University of Thessaly
Department of Planning and Regional Development
Graduate Program in European Regional Development Studies
Fall Semester, 2010-11
Course:
The Geography of European Integration: Economy, Society and
Institutions
Lecturers: Petrakos G., Camhis M., Kotios A., Topaloglou L., Bogiazides N.
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
«La difficulté de panser l’Europe, c’est de
panser l’identité dans la non-identité»
EDGAR MORIN
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
«La difficulté de panser l’Europe, c’est de
panser l’identité dans la non-identité»
EDGAR MORIN
“The difficulty with imagining/conceptualising/thinking
of Europe, is that of imagining/conceptualising/
thinking of identity in the context of non-identity”
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
An overview of the European ‘cultural area’ in
the course of history is best obtained through
an examination of its expression in the
‘concept’ of Europe
The concept’s emergence and development,
permutations and complexity, as perceived
through a contextual, European,
historiographic approach, namely Hegel’s
theory of history
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
Three Hegelian presuppositions:
i) ‘truth is the rational’ (echoing Platonic
monism ‘to err is multiple, but truth is
one’)
GWF Hegel
(1770-1831)
ii) events can be explained, they are
not fortuitous
iii) concepts develop dialectically, as
transcendence of their negation
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
In this sense, the concept of Europe can be
understood and rationally explained. It has
evolved historically in opposition to its
conjunctural perceived otherness.
It proceeds dialectically rather than
incrementally
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
Ex Oriente Lux
Europe begins its long journey as a Phoenician
princess and Minoan queen on the back of a
bull, from the civilized East to, its opposite,
the barbaric West
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
From mythological construct to
mobilizatory concept
For there would be no Europe without
the Arabs and Charlemagne’s
campaign to muster forces against
them
Emperor Charlemagne
(742-814)
That early European empire was
distinctly Christian and its rulers were
referred to (up until 1713, in the
Treaty of Utrecht) as the princes of
Christendom
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
Yet it is the Arabs who preserved ‘Christianity’s
otherness’, the texts of the Greek classical
authors and philosophers, as they discovered
them in the remnants of the Library of
Alexandria.
They were translated into Arabic and brought to
parts of Europe under Arab domination. And
once the Moors were chased from the Iberian
peninsula in 1492, it is often Jewish
translators who, working in Catholic
monasteries, translated them into Latin.
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
The concept of Europe proceeds in its journey
though a Christian opposition to the Arabs,
but meanders back in a challenge to the
totalizing certainties of the Church through
the texts of the Greeks.
The Renaissance ante portas
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
The secular authority of the Church is here
further challenged through the development
of city states. From Florence and Venice to
Bruges and Hamburg a new imperative is
incorporated in the concept of Europe, that of
the sovereignty of the urban citizenry.
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
Art is shifting from strict religious
representations to a broader thematic
canvass including scenes from antiquity and
secular portraits of the aristocracy.
Yet the negation of otherness does not imply its
annihilation. Christian saints and Greek gods
cohabit in harmony in all European art
museums.
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
The Reformation and opposition to aspects of
official Catholicism adds to complexity. If the
believer can enjoy direct access to the
spiritual, so can he aspire to secular power.
The secular world becomes his realm.
Diderot’s precept that ‘man’s vocation is the
control of nature’ enters the European
conceptual arsenal.
Humanism ante portas
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
While empiricism and idealism fight it out on
European grounds, the concept of Europe is
faced with striking otherness much further
afield, as explorers and missionaries become
its messengers in what they perceive as Dark
Continents.
In literature this shock of otherness is admirably
recalled by Dafoe’s Crusoe and Shakespeare’
Prospero
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
Yet dreamers and demons, missionaries and
merchants are soon left behind by the
emergence of a new otherness that was to
transform completely the Old Continent.
For in the Industrial Revolution ‘all that is solid
melts into air’
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
The city state is also replaced by a new
historical subject that still holds sway today
For the French Revolution set universalist
imperatives. The nation state, bourgeois
society and the private economy were to
apply well beyond the bounds of Europe.
Objection or recalcitrance towards them was
met with imperialist conquest.
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
In the course of the twentieth century
bourgeois orthodoxy met, of course, its own
awesome otherness in the form of challenges
by fascism and, more significantly given the
potential of the new historic subject that it
brought into being, socialism.
Labour, the working class or the ‘conscious
direct producer’ is now an inalienable
component of the concept of Europe.
The European cultural area
and a brief account of European history
What the concept of Europe’s constituent
components today, and
Whither its course?