Afterword to the Critical Quarterly Special Issue ‘Peripheral Europes’

Abstract

After reading this set of fascinating essays in cultural-political analysis, one is left with an overwhelming question: Is there any Europe that is not peripheral? Is Europe actually the continent where everything, everywhere and everyone is liminal? If so, has not Critical Quarterly brilliantly subverted its own special issue title ‘Peripheral Europes’?

Tempting though it is to pursue this conceit, the sober truth is that most but not all of Europe sees itself, secretly fears itself and/or is seen by some other Europeans as peripheral, in one way or another. Witness the fact that there are few European countries in which people do not talk about ‘Europe’ as being, in some contexts, somewhere where they are not, but usually (unless they are British Eurosceptics) want to be. Logically, I cannot be in X and going to X at the same time, but this is the European condition. Today's Ukrainians, for example, insist passionately that their country belongs at the heart of Europe yet also habitually talk about going ‘to Europe’ when they cross their western frontier.

Perhaps France alone has no doubt that it is fully and in all respects in Europe. In fact, France tends to believe that it is Europe. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands also have few doubts about their European belonging. Together with Germany, they constitute something that most Europeans recognise (albeit reluctantly) as some kind of a core Europe. This is, roughly speaking, the territory of Charlemagne's empire that coincided, twelve centuries later, with the bounds of the original European Economic Community. Here has been a persistent, although never exclusive, geographical locus of European economic, political and cultural power. Projects of European unification have usually gone out from here.

Yet even Germany has in the past had major doubts about its full European belonging, witness the endless post-1989 reiteration of Thomas Mann's post-World War II observation that Germans should aspire to create a European Germany, not a German Europe. Indeed, in the tensions between its own western and eastern parts (where the geographical location and ascribed character of ‘the East’ has itself changed across history), Germany exhibits some of the internal schizophrenia that Gabriele Lazzari analyses in the relationship between the north and south of Italy. ‘Asia begins at the Elbe’, Konrad Adenauer is reputed to have quipped.

Nonetheless, it is the central, eastern, south-eastern and southern parts of Europe (those apparently simple geographical terms themselves being the subject of constant redefinition) that most clearly at once challenge and exemplify the multiple dichotomies of what Daniella Gáti nicely describes as the Empire of the Binary. West/East, North/South, centre/periphery, coloniser/colonised, Christian/pagan – all these binaries are at once present and subverted in these parts.

Gáti reminds us that early twentieth-century Hungarian culture polarised around two competing influential journals, Nyugat, meaning the West, and Napkelet, meaning sunrise or the East. In the speeches of Hungary's authoritarian, anti-liberal prime minister Viktor Orbán, she finds a tension between presenting Hungarians as the true western Christians and celebrating the original Magyars, those pagan nomads. Marta Figlerowicz explores a similar tension in Maria Janion's analysis of Poland's complex relationship with its own Christian and pre-Christian past. Historically, Poland and Hungary were both themselves imperial powers, before joining the ranks of the colonised. Measured against these master dichotomies, we conclude that Poland and Hungary are at once both and neither of most of the constructed opposites.

There is a long tradition of intra-European orientalism, in which some self-appointed Western Europe views Europe's ‘East’ as backward, exotic and vaguely barbaric. Here are the fantastical lands of vukojebina (wolf-fuckery), to use a salty term from Saša Stanišić's novel Herkunft, here perceptively analysed by Lilla Balint and Djordje Popović. In his seminal book Inventing Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff traces the origins of this immense condescension of the self-styled West back to the Enlightenment. Lazzari vividly reminds us that there is also an intra-European orientalism directed towards the south of the continent and, in the case of Italy, an intra-national orientalism of the Italian North towards the Italian South.

Beyond this, I draw three further conclusions from this special issue. First, I believe Sabrina, the central figure of Sabrina Efionayi's Addio, a domani, with her two mothers – the biological, Gladys, a migrant from Nigeria to Italy, and the adoptive, Antonietta – is a representative European of our time. So is the Bosnian-German hero of Stanišic's Herkunft. Biographical hybridity is now the norm, homogeneity the exception. Probably even Stanišić's ‘Dr Heimat’ actually had a Macedonian grandfather or an Algerian grandmother.

A book by the American writer Christopher Caldwell is subtitled (in some editions) ‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ The correct answers to this question are: no and yes. No, obviously, because different people make it a different place. But yes, European societies can keep their same basic character and values with inhabitants having complex origins and multiple identities. The most distinctive quality of being a European, namely that we can be ‘at home abroad’, helps with that. That is why I have called my personal history of Europe Homelands, in the plural.

Second, perhaps the biggest single moral challenge that Europe now faces lies in the sea that the Romans called mare nostrum. This is brilliantly documented in Chloe Howe Haralambous's chapter on the fate and treatment of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from the North African coast to the promised land of Europe. A continent that likes to define itself against its own barbaric past – a chronological rather than a geographical Other – is here consigning would-be Europeans to a watery death, or paying authoritarian regimes to drag them back, against their will, into inhuman conditions. Her account of the case of the Vos Thalassa continues to haunt me.

This brings me to my final observation. These essays demonstrate the immense value of using literature, and culture more broadly, for historical and political analysis. And Haralambous's essay on rescue at sea would furnish material for great fiction. I think of it as a new story by Joseph Conrad: The Mutiny on the Thalassa.