I
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).
|
|
|
|
|
|
More Articles...
|
|
|
|
|
| Page 1 of 2 |
Partners links
Random Image
Login Form
Newsflash
| Central Europe as a Problem |
| Towards the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Germany the idea of Mitteleuropa, a concept related in discursive terms to colonial expansionism, infamous in its intentions. It is worth recalling, however, that the word "colony" (and its derivatives) comes from the Latin colonia, where it meant: a peasant enclosure, a settlement, in order to enter later - via the French colon (one who tills the soil, a settler) - eighteenth-century European dictionaries in its current, rather pejorative, and in any case widely disputed meaning. In the discourse of colonial expansionism, however, it retained a certain heroic aura, since it preferred settlers to nomads, those who cultivated anything at all to ignoramuses. The Latin colonia coincides here with the closely related term "culture" (from the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation, husbandry, breeding) in its original, agricultural association with that which is stable, |
| Read more... |