Fall 2017 JPI

Practical Marxism faded completely with the denouement of revisionism in Eastern Europe.
In terms of time, the end of the Communist “interlude” in Europe, brought with it new needs for reexamining
Europe's historicity. Once again, the term “end of history” re-emerged with American
political scientist Fukuyama 12 , who used the concept more-or-less in the same manner as Kojeve.
Reaffirming Kojeve’s end of history, Fukuyama saw the globalized world after the fall of communism
as an expected outcome of the unchangeable, rational political order; this time, liberal democracy was
emerging from this order as the ultimate form of human government.
CONTINUITY VERSUS REALITY
Postwar Western Europe collective identity was achieved through the forgetting of recent
history and opting for 19th century humanist liberalism. Cold-War 'Europe', writes Judt, signified
“domestic political stability, increased economic productivity and a steady expansion in foreign
trade.” 13 The two-generation stasis in Europe gave the “impression that peace was the natural order of
things.” 14 This was true for liberal Europe and for the Communist East that “too, had lived through
an age of unusual, albeit involuntary, calm.” 15 Until the fall of the Wall, “inter-state war disappeared
from the continent of Europe” while “war (and ideological confrontation), was outsourced to the socalled
Third World.” 16 Detached from its “self-evident relationship” to America, liberal democratic
Europe eventually reached, however reluctantly, its Eastern counterparts. But the ways in which
integration of the East would proceed were already set. 17
In Dark Continent, Mark Mazower chooses to interpret the modern European society as the
product of liberal democracy's confrontation to Nazi totalitarianism, a thesis that is especially pertinent
for studying European postwar identity. Blueprinting postwar Europe gave birth to the welfare state,
a compromise of “étatisme at home and liberalization of trade.” 18 The European project's functionalist
thinkers, including Kojeve, created a system of state bureaucracy that despite subscribing to a Hegelian
conception of a strong state containing the nation, reflected a continuity with that part of Nazi
ideology, that understood the synthesis of the history of the human in an anthropological sense; the
post-war peacekeeping community managed to “conquer Germany, but not their ideas.” 19
Culturally, this continuity was consolidated by a “myth of resistance” that tacitly marginalized
anti-nationalist culture and appointed Nazi collaborators in the offices of the new bureaucracy.
Institutionally, the military state was replaced by a police state, 20 that mainly exercised its power by
violently containing colonized subjects in the “Third World.” A product of globalization and
colonization, the modern refugee, was also the product of the Jewish genocide that in Mazower's reading
equals imperialism “turning on its head” 21 within the European borders. The history of the refugee,
including the Jews in Nazi Germany, religious and gender minorities, Eastern Europeans, capitalism's
guest-workers from the South and now the refugees fleeing war in Syria, can be read as the history of
the European Other, which might as well be identified as the stateless non-national that the privileging
of negative integration in European development never cared to account for. This deliberately
12 Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. The end of history and the last man. New York: Perennial.
13 Judt, Postwar, 750-751.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (Vintage, 2000), 206.
19 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton University Press, 2008), 63.
20 See James Sheehan, Where Have All The Soldiers Gone? (Mariner Books, 2009), 3-69.
21 Mazower, Dark Continent., xiii.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 39