Fall 2017 JPI

state, as a strong state containing the nation, was part of an idea of Europe that was an alternative to
nationalism. European modernity, as Gerard Delanty presents it in Inventing Europe, is “self-negating”
and “representing the past” of–in the words of Baudrillard– “a nineteenth-century bourgeois dream.” 31
European identity is “a secularizing anti-obscurantist normative idea [that] became an aesthetic
impulse.” 32
In conclusion, European modernity is a euphemistic invention that merely disguises the
continent's fascist past. Pressed by embarrassment and obsessed with peacekeeping in a postwar
context, bourgeois aesthetics accidentally produced institutions that despite being backed by eugenic,
hygienist and imperialist narratives, contained European cosmopolitan identity at its best; the welfare
state was the only sign of a politics of “care” as opposed to genocidal pride that ended
cosmopolitanism in the Holocaust. In a disrupted political landscape, the welfare state serves as a
cultural reference that is one of the few identity contexts invented by Europe that allow for antinationalist
culture.
If re-inventing itself is the genealogy of European identity, then the possibility for a collective
identity that does not adapt to “the times,” a vision, or a destiny, but to the reality of ethnic diversity
and perhaps immoral cosmopolitanism, is still open.
31 Ibid, 81-82.
32 Ibid.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 42