MAKING THE PLANET HOSPITABLE
TO EUROPE

The opening lecture of the London Festival of Europe 2007

Zygmunt Bauman

European Alternatives, Issue 1, June 2007

My title implies that our planet is not at the moment hospitable to Europe.
It also suggests, obliquely, that we, the Europeans, experience the lack of such hospitality as a problem - that is, as a deviation from what could be legitimately expected, an abnormality that needs to be put right again.

‘Again’ – since, presumably, in the past we used to feel on the planet chez soi and expected its hospitality to us and to our daring pursuits to be our birthright; and assumed that the homely feeling will continue as part of the natural order of things. ‘Hospitality’ came so naturally for us as to hardly ever leap into our view as a ‘problem’ calling for special attention. As Martin Heidegger would have put it, it remained in the grey and misty area of zuhanden and as long as things worked as they were expected to, there was no occasion to move it into the sphere of vorhanden – into the focus of attention, into the universe of ‘troubles’ and ‘tasks’...

In 1784, Immanuel Kant shared with his contemporaries a few thoughts conceived in his tranquil, off-the-beaten-track Königsberg seclusion. Those were, in his own rendering, ideas of ‘universal history’, considered from the point of view of ‘world-wide citizenship’. Kant observed that the planet we inhabit is a sphere – and thought through the consequences of that admittedly trivial fact: that we all stay and move on the surface of that sphere, have nowhere else to go and hence are bound to live forever in each other’s neighbourhood and company. Moving on a spherical surface, we cannot but shorten the distance on one side as we try to stretch it on the other. All effort to lengthen a distance cannot but be ultimately self-defeating. Sooner or later, Kant warned, there will be no empty space left into which those of us who have found the already populated places too cramped or too inconvenient, awkward and uncomfortable, could venture. And so Nature commands us to view hospitality as the supreme precept, which we all in equal measure will have to embrace sooner or later - in order to seek the end to the long chain of trials and errors, of catastrophes which our errors caused, and of the ruins left in the wake of those catastrophes.

But unlike other oeuvres of the same author, this little book on the peaceful coexistence of humankind, on the imminent ‘citizenship of the world’ and world-wide hospitality, gathered dust for two centuries in academic libraries. Only quite recently, the little book burst all of a sudden into the very centre of the Jetztzeitgeschichte. It would be a tall order to find these days a learned study of the challenges of the current stage of planetary history that does not quote Kant’s little book as a supreme authority and source of inspiration. As Jacques Derrida, for instance, observed, Kant’s time-honoured insights would easily expose the present-day buzz-words like ‘culture of hospitality’ or ‘ethics of hospitality’ as mere pleonasms: ‘L’hospitalité, c’est la culture même et ce n’est pas une éthique parmi des autres… L’éthique est hospitalité’. Indeed, if ethics, as Kant wished, is a work of reason, then hospitality is – must be, or must sooner or later become - the first rule of human conduct.

Ryszard Kapuściński notes a most fateful, even if surreptitious and subterranean, change in the mood of the planet. In the course of the last five centuries the military and economic domination of Europe tended to be topped with the unchallenged position of Europe as the reference point for evaluation, praise or condemnation of all others, past and present, forms of human life, and as the supreme court where such assessment was authoritatively pronounced and made binding. It was enough just to be a European, says Kapuściński, to feel everywhere else a boss and a ruler. This is no longer the case. The present time is marked by the ever more self-assured and outspoken self-awareness of peoples which still half a century ago genuflected to Europe and placed it on the altar of cargo cults, but now show a fast growing sense of their own value and ever more evident ambition to gain and retain an independent and weighty place in the new, increasingly polycentric and multi-cultural world.

And another profound change has happened to the planet to make us feel apprehensive and uneasy. The wide world ‘out there’, at the other end of a long-distance flight from London, Paris or Amsterdam, seldom if ever appears now to be a playground, a site of adventure - challenging and exciting, but safe, with a happy end certain and insured. Unless the flight in question is an all-inclusive holiday flight to favourite tourist spots, the places at its other end look more like a wilderness teeming with unspoken and unspeakable dangers – the kind of ‘no-go’ areas which ancient Romans used to mark out on their world maps as ‘hic sunt leones’. This is quite a change, a shocking change, traumatic enough to put paid to European self-confidence, courage and ardour.

Indeed, until quite recently Europe was that centre that made the rest of the planet a periphery. As Denis de Rougemont crisply put it, Europe discovered all the lands of Earth, but no one ever discovered Europe; it dominated all continents in succession, but was never dominated by any; and it invented a civilization which the rest of the world tried to imitate, but a reverse process never (thus far, at any rate) happened. We may add: wars of the Europeans, and only those wars, were world wars…

Until quite recently, one could still define Europe as de Rougemont suggested not that long ago: by its ‘globalizing function’. Europe was, for most of its last few centuries, a uniquely adventurous continent. Having been first to enter the mode of life that it subsequently dubbed ‘modern’, Europe created locally problems no one on earth had heard of before and which no one had the slightest inkling how to resolve; Europe also invented the way of their resolution - though in a form unfit to be universalized. Europe resolved the problems it produced by transforming other parts of the planet into a source of cheap energy or cheap minerals, inexpensive and docile labour and dumping grounds for its excessive and redundant products and excessive and redundant people. To put it in the nutshell, Europe invented global solution to locally produced problems - and by doing this, it forced all the others to seek, desperately and in vain, local solutions to the globally produced problems.

All this is over now – and hence the shock and the trauma, anxiety and the wilting of confidence. It is over – as global solutions to the locally produced problems can be only available to a few inhabitants of the planet, and only as long as they enjoy a power privilege over the whole rest, benefiting from a power differential large enough to remain unchallenged (at least not challenged effectively) and be regarded as unchallengeable and for that reason offering an apparently reliable and reassuring foundation for a long secure future. But Europe no longer enjoys such privilege and cannot seriously hope to recover what it has lost.

Hence an abrupt fall of European self-confidence, a sudden explosion of acute interest in a ‘new European identity’ and in ‘redefining the role’ of Europe in the planetary game in which the rules and the stakes have drastically changed and continue to change - though no longer under Europe’s control, and with minimal European influence. Hence also a tide of neo-tribal sentiments swelling from Copenhagen to Rome and from Paris to Prague, magnified and beefed up by the deepening ‘enemy at the gate’ and ‘fifth column’ alerts and fears, and the resulting ‘besieged fortress spirit’ manifested in the fast rising popularity of securely locked borders and doors firmly shut.

It has become common to blame all such worrying developments on Europe’s loss of economic and military domination in the result of the spectacular rise of the United States to the position of the sole planetary superpower and the metropolis of the world-wide empire - and of the parallel dismantling of all European-centred empires.

But is indeed the U.S.A the ‘World Empire’ in the sense with which Europe endowed the concept of ‘empire’ through its own past practices, and bequeathed to the planet residents through its own collective memory? There are many reasons to doubt whether it is, and these reasons seem to multiply currently at almost exponential pace.

There is little if any doubt that in terms of sheer expenditure on military high-tech equipment and all sorts of weapons of mass destruction United States have no equals, and that no single state or combination of states can realistically contemplate matching the US military power in foreseeable future (US spends annually on armaments a sum equal to the joint military expenditure of 25 states next in rank). It is also true, however, that the US military is stretched to its limits without coming any nearer to preventing new emergencies and resolving the problems arising with the past ones. Perhaps yet more important is the ever more obvious inadequacy of American military machine for the kind of tasks posited by the new shape of warfare.

Before sending troops to Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld declared that the ‘war will be won when Americans feel secure again’. But sending troops to Iraq pushed the mood of insecurity, in America and elsewhere, to new heights. Far from shrinking, the spaces of lawlessness, the highly effective training grounds for global terrorism, stretched to unheard of dimensions.

If there is a World Empire, it is confronted with a kind of adversary that cannot be caught in the nets it has and is able to acquire. By military means (and most certainly by military means alone) the ‘war on terrorism’ can’t be won. Its continuation may only further expose the ‘soft underbelly’ of the apparently invincible super power, with disastrous consequences for the planetary cohabitation and the prospect of the planetary peace of the kind dreamt of, more than two centuries ago, by Immanuel Kant.

Stretching the military might of the US ‘to its limits’ is also a principal, arguably the principal, cause of ‘stretching to the limits’ the economic resources of the metropolis – resources that could be conceivably deployed in assuring victory over global terrorism through cutting terrorism at its roots: through arresting and possibly reversing the current polarization of standards of life and life prospects, that most effective fertilizer of the terrorists-growing plantations.

Nowadays, America is perhaps deeper in debt than any other country in history. In 2005, America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets, and funded this by running up debts to Japan, China and Middle Eastern oil producers. America is as addicted to, and dependent on, imported money as it is to and on imported oil; imported money that will need sooner or later to be repaid are not spent on financing potentially profitable investments, but on sustaining consumer boom and the ‘feel-good factor’ in the electorate and on financing growing federal deficits – regularly exacerbated as they are (despite all cuts in social provisions) by the continuing tax cuts for the rich. Some calculate that the dollar will eventually have to fall by 30 percent or more and that both American consumers and the U.S. government will have to start living within their means – awakening from their current superpower, or ‘world empire’ version of the American Dream.

All that does not augur well for the prospects of the aspiring World Empire to acquit itself of the task of the settlement-and-peace-enforcement, which the empires of the past could neglect only at the cost of their decline and demise. It seems that the U.S. enters the stage of undivided world domination while already dangerously close to the exhaustion of their expansive potential. Pax Americana may stretch territorially well beyond the boundaries of Pax Romana, yet its life expectancy is hardly measured in centuries. Like everything else in our ‘negatively globalized’, liquid-modern world, the self-dissembling and self-destructive mechanisms built into every empire on record work faster and need much less time to run the full cycle.

Starting the calculation of tasks and missions of Europe from the axiom of American monopoly of world power and world-policing ability is therefore conspicuously wrong: the present-day challenge to Europe does not derive from the axiom that ‘since we play at best a second fiddle, we can’t, and won’t be allowed, to make much difference to the state of the planet’. The real challenge to Europe derives from the fast accumulating evidence that the sole superpower of the planet fails abominably to lead the planet towards peaceful coexistence and away from imminent disaster. Indeed, there are ample reasons to suppose that this superpower may become a prime cause of disaster not being averted.

Having admitted that ‘it is nonsense to suppose that Europe will rival the economy, military and technological might’ of the United States and of the emergent powerhouses in Asia, George Steiner insists that Europe assignment ‘is one of the spirit and the intellect’. ‘The genius of Europe is what William Blake would have called “the holiness of the minute particular”. It is that of linguistic, cultural, social diversity, of a prodigal mosaic which often makes a trivial distance, twenty kilometres apart, a division between worlds… Europe will indeed perish if it does not fight for its languages, local traditions and social autonomies. If it forgets that “God lies in the detail”.’

Similar thoughts can be found in the literary legacy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It is its variety, its richness boarding on profligacy, which Gadamer places at the top of the list of Europe’s unique merits; he sees the profusion of differences as the foremost among the treasures which Europe preserved and can offer to the world. ‘To live with the Other, live as the Other’s Other, is the fundamental human task – on the most lowly and the most elevated levels alike…’. In Europe like nowhere else, ‘the Other’ has been and is always close, in sight and at hand’s stretch; metaphorically or even literally, the Other is a next door neighbour – and Europeans can’t but negotiate the terms of that neighbourliness despite the alterity and the differences that set them apart. To acquire and share the art of learning from each other is, in Gadamer’s view, ‘the task of Europe’. I would add: Europe’s mission, or more precisely Europe’s fate waiting to be recast into destiny. The importance of this task, and the importance of Europe’s determination to undertake it, is impossible to exaggerate, as ‘the decisive condition of solving vital problems of modern world’, a truly sine qua non condition, are friendship and ‘buoyant solidarity’ that alone can secure ‘an orderly structure’ of human cohabitation.

When seen against the background of the conflict-ridden planet, Europe looks as a laboratory where the tools necessary for Kant’s universal unification of humanity keep being designed, and as a workshop in which they keep being ‘tried in action’, though for the time being in the performance of less ambitious, smaller scale jobs. The tools that are currently forged and put to test inside Europe serve above all the delicate operation of separating the bases of political legitimacy, of democratic procedure and willingness to a community-style sharing of assets, from the principle of national/territorial sovereignty with which they have been for the most part of modern history inextricably linked.

The budding European Federation is now facing the task of repeating the feat accomplished by the nation-state of early modernity: the task of bringing back together power and politics, presently separated and navigating in opposite directions. The road leading to the implementation of that task is as rocky now as it was then, strewn with snares and spattered with incalculable risks. Worse of all, this road is unmapped, and each successive step seems like a leap into the unknown.

Many observers doubt the wisdom of the endeavour and score low the chances of its success. The sceptics don’t believe in the viability of a ‘post-national’ democracy, or any democratic political entity above the level of the nation – insisting that the allegiance to civic and political norms would not replace ‘ethno-cultural ties’ and that citizenship is unworkable on purely ‘civilizational’ (legal-political) basis without the assistance of ‘Eros’ (the ‘emotional dimension’), while assuming that the ‘ethno-cultural ties’ and ‘Eros’ are uniquely and inextricably linked to the kind of the ‘past-and-destiny-sharing sentiment’ which went down in history under the name of nationalism. They believe that communal-style solidarity can strike roots and grow only inside this connection and cannot be rebuilt or established anew in any other way.

Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most consistent and the most authoritative spokesman for the opposition to that kind of scepticism. ‘A democratic order does not inherently need to be mentally rooted in “the nation” as a pre-political community of shared destiny. The strength of the democratic constitutional state lies precisely in its ability to close the holes of social integration through the political participation of its citizens.’ This is true - but the argument may be pushed yet further. ‘The nation’, as any promoter of any ‘national idea’ would eagerly admit, is as vulnerable and frail without a sovereign state that protects it (indeed, assures its continuing identity), as the state would be without a nation that legitimizes its demands of obedience and discipline. Modern nations and modern states are twin products of the same historical constellation. One might ‘precede’ the other only in a short run. The French state was ‘preceded’ by Savoignards and Bretons, not Frenchmen; The German state by Bavarians and Prussians, not Germans. Savoignards and Bretons would have hardly turned into Frenchmen and Bavarians and Prussians into Germans were not their reincarnation ‘power assisted’ by, respectively, the French and the German states.

For all practical intents and purposes, modern nations and modern states alike emerged in the course of simultaneous and closely intertwined processes of nation- and state-building; anything but cloudless processes, and anything but guaranteed to succeed. To say that political framework cannot be established without a viable ethno-cultural organism already in place is neither more nor less convincing than to say that no ethno-cultural organism is likely to become and stay viable without a working and workable political framework. A chicken-and-egg dilemma, if there ever was one.

Habermas’s comprehensive and grinding analysis points in a very similar direction:

…precisely the artificial conditions in which national consciousness arose argue against the defeatist assumption that a form of civic solidarity among strangers can only be generated within the confines of the nation. If this form of collective identity was due to a highly abstractive leap from the local and dynastic to national and then to democratic consciousness, why shouldn’t this learning process be able to continue?

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For the time being, Europe seems to look however for an answer to the new and unfamiliar problems in inward– rather than outward-looking policies, centripetal rather than centrifugal, implosive rather than expansive - like retrenchment, falling back upon themselves, building fences topped with X-ray machines and close circuit television cameras, putting more officials inside the immigration booths and more border guards outside, tightening the nets of immigration and naturalization law, keeping refugees in closely guarded and isolated camps or turning them back before they had a chance of claiming a refugee or asylum-seeker status; in short - in sealing its own doors while doing pretty little, if anything at all, to repair the situation that prompted their closure. Let’s recall that the funds which European Union transferred most willingly and with no haggling to the East-and Central-European countries applying for accession were those earmarked for the fortification of their Eastern borders…

Casting the victims of the rampant globalisation of financial and commodity markets as first and foremost a security threat, rather than people needing aid and entitled to compensation for their damaged lives, has its uses. First, it puts paid to the ethical compunctions: one is dealing with enemies who ‘hate our values’ and cannot stand the sight of men and women living in freedom and democracy. Second, it allows the diversion of the funds that could be used ‘unprofitably’ on the narrowing of disparities and defusing the animosities, to the profitable task of beefing up the weapon industry, arms sales and stockholders gains, and so of improving the statistics of home employment and raising the feel-good gradient.

It also allows the governments to shake off the more irritating constraints of the popular, democratic control by re-casting political and economic choices as military necessities. America, as always, takes the lead – but it is closely watched and eagerly followed by the large number of European governments.

Admittedly, there are reasons for Europe to be increasingly inward-looking. The world no longer looks inviting. It appears to be a hostile world, a treacherous, vengeance-breathing world, a world that needs yet to be made safe for us, the tourists. In an insecure world, security is the name of the game. It is the main purpose of the game and its paramount stake. It is a value that in practice, if not in theory, dwarfs and elbows out all other values – including the values dearest to ‘us’ while hated most by ‘them’, and the prime reasons of ‘their’ wish to harm ‘us’. In a world as insecure as ours, personal freedom of word and action, right to privacy, access to truth – all those things we used to associate with democracy and in whose name we still go to war - need to be trimmed or suspended. Or this is at least what the official version, confirmed by the official practice, maintains.

The truth is, nevertheless, that we cannot effectively defend our freedoms here at home while fencing ourselves off the rest of the world and attending solely to our affairs here at home…

There are valid reasons to suppose that on a globalized planet, on which the plight of everyone everywhere determines and is determined by all other’s plights, one can no longer assure freedom and democracy ‘separately’ - in one country, or in a few selected countries only. The fate of freedom and democracy in each land is decided and settled on the global stage – and only on that stage it can be defended with a realistic chance of a lasting success. It is no longer in the power of any singly acting state, however heavily armed, resolute and uncompromising, to defend chosen values at home while turning its back to the dreams and yearnings of those outside its borders. But turning our backs is precisely what we, the Europeans, seem to be doing, when keeping our riches and multiplying them at the expense of the poor outside.

A few examples will suffice. If 40 years ago the income of the five richest per cent of the world population was thirty times higher than the income of the poorest five per cent, 15 years ago it was already sixty time higher, and by 2002 it reached the factor of 114.

90 per cent of the total wealth of the planet remains in the hands of just one percent of the planet inhabitants.

Tanzania earns 2.2 billion dollars a year which it divides among 25 million inhabitants. The Goldman Sachs Bank earns 2.6 billion dollars, which is then divided between 161 stockholders.

Europe and the US spend each year 17 billion dollars on animal food, while according to experts 19 billion dollars is missing to save the world population of hunger. As Joseph Stiglitz reminded the trade ministers preparing for their Mexico meeting, the average European subsidy per cow ‘matches the 2 dollars per day poverty level on which billions of people barely subsist’ – whereas America’s 4 billion dollars cotton subsidies paid to 25 thousand well-off farmers ‘bring misery to 10 million African farmers and more than offset the US’s miserly aid to some of the affected countries’.

If they are to be lifted and re-focused at a level higher than the nation-state, the essential features of human solidarity (like the sentiments of mutual belonging and of shared responsibility for the common future, or the willingness to care for each other’s well-being and to find amicable and durable solutions of sporadically inflamed conflicts) need necessarily an institutional framework of opinion-building and will-formation. The European Union aims, however slowly and haltingly, towards a rudimentary or embryonic form of such an institutional framework, encountering on its way, as most obtrusive obstacles, the existing nation-states and their reluctance to part with whatever is left of their once fully-fledged sovereignty. The current direction is difficult to plot unambiguously, and prognosticating its future turns is even more difficult (in addition to being irresponsible and unwise).

The present momentum seems to be shaped by two different logics. One is the logic of local retrenchment: the other is the logic of global responsibility and global aspiration.

The first logic is that of the quantitative expansion of the territory-and-resource basis for the Standsortkonkurrenz strategy (‘competition between localities’, ‘locally grounded competition’; more precisely, competition between territorial states). Even if no attempts were ever made by the founders of the European Common Market and their successors to emancipate economy from their relatively incapacitating confinement in the Nationalökonomie frames, the ‘war of liberation’ currently conducted by global capital, finances and trade against ‘local constraints’, a war triggered and intensified not by local interests but by the global diffusion of opportunities, would have been waged anyway and carried on unabated. The role of European institutions does not consist in eroding member-states sovereignty and in particular in exempting economic activity from their controlling (and constraining) interference; in short, it does not consist in facilitating, let alone initiating, the divorce procedure between power and politics. For such purpose the services of European institutions are hardly required. The real function of European institutions consists, on the contrary, in stemming the tide: stopping the capital assets that have escaped the nation-state cages inside the continental stockade and keeping them there. In other words: the logic of local entrenchment is that of re-constructing at the Union level of the legal-institutional web which no longer holds together the ‘national economy’ within the boundaries of the nation-state’s territorial sovereignty. But, as Habermas put it – ‘the creation of larger political unities in itself changes nothing about the mode of Standsortkonkurrenz as such.’ Viewed from the planetary perspective, the joint strategy of a continental combination of states is hardly distinguishable from single nation-states’ codes of conduct which it came to replace. It is still guided by the logic of division, separation, enclosure and retrenchment; of seeking territorial exemptions from the general rules and trends – or to put it bluntly, local solutions for globally generated problems.

The logic of global responsibility on the other hand (and once that responsibility is acknowledged and taken, also the logic of global aspiration), is aimed, at least in principle, at confronting the globally generated problems point-blank - at their own level. It stems from the assumption that lasting and truly effective solutions to the planet-wide problems can only be found and work through the re-negotiation and reform of the web of global interdependencies and interactions. Instead of aiming at the least local damage and most local benefits derived from the capricious and haphazard drifts of global economic forces, it would rather pursue a new kind of global setting, in which the itineraries of economic initiatives anywhere on the planet won’t be any longer whimsical and guided haphazardly by momentary gains alone, with no attention paid to the side-effects and ‘collateral casualties’, and no importance attached to the social dimensions of the cost-and-effects balances. In short, that logic is aimed, to quote Habermas again, at the development of ‘politics that can catch up with global markets’.

Unlike the logic of local entrenchment, which mostly re-plays the perseverant tunes of the ‘raison d’êtat philosophy’ - the logic of global responsibility and aspiration ushers onto an unknown territory and opens an era of political experimentation. It rejects, as leading admittedly into a blind alley, the strategy of a purely local defence against planetary trends; it also abstains (by necessity, if not by reasons of conscience) from falling back on another orthodox European strategy of treating the planetary space as a ‘hinterland’ (or, indeed, the Lebensraum) onto which the problems home-produced yet un-resolvable at home could be unloaded.

And so, willy-nilly, new unexplored strategies and tactics must be sought and tried without the possibility to reliably calculate, let alone to assure, their ultimate success. What Europe faces now is the prospect of developing, gradually and simultaneously, and possibly through a long series of trials and errors, the objects and the tools fit to tackle and resolve them. To make the task yet more daunting, the ultimate destination of all that labour, an effective planetary policy based on a continuous polilogue rather than on the soliloquy of a single planetary government, is equally unprecedented. Only historical practice may prove (though never disprove) its feasibility; or, more correctly, render it feasible.

We feel, guess, suspect what needs to be done. But we cannot know in which shape and form it eventually will. We can be pretty sure though that the ultimate shape will not be familiar – different from all we’ve got used to in the past, in the era of nation building and nation-states’ self-assertion. And it can hardly be otherwise, as all political institutions currently at our disposal were made to the measure of the territorial sovereignty of the nation state; they resist stretching to the planetary, supra-national scale, and the political institutions serving the self-constitution of the planet-wide human community won’t be, can’t be ‘the same, only bigger’. We may well sense that the passage from ‘inter-national’ agencies and tools of action to ‘universal’ – all-human – institution must be and will be a qualitative, not merely a quantitative change. So we may ponder, worryingly, whether the presently available frames of ‘global politics’ may accommodate the practices of the emergent global polity or indeed serve as their incubator; what about the UN, for instance – briefed at its birth to guard and defend the undivided sovereignty of the state over its territory? The binding force of global laws – can it depend on the (admittedly revocable!) agreements of sovereign members of the ‘international community’ to obey them?

To grasp the logic of the fateful departures in the 17th Century European thought, Reinhardt Kosseleck deployed the trope of the ‘mountain pass’. I suggest that this is apt and felicitous metaphor for us as much as it was for our ancestors of four centuries ago.

Like our ancestors three centuries ago, we are on a rising slope of a mountain pass which we have never climbed before - and so we have no inkling what sort of view will open once we have reached it; we are not sure to where the winding and twisted gorge will eventually lead us. One thing we can be sure of is that where we are now, at some point of a steeply rising slope, we cannot settle and rest. And so we go on moving; we move not so much ‘in order to’, as ‘because of’ – we move because we can’t rest nor stand still for long. Only when (if) we reach the pass and survey the landscape on its other side, time will come to move ‘in order to’; pulled ahead by the sight of a visible destination, by the goal within our reach, rather than pushed to move by current discomforts. Concepts fit to grasp the realities that are not yet are formed in the practice of climbing, and not a moment before it started. Of the other side of the mountain pass, prudent climbers ought to keep silent.

The climbers’ ignorance about the shape of their final destination does not mean that they should stop moving. And in the case of Europeans, known for their fondness for adventure and knack for experimentation, it is unlikely that they will. We will need many stark choices, all to be made under the condition of severely limited knowledge (this is exactly what sets adventure apart from routine and acting-on-command). The adversary odds seem truly daunting – but there are hopes not at all idle, hopes rooted firmly in our acquired skills of living with difference and of engagement in meaningful and mutually beneficial dialogue, skills that stay most of the time hidden yet come to the surface in the moments of crisis. In a conversation held in May 2003, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida called 15 February 2003 ‘another 4th of July’, but this time on the all-European scale: the day on which ‘a genuine shared European conscience’ was born. On that day, millions of Europeans went to the streets of Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, London and other capitals of Europe to manifest their unanimous condemnation of the invasion of Iraq about to be launched – and obliquely their shared historical memory of past sufferings and shared revulsion to violence and atrocities committed in the name of national rivalries.

The choice we confront is between our cities turning into places of terror ‘where the stranger is to be feared and distrusted’, or sustaining the legacy of mutual civility of citizens and ‘solidarity of strangers’, solidarity strengthened by the ever harder tests to which it is subjected and which it survives – now and in the future.

The logic of global responsibility/aspiration, if adopted and given preference over the logic of local retrenchment, may help to prepare Europe to its successive adventure, perhaps greater than all previous ones. Despite the formidable volume of adverse odds, it could once more cast Europe into the role of a global pattern-setter; it may enable Europe to deploy the values it has learned to cherish and managed to preserve against odds, and the political/ethical experience it has acquired of democratic self-government, in the awesome task of replacing the collection of territorially entrenched entities engaged in a zero-sum game of survival with a fully inclusive, planetary human community. Only when (if) such a community is achieved, Europe may consider its mission accomplished. The values enlightening Europe’s ambitions and pursuits, values that are Europe, can be truly safe only within such a community.

What lies ahead has been prophetically put in writing by Franz Kafka - as a premonition, a warning, and encouragement:

If you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.

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