{"id":74,"date":"2006-01-12T02:46:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-12T10:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2006-01-12T02:46:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-12T10:46:00","slug":"on-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/on-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"On Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

This morning the “Perlentaucher<\/a>” (Pearldiver), my daily digest of cultural journalism culled from German newspapers, cites an article by two Swedish journalists — Richard Swartz and Rolf Gustavsson — published in the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/span> (though not available online), which seems to me to get to an important aspect of current debates about the EU:<\/p>\n

“Instead of cultivating utopias, the Europeans have to learn how to live with their union as something unfinished, as a provisional situation…. Europe has no soul, no heart, no fixed form. It cannot be nailed down by geography, just as the European cannot be defined by religion or language — even culture cannot be used for such a purpose. Europe consists exclusively of larger and smaller minorities, and for the time being Europe can offer no more than a very refined form of collaboration with supranational aspects. Nothing more and nothing less. Anything beyond that would be arrogant and dangerous. Arrogant because after the self-created catastrophes of the 20th century, Europe should exercise humility and should not let go of the memory of those horrors. Dangerous because the vision of a united Europe — a sort of United States of Europe — is based on the idea of a to be perfected utopia, and all utopias tend toward totalitarianism.”<\/p>\n

This is the best use of Keats’ negative capability<\/span> I have seen proposed in the field of political thought in a long time. Something the Amerikan Imperium lacks completely these days.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning the “Perlentaucher” (Pearldiver), my daily digest of cultural journalism culled from German newspapers, cites an article by two Swedish journalists — Richard Swartz and Rolf Gustavsson — published in the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}