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Europe and Its Others
like to define European cultural identity by means of such values or analogous
ones: Namely, these values are too general, too universal, to define a specific
cultural identity and to differentiate it from other cultures. On the other
hand, the catalog of these values is too meager to do justice to the immense
wealth of the European cultural tradition. The discourse on European cultural
identity has been circulating this paradox for decades now. On the one hand,
this circulation evokes the feeling of an enormous intellectual dynamic, but
on the other the corresponding discourse remains in the same spot the whole
time. The project of defining the particular cultural identity of Europe by
appealing to universalistic, humanistic values cannot succeed, if only because
it is incoherent on the level of simple logic.
Every logically coherent definition of a cultural identity presumes that
other cultures are different but of equal value. If, however, the particular
European values are defined as universal humanistic values, that can only
mean that other non-European cultures must be considered antihumanistic
by nature, that is, as inherently inhuman, antidemocratic, intolerant, and so
on. In view of this diagnosis, it is clear that the European cultural and political
sensibility is necessarily ambiguous. To the extent that human rights and
democracy can be recognized as universal values, Europeans, as champions of
such values, feel morally obliged to push them through worldwide. In the
process they find themselves, quite rightly, confronted with the accusation
that they are pursuing an old European policy of imperialist expansion under
the guise of defending and championing human rights. To the extent,
however, that human rights can be recognized as particularly European values,
Europeans feel obliged to protect themselves within Europe, that is, to isolate
the European cultural sphere and defend it against the antihumanistic aliens.
Hence European politics oscillates between imperialism and isolationism—
mirroring the particular–universal character of the values that it wants to
assert as its own.
Quite clearly such a particular–universal definition of European culture
places other cultures under immense pressure to justify themselves. Either
they are supposed to prove that they have already Europeanized to the point
where they have assimilated the universal, humanistic values, or they are supposed
to prove that they have their own humanistic traditions whose origin
does not necessarily lie in the Judeo-Christian tradition but rather in the
Buddhist, Confucian, or Islamic tradition. Both strategies for justification,