Postcolonial Europe

The current "discourse of Europe" features an effort to "identify" a Europe that is good and noble, capable of serving as a spiritual basis for a new and (let us not fear the term) post-modernist economic system based on consumerism, multinational capitalism, and commitment to what is euphemistically called "the free market". This quest for a Europe that is good and noble and therefore worthy to provide the ethos of a new kind of community (at once democratic and cultivated, both socialistic and capitalistic, Christian and humanistic, scientific and pious) is motivated in large part by the desire to redeem the Europe of the fathers from the onus of guilt born of an awareness that "Europe" had been responsible for the new forms of social violence spawned in the "rotten twentieth century" (Timothy Garton Ash’s term).