Abstract
Might Europe presently be undergoing a transformation on par with the Renaissance or Reformation? Needless to say, it is too early to know. Nevertheless, the current project of European integration shares at least one salient characteristic with the earlier movements of rebirth and reform, namely, scathing self-criticism accompanied by nervous apprehension regarding perceived rivals.
If we succeed, in 50 years, Europe will have changed its role in the world. It will be respected and listened to.1
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
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Notes
Christian Meier, From Athens to Auschwitz, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 1.
Umberto Eco, “An Uncertain Europe Between Rebirth and Decline,” in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey (eds.), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005), p. 20.
Quoted in Max Berley, “Le Modest Proposal” Foreign Policy (January–February 2003): 80. Bush remark quoted in William Odom and Robert Dujaric, America’s Inadvertent Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 51.
Stehpen Haseler, The Super-Rich (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), p. 169.
Claus Leggewie, Amerikas Welt: Die USA in unseren Köpfen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2000), p. 29.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Agnes Heller, “Europe: An Epilogue?” in Brian Nelson, David Roberts, and Walter Veit (eds.), The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity (New York: Berg, 1992), p. 22.
Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).
Ray Hudson and Allan Williams (eds.), Divided Europe (London: Sage, 1998);
John Newhouse, Europe Adrift (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997);
Ronald Tiersky (ed.), Euro-Skepticism: A Reader (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2001);
John Redwood, Superpower Struggles: Mighty America, Faltering Europe, Rising Asia (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Claire Berlinski, Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too (New York: Random House, 2007); Laqueur, Last.
See, for instance, K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
R. Bin Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995); and
André Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Joseph Nye, “Soft Power” Foreign Policy 80 (Fall 1990): 153–71.
Victor Lieberman, “Introduction” to Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 5.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). See the endnote 23 above for other anti-Eurocentrists.
See, for instance, Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006).
See Mathew Melko, “Mainstream Civilizations” Comparative Civilizations Review 44 (Spring 2001): 55–71.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 43.
See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); or
Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 24–77.
Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Edward Shils and Henry Finch (eds.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), pp. 72–111;
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996);
Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Barden and John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1975); and
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971).
Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 5–6, argues that a sense of Europeanness has existed since the fifth entury BCE.
Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007) stresses the strong ties binding America and Britain. Though I recognize that Britain’s affinities to America are greater than the Continent’s, I point up salient differences that connect the United Kingdom to Europe more than America.
See, for example, Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor, 1982), vol. 4, pp. 145–47.
Robert Solomon, History and Human Nature: A Philosophical Review of European Philosophy and Culture, 1750–1850 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. xvii.
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), vol. 8, pp. 728–29.
Montesquieu and Voltaire quoted on p. 65, Rousseau on p. 82 of Derek Heater, The Idea of European Unity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); Gibbon on p. 353 of Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium.
Edmund Burke, “First Letter on a Regicide Peace,” R.B. McDowell (ed.), in Paul Langford (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 9, p. 250.
Quoted in Biancamaria Fontana, “The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 127.
Quoted in Stefan Elbe, Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 12.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 3.
Lucien Febvre, L’Europe. Genèse d’une civilization (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 44.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Diversity of Europe: Inheritance and Future,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer (ed.), Education, Poetry and History: Applied Hermeneutics, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 224.
See George Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt 1320–1450 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 2.
See Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 3.
Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 5.
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© 2009 Peter O’Brien
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O’Brien, P. (2009). Introduction. In: European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617803_1
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