Speaking at the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference, Neil Turnbull considers the prospects for the European project as we move from the Westphalian age of nation-states to a new age of empires. What kind of empire is now emerging in Europe, and what form will it take in the future?
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Why has the international community failed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability? Why is Germany, even today, the mullahs’ biggest trading partner in the West? What underpins the strange friendship between Germany and Iran that goes back to the beginning of the last century and has survived every war, catastrophe, and revolution? Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold helps us to answer these questions. By unearthing new evidence from the National Archives in Washington, DC, and the German Foreign Office Archives in Berlin, Küntzel reveals that there has always been a hidden dispute between the White House and the German government over how to tackle Iran, and this dispute has deep historical roots. In this video from the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference, Susanna Rizzo discusses her work on the complex history of the idea of Europe, how it has been shaped by discourses about place and the other, and then considers what the future will be for an increasingly pluralized Europe in which the notion of European identity has been reformulated. |
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I thank very much the organizers for this opportunity to discuss “The Idea of Europe.” Among the several specific topics for discussion suggested in the conference outline, my paper will address the question: “Universalism or exceptionalism?” Now, in the context of this conference, this question might be understood either in historical-political or in philosophical terms, or somehow in both. And it is my contention that, in “the Idea of Europe” the historical-political and the philosophical as such substantially converge. In other words, in “the idea,” with its philosophical complexities, we should be able to find the trace of the decisive rupture in historical time—event, exception—that gave rise to modern Europe and conferred a particular direction, a primordial bias to its temporal unfolding; a bias not opposed to modern reason’s universalism, and inherently beyond the reach of its critical powers. 
In this article, I focus on the impact on modern Western thinking, ideas, and engagement with the world of the loss of the assumption of a creator, or an intelligent ordering agent, in conjunction with the emphasis on detail in preference to the whole in modern thought. I begin by discussing some of the critical dynamics contributed by Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to the concept of Europe in an attempt to identify the source of the energy and vitality arising from this synthesis. I particularly look at the synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, specifically how each influenced the other and where the potential for synergy arose. This Western synthesis no longer operates in Europe and the West. 
