Listen to Nicolas de Warren, Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, present at the Europe and the Crisis of Reason workshop, titled "The Afterlives of Europe Nevermore."
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Transcription:
Nicolas: So, first of all, it's my great pleasure to be back in Helsinki, to be back also in this project that I've been following since its inception. So, it's always good to see projects develop in ways that are also surprising, intellectually rewarding. What I thought I would do in my contribution to this topic is to sort of make an argument that much of the discourse about the crisis of reason, especially as it develops in the 1920s and 30s, really reflects the historical event of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the disappearance of Central Europe. So, I'm going to try to argue, to retell the narrative of the crisis of Europe from the point of view of the collapse of this possibility of an alternative Europe, which is neither the West nor the East, but which is Central Europe. And so, we'll make some references to authors from the 20s and 30s, and then obviously, or maybe not so obviously, make it relevant for where we are today in 2024. So, I think it goes without saying that even the most cursory assessment of the predicament of Europe, two years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and seven months after the start of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the attack of Hamas in Israel, which is, of course, still untold and still unfolding of catastrophe, should give pause to consider whether we are witnessing today, to adopt the novelist Joseph Roth's striking expression from 100 years ago, an expression that he wrote in 1924, quote, "The tombs of world history are yawning open, and all the corpses one thought interred are stepping out", end of quote. And this is a statement that Joseph Roth had written in a short journal article on the occasion of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1924 of Hitler and Germany. It bears reminding that these two areas of conflict, Ukraine on the one hand and Israel and Palestine on the other, are taking place in the geopolitical borderlands of the dissolution of the two empires that didn't survive the First World War. So, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Those are the two empires that don't survive the 20th century, and specifically the First World War. So, Joseph Roth's own itinerant life, his writing of novels and short stories are themselves a chronicle that witnesses the dissolution of Central Europe, and with that, the end of Europe. As he writes to his friend Stefan Zweig just before his own death, quote, "Debts, ghosts, privation, and writing, talking, smiling, no suit, no shirt, no boots, hungry open mouths, and scroungers to stuff them, and ghosts, ghosts, wall to wall ghosts. What a life behind me!" So, this statement of Joseph Roth describing his own life, I think, serves also as a kind of vehicle to give expression to how he understands the end of Europe as he experiences it in the 1930s. And as you know, Stefan Zweig's own chronicle or witnessing of the end of Europe, the crisis of Europe in his book Die Welt von Gestern, and eventual suicide, his suicide in South America. So, both of these works, so Stefan Zweig's The World from Yesterday and Joseph's Roth's novels, really can be read as part elegy, part mourning, part monument for the dissolution and the disappearance of the Habsburg Empire and the form of life and the possibility of a certain conception of Europe that had been formulated through the prism of the Habsburg Empire. This is what the Czech writer Milan Kundera, in a very important essay from 1983 called The Tragedy of Central Europe, where Milan Kundera asked the question why has the disappearance of Central Europe not been noticed, not been recognised. And he speaks of this in terms of the disappearance and vanishing of Central Europe as paradoxically the First World War. When you think of the First World War, you think Sarajevo, 1914, the context of Austro-Hungary, but the end is something, you might say it's sort of like T.S. Eliot's statement in The Wasteland, not with a bang, but with a whimper. It just sort of disappears. And this is what Milan Kundera thinks is the most important narrative that has yet to be recounted to understand the tragedy of Europe itself. Milan Kundera, of course, also proposes that the failure to understand and to notice, to think about the ramifications of the disappearance of Central Europe is also what he calls the betrayal of Central Europe by the West.
Nicolas: So, it's not surprising that some of the most important literary testimonies and modernist novels, when one thinks, for example, of Hermann Broch's Die Schlafwandler, Sleepwalkers, when we think of Musil, obviously Radetzky March by Joseph Roth and others, that these are all testimonies to the dissolution and the crisis of Europe in the 1920s and 30s, which are clearly situated in the context of Central Europe. It's also not surprising that Edmund Husserl's two very important lectures on the crisis of Europe, the Prague Lectures and the Vienna Lectures, which were delivered in 1935, from which Husserl's texts, The Crisis of the European Science Emerges, were given as lectures in two of the most important capitals of Central Europe and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1934, so a year before Husserl's Prague lectures and Vienna lectures, Prague hosted the International World Congress of Philosophy, where the main topic of debate was the future of democracy. As it was reported in a New York Times article from September 4th, 1934, the headline was, Politics Invading Philosophy, and it was an article that was talking about how the real debate that was going on at the World Congress of Philosophy in Prague in 1934 were advocates of a democratic, liberal Europe, and then more totalitarian and ethno-nationalist leaning philosophers. And indeed, the central discussion there was the question of Europe, the crisis of reason as the crisis of democracy. No need to remind you that the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia at the time, was one of the first democracies under the presidency of Masaryk. Masaryk who himself had a very formative influence on Husserl and urging Husserl to enter the career of philosophy. Husserl himself was invited to speak at the World Congress of Philosophy in 1934 in Prague, was not able to attend, but sent a letter. And in this letter, Husserl speaks of, and I will quote what he calls, in German, [speaks in German 00:06:59], so philosophical community and philosophy is the primal original phenomena, Urphänomen is, of course, a term from Goethe, [speaks in German 00:07:13], so through the force of which, through philosophy, the merely or presumptively or falsely internationalism of power can then be supplanted by what he calls the new, [?? 00:07:40], the new cosmopolitanism, the new internationality of what he calls in German, [?? 00:07:47], so the presumptive or false cosmopolitanism of power and struggle of power, can be supplanted or should be supplanted by the solidarity, is how I would translate verbundenheit, of spirit of autonomy, and that is going to be what he calls the essence of European humanity and culture.
Nicolas: What I think Husserl and these authors, both Husserl as a philosopher, Joseph Roth, Musil, they all come out of the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And I'd like to formulate that what these authors share in common, philosophers on the one hand, writers on the other, is that, in their respective works, they are trying to articulate and deal with what the sociologist Ernest Gellner called the Habsburg dilemma. And the Habsburg dilemma, this is in Ernest Gellner's last book called Language in Solitude, which is a comparative study of Wittgenstein and Malinowski, two other figures that come out of this cultural context, the Habsburg dilemma is the dilemma of the Habsburg Empire. How do you reconcile a multicultural, multilingual confederacy of nations, Bosnians, Slavs, Czechs, Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, with a unified structure? And one of the things that Ernest Gellner articulates is that from Freud to Wittgenstein to Husserl, Joseph Roth, that all of these figures that come out of the Austro-Hungarian context, this is their fundamental problem. How can we develop in our modern language a multicultural, unified conception of Europe? This will be the vision of Central Europe. This is precisely the vision of Central Europe that's also articulated in Masaryk. So, Tomáš Masaryk, who, as you know, was a philosopher who becomes the first president of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, in his book called Das neue Europa, which he publishes in 1917, where he argues that really what's at stake with the First World War is, on the one hand, to resist the temptation of what he calls pan-German universalism, so Prussian pan-German hierarchy, on the other hand, Russia, and the other hand, the utilitarianism and capitalism of the West. And that's going to be the idea of Mitteleuropa that Masaryk articulates, where Masaryk says very clearly that Mitteleuropa, as the new Europe that is meant to emerge from the First World War, and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is, as he says, not a bridge between East and West, but as he says in German, [ein Bollwerk der Demokratie? 00:10:46], so a stronghold or a bulwark of democracy. And this is something which taps into a very deep vein of Czech philosophy, Czech thinking, going back to the 19th century. One of the so-called three fathers of the Czech nation, Masaryk, in the 20th century, in the 19th century, an intellectual, a figure called František Palacký, who is a very important Czech nationalist, who also articulated the idea that Central Europe should be, quote, "A family of equal nations that are able to cultivate their own individuality." So, what I'd like to propose as a kind of a retelling of the story of the Europe and the crisis of reason is really to situate it through the perspective of what Milan Kundera has argued we have forgotten and the kind of cavity or the emptiness that was left behind through the dissolution of the idea of Central Europe as an intellectual, as a cultural, as Husserl would say, as a spiritual space of thinking and orientation.
Nicolas: So, what I'd like to do now is, that's sort of the larger claim, and I just want to illustrate it by specifically looking at two authors. One is Joseph Roth, and the other is the Polish writer Stanislaw Wieckowski, who wrote a novel called Insatiability, and I'll come back to that. So, I want us to look at these two authors and see how they articulate this problem of the Austrian dilemma. I'm going to basically end by saying this is the dilemma of Europe today. We have inherited this dilemma. So, if you're familiar with Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, the novel that he publishes in the 90s, which is a kind of chronicle of the end and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, you'll recall that the novel begins with its charts, the novel charts, the life story of a family, the von Trottas, over a generation, from the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, which is when Austria-Hungary was defeated by Prussia, which then launched the ascendancy of Prussia to the First World War. That's the historical span of the novel. And you'll remember that the novel begins with the battle of Königgrätz in 1866, so between the Austro-Hungarians and the Prussians, where the emperor is saved by a bullet that is headed towards him by the grandfather of the von Trotta, who takes the bullet, doesn't die, then gets promoted, and then the novel is the chronicle of what happens to this success story of this family and the sons, et cetera. But I think there, what Joseph Roth is really communicating is the interesting paradox that, on the one hand, the Kaiser is not killed, he's not dead, but in a sense, the empire is already dead. The Austro-Hungarian empire is already dead, such that in a sense what this novel is really chronicling as another aspect to the Habsburg dilemma is the sense in which the emperor or the empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire is dead, but it hasn't yet died. And so, the question is, how is it that things that are dead still have to die? That will itself be the metaphor for Europe for Joseph Roth that he tries to understand in the 1920s and 30s. Because indeed, one could argue that in the aftermath of the First World War, the perception that Europe was dead but had not yet died was the dominant rhetorical trope for the discussion of crisis. The French writer, poet Paul Valéry in 1919 writes an essay called La Crise de l'Esprit, The Crisis of Spirit, and writes in this essay, "As for us civilizations, we know now that we are mortal", and basically suggests that what the First World War shows is that Europe had to die in order to know itself that it is mortal, and only once Europe dies to know that it's mortal can it even have the possibility of living again. So, you might say that, in this regard, Europe has to endure and survive many afterlives in order to know what it would mean for it to live. Valéry continues this meditation by speaking of what he calls the European Hamlet and speaks of how, what he calls the immense terrorists of Elsinore, so Elsinore, of course, is the domain in Shakespeare's play, that Hamlet, what he calls the European Hamlet is quote, "An intellectual, he meditates on the life and death of truths, his ghosts are all the objects of our controversies, his remorse is all the titles of our glory. If he seizes a skull, that of Leibniz who dreamed of universal peace, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Hamlet does not know what to do with these skulls." So, I think the idea here is that Europe has died, and now it is a ghost. And the ghost has returned and is going to make a kind of demand, if you wish. So, this is the sense in which in the intra-war period, that you find in other writers and poets, if you think of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and others, in Joseph Roth, the idea that Europe is dead, but in a sense, it hasn't yet died.
Nicolas: So, one of these implications that the narrative of the crisis of Europe in the 20s and 30s is, to quote from the letter, the self-description of Joseph Roth, it's wall to wall of ghosts, is that the temporality of this crisis is not uniform, but is actually different layers of sedimentations of what Ernst Bloch in his text, Erbschaft dieser Zeit from 1930, called [speaking German 00:16:53]. So, the idea is that Europe, which is now experiencing a kind of crisis, it's dead, but it has yet to die, that the temporality of this deadness, the being dead that is not yet fully dead, if you wish, is one of a time that is fundamentally out of joint, where narratives are not simultaneous with each other, such that so much of the narrative of the crisis of Europe is really a narrative about the contestation of which narrative is the narrative that's going to tell the actual story of Europe. And for Ernst Bloch, as he describes in Erbschaft dieser Zeit, so Heritage of the Times, if you wish in English, as he writes, and I'll quote it in German, [speaking German 00:17:37], so all historical narratives, [speaking in German 00:17:42], so not all narratives, not all historical experiences of Europe in the present are actually together in the present at the same time. It only seems that they are externally. And here I think what's important is that so much of the discourse of the crisis of Europe is the attempt to impose the true narrative in which all other narratives would be simultaneous with it. So, it's a kind of contestation of the narrative imagination to imagine what kind of afterlife would Europe have, given that it's dead. On the other hand, what Bloch also sees quite perceptively in Erbschaft dieser Zeit is that it's precisely this situation of time being out of joint, of course, the reference is to Hamlet, this principle of time not being simultaneous, so what he calls the principle of [speaking in German 00:18:42], that is also powerfully exploited by Nazism and fascism. So, Bloch describes Nazism as the exploitation of precisely this fragmentation of time. On the one hand, a narrative of hyper technological modernity, we're going to build autobahns, et cetera, but on the other hand, a kind of nostalgia for agrarian, rural Germany. So, this combination of different narratives that don't seem to be simultaneous with each other is in fact exploited by Nazism. And that was Ernst Bloch's diagnosis of that.
Nicolas: So, this leads us to the thought that, as the British poet H.D., or Hilda Doolittle her name was, once wrote, "Every house is haunted." So, the question is, what kind of house is Europe as a haunted house? And there are different kinds of senses in which houses Europe can be haunted, as was registered in the novels of Joseph Roth. And here I'd like to propose a kind of analogy that every house is haunted, but the hauntings of the house don't occur at the same time. This is going to be the idea of the principle of non-simultaneity. And to illustrate this, I'd like to propose a very brief interpretation as a metaphor for a haunted house, where you have hauntings that are not in the same time, of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining. The film The Shining is fundamentally about the haunting of the United States, haunted by the traumas of its past that it doesn't want to admit. This, on the one hand, is the destruction of indigenous peoples. There's all references in Kubrick's Shining to the destruction of indigenous peoples. Slavery, if you remember, the film ends with a photo of the main character, Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, you see him in a photo from 1921, July 4th. July 4th, of course, is American Day of Independence, but 1921 is also the year in which the Tulsa massacres, where so-called Black Wall Street was destroyed by a white racist rampage in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So, on the one hand, in The Shining, the house is haunted by different ghosts of the past, the destruction of indigenous peoples, slavery, et cetera, but then, there are other ghosts as well. And these aren't simply the ghosts of the past that continue to haunt the present in a sense, but also the demons of the past that want to perpetuate the violence of the past. And in the film, if you remember, these are the scenes where Jack Nicholson, the writer Jack Torrance, then himself sees ghosts, the bartender that he has drinks with, and then, if you remember the film, if you don't know the film, see the film because it's really a brilliant film, because you don't think that it's really about the history of America, the film, but it is, where he bumps into a waiter, they go into a bathroom, the bathroom is full of red colour, blood, and it turns out that the waiter is actually the ghost of the caretaker who had killed the two kids. That is the room 237 that is haunted, that the son in The Shining sees, and that's when the ghost, who is a demon, tells Jack Nicholson, "You have to kill your children, and you have to prevent the child to understand and redeem the past." So, the point I simply want to say is, houses are haunted not only by the violence perpetrated in the past, but by the perpetuation of violence that still haunts us and repeats itself, if you wish. And if this is the case, then I think it puts an interesting twist to the idea that Derrida had proposed in his Spectres of Marx, that what it means to learn how to live justly, to learn how to live in justice, in relationship to the question of justice, would have to be a question that understands how to live with ghosts and how to deal with ghosts. Not only ghosts of the past, but ghosts of the future. What I'd like to propose is what's complicated about this question in the context of what I'm calling the Habsburg dilemma is that these ghosts are not simply the ghosts of the victims of the past, in the American context, the destruction of indigenous peoples, slavery, in the European context, antisemitism and colonialism, but that there are also ghosts that still want to perpetuate that violence that are going to return. And this is precisely Joseph Roth's observation in 1924. The tombs have been opened, and the ghosts have returned.
Nicolas: This problem of the Habsburg dilemma as how do you reconcile multiculturalism with unity, universalism with regionalism, is then going to be inflected with how do we exercise the ghosts not only of the justice for crimes and traumas of the past in the history of Europe, but the continuation of the temptation to perpetuate those very injustices. So, you might say that for Joseph Roth, the fundamental problem of overcoming the crisis of reason is the problem of exorcism. But exorcism in two senses. Not only the ghosts of the victims, but that the perpetuators are still haunting us and are still returning. And I think that this will be the perspective in which I'll end about contemporary Ukraine and the confrontation with Russia. The return of the demons, if you wish. The demons that go back to before the First World War. So, in Joseph Roth, just to now bring these comments to a kind of conclusion, to really open up the question of Central Europe as providing a very distinctive perspective on the crisis of Europe, Joseph Roth's first novel after the First World War is called Hotel Savoy. It's an amazing novel, which is set in a hotel in the Polish town of Łódź, where you have all these different characters that are coming through. You have veterans, refugees, basically all of the human trash, if you wish, and I use that metaphorically. You know, all the populations that are dispossessed, that are homeless and wandering, looking for a new home in Central Europe, after not only the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but of course, don't forget that although the First World War ends on the Western Front in 1918, violence does not end on the Eastern Front, because there is the Russian Civil War, there's the Russia-Polish War. So, in the West, we have this idea that 1918 victory war is over, but from the perspective of Central Europe and the East, violence continues well into the 1920s. So, in this novel, what Joseph Roth proposes is to think of Europe as through the model of a hotel, as opposed to the notion of a super nation state. So, in the development of the idea of Europe, there's always analogies. Is Europe going to be a super nation state, or is Europe going to be a federation of states? And what Joseph Roth proposes is kind of a different analogy, a different metaphor. It's going to be something like a hotel where hospitality to the immigrant, the dispossessed, almost in Levinasian terms, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. And that's in a sense, the house becomes a hotel in that sense. Joseph Roth in a letter speaks of himself or what he calls in German [speaking in German 00:26:28], a patriot of the hotel. And he says in an essay called Arrival in the Hotel in 1929, "The hotel I love like a fatherland." So, it's an interesting idea that Europe has to be something like a hotel. This idea is then taken up again in two other novels by Joseph Roth, The Bust of the Emperor from 1935 and The Radetzky March, the famous novel from 1932. And there, in The Radetzky March and The Bust of Emperor, Joseph Roth sort of imagines this idea that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which he fantasises, has a kind of nostalgia for it, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was precisely a kind of anti-nation state, as he calls it. So, it was the attempt to create a nation state but not based on the model of a nation, because it was precisely the attempt to establish a symbiosis of what Joseph Roth calls the scattered peoples of the central European area under a kind of imperial protector, but this is a family of nations which is not defined by a strong nationalist identity. So, it was a kind of interesting idea. How do you create a cosmopolitan world that has true solidarity without nationalism, and without it simply being a kind of bureaucracy? So, in a sense, I would propose this is the problem of Europe today. There's no strong sense of nationalism, and no one's going to die for Europe. But on the other hand, Europe can't just be bureaucracy. It has to be somehow something else. And this is exactly how Roth fantasises the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Again, it's not the actual reality. It's his fictional imagination of it.
Nicolas: On the other hand, Roth clearly sees that this is a fragile kind of project, because in one of the most important scenes in the novel from the Radetzky March, when news arrives, so the character Trotta is a military officer, he's in a regiment, barracks in Galicia, on the outskirts of the empire, and he's there when news arise of the assassination at Sarajevo, and then there's a scene in which all the soldiers in the barracks are discussing this news that has arrived. And here, this group of soldiers that is described in the novel really describes the multi-ethnic, multi-linguist character of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. You have Slavs, Hungarians, et cetera, et cetera. And the discussion that then Roth portrays in this scene is precisely one where you have 12 different ethnic groups that now, rather than trying to be a force of stability, are now being pulled apart by their force of their own ethnic nationalism. So, he's really trying to think through this problem that a unified multicultural cosmopolitan Europe, which would not be based on a strong sense of nationalism, is both going to be brought together and pulled apart by the very forces of its own multiculturalism. And that's going to be the tension. This is also going to be the tension that is formulated in the novel Insatiability by Stanisław Witkiewicz. So, Stanisław Witkiewicz was a Polish writer who had studied with Roman Ingarden and was a kind of polymath who had read a lot of philosophy, et cetera. This is a kind of dystopian novel that was published in 1930, written in 1927. And in this novel, the main character is a guy called Zip, and the novel is set in the year 2000 in Europe. And the novel is basically a kind of dystopian novel about how the attempt to reform Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, as seen through this character Zip who's a kind of philosopher, a kind of philosopher's existence, is trying to navigate the encroachment of Marxism and the lure of totalitarianism on the one hand, which is represented by the Chinese. You may know the novel if you remember Miłosz's Captive Mind. The beginning of Miłosz' Captive Mind has an extended discussion of this novel, which Miłosz reads as a kind of prescient anticipation of the Cold War and the bifurcation of Europe between totalitarianism, the continuation of totalitarianism on one hand, and Western liberalism on the other. The reason why I mention this novel is that the main character, Zip, has all these sorts of discussions against Marxism. There's the threat of Chinese communists who are going to come through a pill called the Murti Bing pill. Milosz makes a bit of a mouth out of it. And the defence against Marxism on the one hand, and let's call it liberalism on the other hand, at least in the mouthpiece of the philosopher, this character Zip, is Husserl, is Husserl's phenomenology. And Witkiewicz had a number of letters with Ingarden about Husserl's philosophy. The long story short is that the novel has the first part Awakening. So, the promise of the new Europe is going to be the spirit of humanity, the resurrection of reason through phenomenology, as outlined by Husserl in his Prague and Vienna lectures. The second part of the novel is called Insanity, is called Madness. It chronicles the collapse of this very project. And the novel ends in a very dystopian sense. The Chinese communists have taken over Europe, and everyone now has taken these pills, this drug, which is ideology, which allows us to be happy without being autonomous and reflective. So, it's a kind of parable of totalitarianism as filling the void, the cavity of Central Europe.
Nicolas: So, I'd like to end now with just a few observations about today. Why does any of this stuff still speak to us today? Another way to think about it is, why should we still be haunted by the disappearance of Central Europe? Why should we still be haunted by these authors that I've mentioned? If you look at every one of the treaties that contributed to the making of the European Union, they all insist on common European identity. And here, let me quote from the Treaty of Lisbon. This is what, according to the Treaty of Lisbon, is Europe. Cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance of Europe from which we develop the universal values of rights of the human person, so individual rights, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law. Those are identified as the essence of Europe, the very anatomy of Europe that in the 20s and 30s was also propounded by individuals like Masaryk, like Husserl, et cetera. And of course, today, Europe is still, as Pascal Bruckner calls, that desperately secular construction. And here, I'll quote another philosopher, Étienne Balibar, it's still a kind of contested, unresolved question. Namely, what do these words, human rights, democracy, et cetera, actually mean? And here, the tacit assumption, I think, is that if the European Union in Europe is to evolve into something other than merely an economic and administrative block, which arguably currently only is thus far, then it has to do by analogy with some conception of either a nation, a strong nation state, or a federation of states. Which are also the two ideas that come out of the 19th century. Sort of Mazzini's liberal nationalism, or a kind of Hegel pan, super nation state. Those are the two models of Europe and two models then associated with a kind of political rationality. I'd like to propose what authors like Joseph Roth, Witkowski, and others in the Central European context, is they articulate a very different conception of Europe from the perspective of Central Europe. Neither as a super nation state, but also not merely as an economic and administrative machine, and also not as a federation of states, and most importantly, not as Western and not as the East. So, you know, it's not the West, it's not the East. It's going to be something else. It's going to be what Masaryk calls [Das neue Europa? 00:35:14]. And here, one can think of the idea that Europe would require the overlapping shared sovereignties into a kind of post-sovereign international organisation, a kind of a post-sovereign international context, much in the way in which a contemporary Greek philosopher, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, who's basically a political philosopher, has proposed that Europe should be composed not of a single, and for the time being, at least illusionary, European demos. There is no such thing as a European demos, but a multiplicity of what she calls demoi. So, there's not one people called Europe. There's a multiplicity of peoples, of demoi, who have come together to form not a democracy, but what she calls a "demoicracy", and that consequently the EU should be understood not as a state, even a confederated one, but a union of peoples, I'm quoting from her, "who govern together but not as one." I'd like to propose that this is precisely the idea of Central Europe in writers like Joseph Roth and others. A union of people, multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, but not as one. This would hold the promise of escape from the tyranny of dichotomies that arguably still dominate European Union debates today, by representing a kind of third way. So, Central Europe as a kind of concept is a kind of third way between, on the one hand, the cilia of Sovereigntists on the one hand, and the [?? 00:36:50] of Federalists on the other, such that this democratic union to come, this union à venir, one might say, should remain an open-ended process of transformation that seeks to accommodate the tensions inherent in the political mutual opening between separate peoples, and I'm quoting from Nicolaïdis. And that would be the sense in which member states share their sovereignty without the union as a union of states, but rather as a union of peoples. And this would be the way in which citizenship is bound together through what the political philosopher Richard Bellamy calls reciprocal non-domination.
Nicolas: So, I'd like to just end that this is precisely the challenge that in a sense still haunts us. Let's call it the possibility or the promise of Central Europe. And it is in the vacuum of Central Europe that has disappeared, which is also at the same time being filled by the return of the ghosts, of other ghosts. Let me remind you that in 2007, Viktor Orban said this, "27 years ago, here in Central Europe, we believed that Europe was our future. Today, we feel that we are the future of Europe, as a closed community of Eurocentric nations based on 2,000 years of Christian culture and a way of life beyond globalism." This is what Orban calls illiberal Europe, illiberal Central Europe, which in a kind of solidarity with other populist movements in Poland and elsewhere is the return of other ghosts, not the ghosts of, let's call it the victims of the past, but the demons that are returning. Another demon that has clearly returned in the past two years to fill this void of Central Europe is Putin. Let me remind you that in 2011, Putin, in a speech, fantasised about what he called the Eurasian Union with Russia, with Russia at its centre, not based on human rights, but what he called civilisation. And he saw this as a union of Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And this would, in a sense, be for him the reconstitution of Eurasia in Central Europe and Russia. So, the point I simply want to make is, we are still today haunted by ghosts. We are still a haunted house. But not simply the ghosts of the past for which justice and reconciliation need be demanded, but we are also haunted by what we might call the demons of the past. The demons of the past who have returned, and the space of contestation between, on the one hand, these demons and these ghosts is still the space left behind by the disappearance of Central Europe. And if there's one last final line, I'll quote from a letter that Joseph Roth writes to Stefan Zweig shortly before Stefan Zweig's own suicide and Roth's own death, where he speaks of the catastrophe to come. "The barbarians, in a sense, have returned, and there's no denying that we are witnessing hell on earth." The question for us is, can we endure another death of Europe? And if we can, should Europe still live, or should it finally come to an end? Thank you.