Europagedanke - Europe : a Nietzschean perspective

What does it mean to be European? Should a common European identity be forged in the twenty-first century?

In this innovative volume, Stefan Elbe addresses these important questions through his exploration of the good Europeans, an idea outlined by one of the most enigmatic and stimulating thinkers of the modern age Friedrich Nietzsche.

Despite the growing attention that Nietzsche has received in scholarly circles over the past decade, his thinking about modern nationalism and the idea of Europe remains remarkably unexplored. Elbe, however, shows how Nietzsche explicitly cast the question of Europe within the larger cultural context of secularisation and the death of God. Elbe is thus able to demonstrate the continued relevance of Nietzsche's investigation of European nihilism for the debate on the European idea. The book concludes by exploring Nietzsche's own idea of what it would mean to be a good European within the context of a modern and secular culture.

This book is the first systematic study of Nietzsche's European thought, and provides a rare philosophical approach to the idea of Europe.

Stefan Elbe lectures in International Relations at the University of Warwick. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Political Ideologies, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and International Security.

Russian Messianism
Third Rome, revolution, Communism and after
Peter J.S. Duncan

European Integration and the Postmodern Condition
Governance, democracy, identity
Peter van Ham

Nationalism in Italian Politics
The stories of the North League, 19802000
Damian Tambini

International Intervention in the Balkans
A critical evaluation
Edited by Peter Siani-Davies and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers

Widening the European Union
The politics of institutional change and reform
Edited by Bernard Steunenberg

Institutional Challenges in the European Union
Edited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian van Deemen and Mika Widgrn

Europe Unbound
Enlarging and reshaping the boundaries of the European Union
Edited by Jan Zielonka

Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans
Nationalism and the destruction of tradition
Cathie Carmichael

Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe
The democratisation of the general public in fifteen Central and Eastern European countries, 19911998
Christian W. Haerpfer

Private Sector Involvement in the Euro
The power of ideas
Stefan Collignon and Daniela Schwarzer

Europe
A Nietzschean perspective
Stefan Elbe

Europe, Globalisation and Sustainable Development
Edited by Brian Baxter, John Barry and Richard Dunphy

European Union Council Presidencies
A comparative analysis
Edited by Ole Elgstrm

European Governance and Supranational Institutions
Making states comply
Jonas Tallberg

European Union, NATO and Russia
Martin Smith and Graham Timmins

Stefan Elbe

First published 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

2003 Stefan Elbe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by an electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Elbe, Stefan, 1975

Europe: a Nietzschean perspective/Stefan Elbe.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. European Union. 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900
Views on Europe. I. Title.

JN30 .E358 2003
306.094dc21 2002155516

ISBN 0-203-42655-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-43902-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-36975-4 (hardcover)

To my family old and new

This book is based on my doctoral research carried out in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It benefited immensely from the latter's intellectual environment and yet undoubtedly contains some of the imperfections that invariably accompany a student's undertaking of his first book-length research project. In my case this problem was confounded because of my initial preference for a difficult, interdisciplinary, and overly grand research project. These are clearly first steps, in other words, but steps that have proved deeply rewarding, at least on a personal level.

Nor was it easy settling on the final title for this book. The term Europe, for example, should be read in the broader sense of the term because it is not primarily the European Union that is at issue in the following pages, although the text will certainly touch upon its institutions. Rather, the main subject of this study is the idea of Europe and, more specifically still, the contemporary incomprehension that surrounds this notion. Given this broader focus on the European imagination, the book might also be of interest to those people currently living outside the countries which are already members of the European Union, or which are joining the club in the near future; it might equally engage the imagination of those with an interest in the wider themes of modern civilization and the West.

A Nietzschean Perspective this part of the title is significant too. Hopefully it communicates to the reader that the following study only advances one possible treatment of the issues confronting scholars and policy-makers when employing the term Europe. Other accounts are clearly possible, although no one to my knowledge has previously teased out Nietzsche's stimulating and original views on nationalism and the European idea in a sustained fashion. Yet Nietzsche himself would also have been amongst the first to insist on the necessity of having a plurality of perspectives, famously arguing in On the Genealogy of Morals that an individual can only see or know from a particular perspective, and so the more eyes, different eyes, we allow to reflect on an issue, the more complete our objectivity will be. The following book is written very much in this spirit, endeavouring to advance an additional and intriguing perspective that might liven up the contemporary debate.

The phrasing A Nietzschean Perspective is important, secondly, in that the primary purpose of the following volume is not to engage with the detailed disputes that have emerged amongst Nietzsche scholars over the past decades. Nor does it provide an extensive exegesis of his more philosophical ideas of the will-to-power, the eternal return, and the overman. These tasks have already been undertaken by a plethora of other Nietzsche scholars and philosophers. The following study remains informed by these debates, to be sure, but its foremost and more modest emphasis is on putting Nietzsche's thought to contemporary use, i.e. to show how his thought can still fruitfully inform our thinking about an important contemporary issue. To name but one example, I have drawn liberally on Nietzsche's posthumously published notes something that seems unavoidable to me anyway when reflecting on the theme of European nihilism. Nietzsche was clearly very careful about his published writings and he may well have ultimately rejected some of the thoughts he penned in his notebooks just as he later rejected some of the thoughts he had published in his own lifetime. Deep spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions, he noted in