The Idea of Europe: A Critical History

Description

There is an increasingly widespread sense that Europe is in crisis. Notions of a shared European identity and a common European culture appear to be losing their purchase. This crisis is often seen as a conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nationalist idea of Europe. The reality is, however, considerably more complex, as the long history of the idea of Europe reveals. In The Idea of Europe: A Critical History, Shane Weller explores that history from its origins in classical antiquity to the present day. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he demonstrates that, all too often, seemingly progressive ideas of Europe have been shaped by Eurocentric, culturally supremacist, and even racist assumptions. Seeking to break with this troubling pattern, Weller calls for an idea of Europe shaped by a spirit of self-critique and by an openness to those cultures that have for so long been dismissed as non-European.

Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His publications include Modernism and Nihilism (2011) and Language and Negativity in European Modernism: Toward a Literature of the Unword (2019).

'This marvelous book provides a masterful history of the idea of Europe from classical antiquity to the present day. It takes someone with exceptionally sharp analytical skills to expose the ways in which the many advocates of European values and a united Europe have struggled to think beyond their own national-cultural identifications and to free themselves from a Eurocentric idea of Europe. Weller's book is a superb attempt not only to assess the idea of Europe critically, but also to propose a new way of imagining the European that takes full account of its troubled past.' Dirk Van Hulle, University of Oxford 'The Idea of Europe is the history of an idea that is as complex as it is contradictory and ambiguous. Shane Weller's new book critically uncovers these contradictions - universalism and nationalism, diversity and unity, civilization and barbarism - and the many attempts to overcome them. The book is a tour de force. It follows the idea of Europe from Aristotle to Husserl, from Montesquieu to Turgenev and Orhan Pamuk, and it helps us to think Europe in all its complexity and, maybe, to move beyond the pitfalls of Eurocentrism, Euro-supremacism, and Euro-universalism.' Jan Loop, University of Copenhagen 'Highly recommended.' B. T. Browne, Choice Connect 'Weller's critical history of the idea of Europe is an important corrective to the self-mythologisation of the EU. It should be read especially by 'pro-Europeans' who continue to invoke the Enlightenment as if it were not implicated in European barbarism.' Hans Kundnani, The New Statesman