The 'Heterogeneous Identity'
of Europeans

Marc Crépon
Translated from the French by NM and Segoléne Pruvot

In the many philosophical attempts to define the identity of Europe over more than the last two centuries, it is possible to distinguish two major directions of thought:

1) The first is to attribute to Europe a heritage both selective and restrictive. Together or separately, one after the other, ancient Greece, Rome or Judeo-Christianism are invoked, with various accentuations - shared historical references that Europeans have ceaselessly re-identified, cultivated, sustained, promoted and conjoined over the course of their history. To think of Europe would be to make a typology of these gestures, of which the history of the different European nations, the museums and their capitals offer a million and one traces. There are amongst them those which have sustained what might be called the ‘politics of identity’ or the ‘politics of belonging’ each time they have been used as a political instrument. 
This first way of identifying Europe calls for three remarks. The first is it frequently leads to a substantialisation of Europe’s identity. It is just the same as imposing something like an essence (Greek, Roman or Judeo-Christian) on Europe. The second is that this imposition is usually exclusive. It ends up by designating, even inside Europe, that which is not European or that which is less European - perhaps also that which cannot be held for European, and which it should defend itself against. The third, finally, is that identity thus defined always presupposes a genealogy - that is to say a discourse of origins - and moreover a mono-genealogy, even when it recognises conjointly the Greek, Roman and Christian heritages. Said in other words, at each turn it is the relation of Europe to its ‘alterities’ that is forgotten - it is the set of those constitutive elements of its identity which are not directly implicated in this triple heritage that is hidden.

2) The second way of defining Europe consists in making Europe an end in itself. This is just as exclusive: Europe becomes an end which, without doubt, groups the Europeans, but also separates them and distinguishes them from all others. And it is true that, for more than two hundred years, many things have been invoked in the name of this communal project. This project would ultimately impose itself on the rest of the world: rationality, modernity or, in more political versions - which always run the risk of being subverted or instrumentalised - democracy, the rights of Man etc. 
Of such an approach one should not ignore the merit: in making a communal project of Europe, it makes the crucible of European identity out of the transcendence of national allegiances and the inscription of European history in a movement that cannot be reduced to national ambitions and calculation. But one must also recall that this way of defining Europe is not without many problems. It may well be these that a Europe unsure of its own identity, now more than ever, is confronted with.

Firstly, it is a conception of European identity that one can call Euro-centric, in that, making of reason, progress, democracy etc. the property of Europe, it designates itself, again and always, as the centre of the world. Furthermore, it implies a movement of the universal characterised by its own unilateralism: from Europe towards the rest of the world. According to such a vision, it is the responsibility of the Europeans, now and throughout history, to bring in and often impose their values, their principles, which are ipso facto taken to have universal force. On the basis of ignorance or denial of what the rest of the world has been able to bring simultaneously to Europe, Europe carries out what one cannot but understand as a confiscation of the universal.

One cannot subscribe to this confiscation today, for at least two reasons. The first, which recalls Patocka’s essays on Europe in the 1970s, is that the two World Wars (and more so the second) definitively sanctioned the image that Europe could give to itself - this sanction is imposed in the first instance by the rest of the world and has prompted the chaotic reconfiguration of the relationship between the European continent and its alterities. The second is that this appropriation is always likely to come back doubly: at the same time against Europe itself and also against those ideals which it appropriates as its own.

Today, this unilateral movement cannot carry on. It is no longer acceptable nor credible. Its continuation would bring the allegation, quite rightly, that Europe is being arrogant or hegemonic. This accusation is indexed to the one million and one forms which Euro-centrism has taken over the last centuries. The other result would be the discrediting outside of Europe of those ideals Europe has appropriated as its own (democracy, human rights, progress, etc). In other geographical areas, and under other political skies, these ideals would be denounced for being precisely European, all too European.

But, for all that, this does not signify that the notions of heritage and project should be rejected. It indicates only that, if the problem of each of the two conceptions hitherto analysed is that of their exclusivity, they must be rethought in the prism of a new conception of identity, which no longer ignores the constitutive relation of Europe with that which it has itself defined, imagined, and sometimes fantasised, as its own alterities. This is a precondition for the future credibility of the heritage and project of Europe.

The one and the other, in effect, can provide the basis for hope and positive action, at the world-scale, only if they are underlined by the recognition that Europe is the complex result of a double movement of multiple assemblages and adoptions. Since Europe’s history cannot be dissociated from the numerous exchanges that have linked it, reciprocally, to other continents, Europe cannot define itself exclusively on its own and starting from itself. All reflections on its past as well as on its future must, on the contrary, start from the following axiom: “that which did not ‘belong’ to Europe has nevertheless, in one way or another, come to it and then ‘belonged’ to it at least partially; whatever one defines as the property of Europe also exists outside of Europe - and therefore does not strictly ‘belong to it’ (or not anymore).”

What has made Europe? Nothing more and nothing less than a double network of relations. In a first sense, it takes its identity from the ensemble of relations which the nations making up Europe have had one with another. Europe is made intrinsically of that which they have exchanged, imported and translated in all the domains: artistic, political, institutional, technical and scientific. Europe presents itself therefore as an ensemble of regional and national entities which have been composed one with the other and which were made, not without conflict or resistance, following different processes of adoption. But Europe also takes its identity from the ensemble of relations which these same nations have maintained, together and concurrently, with those which they have ‘taken’ as their communal alterity: the alterity or the alterities of Europe. Europe is a collection of countries which, in their great majority, shared a common way of relating to the other continents - at a given moment in their history, they have joined their own development with a project of appropriation and exploitation of the rest of the world. Each of them (or nearly all) carry traces of these relations that can be interpreted as, again, a series of elements assembled and adopted - those same ones which, today, the forces most hostile to the European project would like to see it renounce. 
The consequences of this other way of thinking of identity for our conception of the heritage and the project of Europe are not insignificant. To think of Europe in these terms is, in effect, to uncouple ‘European belonging’ from mono-genealogy by opposing the idea of a homogenous identity with that of an identity fundamentally heterogeneous. The same manoeuvre ensures that inside Europe we avoid the situation where, due to a restrictive notion of identity, belonging becomes selective and exclusive in such a way that a non-negligible number of European citizens - and indeed those who still lack the rights of citizenship - are perceived to be, or regard themselves to be, non-European or less European.

This other way of thinking gives European heritage a content which is essentially relational. Wherever we come from, whatever our personal and family history, whatever the religious context in which we have been brought up and whatever our education, that which we Europeans inherit is, before all, this double array of relations. These multiple constructions, in all domains of our shared existence, memory, customs, institutions, art, but also alimentation, clothing and many other things still carry, in various degrees, the traces of a diverse history. All politics that tries to impose exclusive and restrictive criteria on belonging (in name of such a monogenealogy, the belonging to such a civilisation, such a religion etc) denies its own history and finally its very own identity. We know (as recent history has shown) that such a politics is also (and always) potentially murderous; because it is, each time, through the denial of the constitutively heterogeneous nature of identity (hiding this heterogeneity from those whose identity is itself composed of it) that violence starts. 
With regard to the European project, all this means that we cannot avoid a renewed interrogation of the conditions of the relations it wants to sustain with that which it has always thought and defined as its own alterities.

Two divergent ways are then available. The first makes of Europe, despite its composite history and identity, a fortress; a fortress seeking power, on the look out for anything that might oppose its logic. It protects itself from others in infinitely hardening the conditions of its hospitality, making more precarious each instant the conditions of life for strangers on its territory, imposing on the rest of the world the multiple, recurring manifestations of its enclosure and its defence. By reducing the ambitions of the European projects to un peau de chagrin, this route condemns Europeans to an infinite spiral of fears and increasingly menacing attempts to ensure security. In the long run, it will turn against Europe itself - as everywhere (including inside its borders) it discerns, records, registers and controls ‘strangers’ who might threaten it.

The second way, on the contrary, knows that the ‘European dream’ - as Jeremy Rifkin called it - has a chance to be shared, not only by the ‘populations’ of the ‘European nations’, but also by others. It is in the name of this ‘openness’, as against the retrenchment of identity - the appropriations and confiscations of belonging, be they in the name of politics, religion or something else - that Europe has constructed (and must continue to construct) a heterogeneous identity. The fortune of Europe, and the reason for taking the risk of Europe, today as before, is that it never remains identical to itself: it has never been possible to reduce Europe, at any point in the course of its history, to one or another circumscription of what could define it. Not even a religion or a certain form of government determines it.

As Valery already pointed out in 1922, in his « Note or the European », re-printed in The Crisis of the Spirit, the principle of Europe is its own transformation in result of its exposure to the rest of the world. This exposition is not simple - most of the time it has taken the form of a brutal imposition (of which it still carries the painful memory). But at the same time as Europe imposed itself on others (by appropriating and colonising the world), it became more heterogeneous itself. This is the rule of its history. Such is, once again, its heritage, and this is the scale on which its project should be measured. One cannot formulate economic and social policy, immigration policy, foreign policy, educational and judicial policy, as if the future of Europe does not depend intrinsically on the relation that it defines and sustains with that which it will carry on conceiving, imagining, fictionalising and fantasising as its own alterities. None of them can be made as if, in closing the many routes of heterogenisation, it is not this future that would be compromised. 
Now, this rule not only concerns collective cultural identities (that of Europe or of each ‘nation’ which makes it up). It firstly applies to each and every European citizen, current, past and future. Further, it is for everyone the best way to achieve what we can call ‘the idiomatic invention of one’s own singularity’. It is here that the question of multilingualism is written, in a way paradigmatic to reflections on identity. What does Umberto Eco’s now famous expression ‘the language of Europe is translation’ state if not, in a broader sense, that any singular heterogenisation must firstly be that of identity itself? From a literary and linguistic point of view, this implies that those texts which European nations have appropriated do belong to the nations themselves. Instead, they are given to each and every European citizen, whatever their linguistic knowledge, to appropriate - i.e. to make a constitutive element of this invention of oneself, to which reading contributes, in an essential but not an exclusive way.

The works of Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Kafka, Hugo or Pushkin and many others, throughout the centuries, not only haunt the memory of the English, Italians, Spanish, Germans, French or Russians. Through translations, they have been (and will continue to be), over the centuries or decades, integrated in each European language. They have left (and will continue to leave) their traces in these languages, so that each time we read them, in translation or in the original, we give ourselves additional tools to move aside, deviate or differ from the most conventional uses of language. Now, it is in this distancing, deviation or difference that the idiomatic invention of singularity consists. If we conceive of language not only as a mere means of communication - always susceptible to standardisation and uniformisation - but also as the means for this invention, in which the variability of identity depends, translations that bring the reverberations of another language into our own subvert attempts to formalise identity.

He who invents his own idiom - and this is what schools, amongst other institutions, should aim at making possible, if their purpose is to awaken and educate, rather than to adapt - he who gives himself an idiom, in order to share it or to pass it on, does not do so in and from a language that no difference, no exposition to alterity, has modified. He or she does not reproduce nor cultivate nor develop a foundation identifiable with the patrimony of a community closed within itself, even if there are those who would like to make such a patrimony an element of their identity.

Having the use of a European language, whatever it might be, is to do the contrary to this. It is to be the trustee, in various ways, of one thousand and one translations - it is to inherit that which has been translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from each of these languages into all the vernaculars and from all these languages into all the others. But this is not all. The word ‘idiom’ also carries another meaning. Everyone inherits these marks in a different way. Or, more exactly, these would be nothing if everyone did not have the responsibility to use them in their own way. This is the reason why the statement that the language of Europe is translation refers to something like a ‘freedom’: freedom to invent itself within the traces one is given - that is to say to translate them one more time. Over translations sedimented in the language are superimposed the ones that everyone should be free to use in one’s own language.

This should be the function of any education policy as of any European linguistic policy. But nothing is less evident as things stand. This would suppose that learning languages (and first of all foreign languages) is not reduced to just placing a means of communication at one’s disposal. It would imply that, throughout Europe, the study of language and literature should be dedicated to bringing out the million and one resonances, the million and one reverberations of languages and literatures within one another. It also implies that the consistent discrediting of literary studies - thought of as useless or out of date (notably studies of Greek and Latin) - should be halted.

But there is one last way to understand Umberto Eco’s sentence ‘the language of Europe is translation’, in giving it its broader significance. It is to understand that translation is not only the ‘language’ that Europeans speak one to another, but what they should ‘exemplify’ in speaking to the rest of the world. It is true that to speak of such a relation is not straightforward - it is legitimate to ask oneself to what extent, in so doing, one avoids re-introducing surreptitiously the European teleology and universalism we were trying to get rid of. This would be the case if translation, understood as openness, did not itself have the inverse effect. Translation speaks first of all about openness and hospitality. To translate is welcome into a language what has been written and thought in another language, it is to open oneself to the risk of something which presents difference to oneself, of which the principle is not autonomous.

To speak, as we have tried, of the relationship between Europe and its alterities as a constitutive relation is to recall the fact of such heterogeneousness. Europe is a space in which men and women of different ‘origins’, religions and beliefs learn - not without difficulties, resistance and violence - not only to cohabit and tolerate each other, but to live together; that is to say, to make of the various and unpredictable inventions of their own identities a translation. 
A true ‘European history’ would suppose that all attempts at enclosure, all the confiscations of self-invention, all the censures and prohibitions, fevers, resurgences of nationalism and fanaticism, have been refuted as being opposed to its law.

But nothing is stable - because nothing is more delicate than this heterogeneousness. The forces which oppose it are rearming both inside Europe and outside its frontiers - as are all those who would like to establish another law which determines identity: that of separation, of incompatibility, of retrenchment of each in the sphere of their own civilisation. Today there are many throughout the world who are tempted by this other way of formulating identity, which is always violent and murderous. And this means that, just as Derrida called for, most notably in L’Autre Cap, something like a responsibility for Europe must be thought of today, and that would be firstly and above all this singular way of formulating identity, which recalls the idea of translation (even if it is not the only one to practice such a mode) - in opposition to these discourses of fixity, of definition, of stigmatisation or of the excitation of feelings of belonging of which one speaks a little in all the world, including inside Europe. It is not an unavoidable clash between opposing civilisations which defines the present moment, but a fight to the death between two ways of thinking of identity which are at work in every civilisation: on one side, that which recognises (and lives from) its own constitutively heterogenous identity, and for which every belonging in its becoming is defined by its openness; on the other side that which is regressive, which is sustained and haunted by a fantasy of homogeneity.

The responsibility for Europe is to take the mantle, so difficult, of this difference. And this obliges it to listen to and to give rights to all voices, with even more reason when those voices are feeble and fragile and when they have no power - to all the voices which try to think of their identity in terms of translation. This obliges the European authorities (heads of government, ministers and commissioners) not to make out as if these voices did not exist, in the name of economic calculation, of strategic interest, of such a simplification of thought and action, as if they counted for nothing, as if everything were already played-out long ago - as if the combat between two languages were already lost to begin with. But this responsibility (both ethical and political) is also that of European citizens who, from their legitimate fear of all those who promote and carry out violence, are exposed, at each new insurgence of the unacceptable (such a crime, such a massacre, such a threat), to the regressive temptation of refusing and denying the constitutively heterogeneous, plural and composite character of all identity. This is, and will always be, the most dangerous of traps laid for them.

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