had any success up to now depends on whom you read – if Jonathan Boyarin can state confidently how ‘postcolonial scholarship has illuminated the difficult project of sustaining Christian European identity’ (2009: 1), a gifted scholar such as W. C. Jordan can still attest with equal confidence to the ‘fundamental unity of medieval European civilization’ (2002: 89). Assuming the conjunction and culmination of these five strate-gies were ever to be successful, I would like to end by considering three possible conse-quences of a deconstructed ‘Europe’.

The first effect might well be the subsequent dissolution of the term ‘Muslim world’ (dar ul-Islam). If we are going to deconstruct a ‘Christian Europe’, then the notion of a Muslim non-Europe – in particular, a Muslim North Africa, a Muslim Levant – will also have to share the same fate. For many scholars, this will hardly come as shocking news – almost 20 years ago now, Aziz al-Azmeh told us ‘there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it’ (1992: 1), while the scholar Cemil Aydin has historicized the phrase quite impressively, charting the origin and development of the modern term ‘Muslim world’ and its political genealogy from the mid-nineteenth century (2013: 159−86). If the territoriality of religious belief is what is questioned when a term such as ‘Christian Europe’ is deconstructed, then the de-Christianizing of Europe will bring to light a whole series of repressed, non-Muslim pasts in the allegedly Muslim countries outside Europe – Jewish, Christian and pre-Islamic histories whose articulation may be comfortable to some, uncomfortable to others. Regardless of whether it is Moroccan Jews, North African Greeks, Turkish Armenians, Druze, Copts, Lebanese Catholics − the de-Christianizing of the space called ‘Europe’ cannot avoid some collateral de-Islamization of the space called ‘the Middle East’.

A second possible consequence is that the word ‘Europe’ continues to linger, but in a deconstructed, ‘crossed-out’ fashion: a Europe under erasure (sous rature15), as Derrida would have said – not Europe, but Europe, a Europe deconstructed enough, semantically open enough, to allow its borders to expand across the Mediterranean. The dilemmas involved in any weakening of European spirit in Europe are familiar enough already – increased openness towards conventionally ‘non-European’ on one hand, but perhaps matched by the rise of previously checked ethno-nationalisms within Europe on the other (the fate of the former Yugoslavia being a constant warning to many of the perils of ‘anti-Europeanness’). Such a deconstructed Europe would lose some of its Christianness, some of its synonymy with modernity, some of its uniqueness as the torch-bearer of the Enlightenment, and in exchange acquire – through the expansion of its borders – a more Mediterranean aspect, certainly a more eastward-looking one. Turkish membership of the European Union (quite apart from the thorny question of who would profit the most from such a relationship) would be a definite step towards such a Europe.

The third possible after-effect of a deconstructed Europe is somewhat more terminal: the disappearance of the word ‘Europe’ altogether. Before anyone laughs, they should recall that entities much larger than Europe and much longer in duration have sunk into




relative oblivion – for over seven decades the Soviet Union covered a space six times that of modern Europe, while the Holy Roman Empire (a German−Latin kingdom stretching from Sicily to the Baltic) lasted for nearly 1000 years before its dissolution in 1806. Both names now, for better or for worse, live on only in museums. The modern ‘Europe’ we invoke to help, block, welcome or deport people from ‘outside Europe’ is really quite a young word, barely 400 years old – why should we believe that such a name might last forever? In a recent book entitled Vanished Kingdoms, one historian has examined the states and empires within Europe that are no more. Apart from the oddities and eccentricities – the brief Visigoth kingdom of Tolosa in western France, or the even briefer ‘One Day Republic’ of Rusyn in Carpatho-Ukraine – there are other, more size-able entities that have slid into oblivion like the fragments of melting icebergs: the Rzeczpospolita of Poland−Lithuania, which at the time of its founding (1569) was the largest state in Europe; the various manifestations of Burgundia (kingdom/duchy/county-palatine/collection of states) which lasted over 1300 years until their absorption into modern France (Davies, 2011: 13−33, 85−151). All of these names, once endowed with the power to summon armies and govern vast tracts of land, are now no more. The pos-sibility that ‘Europe’ may one day succumb in a similar fashion to a more powerful name, a secret name belonging to the future, a name we cannot as yet envisage, is a pos-sibility only those indifferent to History will rule out.

Notes

1. Luther (1967: 175; 1968: 224, 237). See also Leibniz’s two essays ‘Thoughts on the Unfortunate Retreat from Hungary’ (1683) and ‘Some Reflections on the Present War in Hungary’ (1683) in Leibniz (1984: 605−17).

2. For more on Leibniz and Islam, see Almond (2010: 13). 3. It now seems almost certain that da Vinci was the son of a Turkish or Arab slave, according to

the scholar Francesco Cianchi − see Hooper (2008). 4. For more on Andrés, see Dainotto (2007: 120ff). 5. Bernal’s claim is disputed by Jasanoff and Nussbaum (1996: 193). 6. For Bourdieu and his relationship to the field of Mediterranean studies, see Reed-Danahay

(2004: 84−8). 7. See Reinelt (2001: 365) for this hope of Europe becoming ‘a liminal concept, fluid and

indeterminate’. 8. Not to mention what Jaspers called Europe’s ‘dialectical way of Being’ (cited in Gasche,

2007: 14). 9. The term ‘provincializing Europe’ actually originates with Hans-Georg Gadamer.10. Berna Moran is referring to Recaizade Ekrem’s novel Araba Sevdasi (cited in Adak, 2008:

24).11. Gikandi (2004: 98−9) examines this symbiotic relationship in terms of postcolonial theory,

(European) post-structuralism and anti-colonialism.12. For more on the political use of religion in Austria today, see Koechler (2012).13. The Arabs were Sicilians fighting for Frederick II (of the Hohenstaufen).14. A cursory glance through the writings of key nineteenth-century German philosophical and lit-

erary figures provides a striking illustration of how a thinker’s empirical knowledge of another culture seems to have had little effect on their evaluation of it. Hegel, who famously declared Islam to have ‘disappeared from the stage of world history’, edited a newspaper for a year



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(Bamberger Zeitung March 1807 − October 1808) which gave considerable coverage and sym-pathy to reports from the Ottoman world; Schlegel, who had spent years absorbing endless books on Arabs, Persians and Turks, was convinced of the worthlessness of Turkish culture and the backwardness of ‘Mohammedanism’, despite the countless positive images of Islam and Muslims he would have encountered in the many Orientalists he read and quoted (Wahl, Jones, Remer); Goethe’s intense reading of the Turcophile Heinrich von Diez, whose anthology and correspondence made him familiar with an unusually sophisticated and cosmopolitan version of nineteenth-century Ottoman society, did not prevent the poet from continuing to refer to Turks as ‘wild hordes’ and ‘bloodthirsty animals’. See Almond (2010: 108−11, 71−88, 89−107).

15. The Derridean term ‘under erasure’ ultimately comes from Heidegger’s 1956 work Zur Seinsfrage (Towards a Question of Being), but is significantly developed by Derrida in a very different way – see Derrida (1974: xvii ff). For an attempt by Derrida to use a deconstructed notion of Europe to say ‘without any Eurocentrism’ that the future of any philosophy-to-come must necessarily be European, see Derrida in interview (Borradori, 2003: 116–17).

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Author biography

Ian Almond is Professor of World Literature at Georgetown University in Qatar. He received his PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 2000. He is the author of four books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (2010), and over 40 articles in a variety of journals including PMLA, Radical Philosophy, ELH and New Literary History. He specializes in comparative world literature, with a tri-continental emphasis on Mexico, Bengal and Turkey. He is currently working on a history of Islam in Latin America.



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Five ways of deconstructing Europe