Suchergebnisse

The cold war is over." By 1972 this phrase has become a cliché, perhaps especially among knowledgeable people. In other times there would be nothing very wrong with this: for there are many clichés that are by no means untrue. (Where there is smoke there is fire.) Unfortunately, the movement of ideas has become so predictable, because of their total involvement with publicity, that clichés no longer merit even partial trust. (Where there is smoke there is smoke; and where there is fire there is fire.) For years I have borrowed Wilde's admirable aphorism about people who pursue the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective, until I found that, no matter how funny, it is no longer applicable: for the public cogitators and public prophets of our time have captured the obvious with all of the calculation that a farsighted young associate professor, in pursuit of a profitable academic career, can muster.

The Second World War became a world war only in December 1941. By that time not only the extent but also the character of its warfare had changed, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thus 1941 was even more of a turning-point in the history of the Second World War than 1917 had been in the history of the First. Most historians of the Second World War would agree with this assessment. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that relatively little interest has been devoted to the history of the everyday lives of European peoples during the years 1939–41, during what could be called in retrospect (perhaps hopefully so) the Last European War.

We see the present with the eyes of the past, and the past with the eyes of the present. This is a truism: but one that is nonetheless worth repeating at a time when it is fashionable to believe that we live in a posthistoric age, that the past has little to tell us that is new or that is true. But what is fashionable is not correct, for all that we know comes from the past, from some kind of a past; all of our knowledge is essentially past-knowledge, whether we are conscious of this or not. Politics, for example, is not only inseparable from historical interpretation: it is a certain kind of historical interpretation. And since this interpretation is a living and changing thing in our minds (for "history," contrary to the generally accepted view, is not a static account of past periods) the interpretation involves, inevitably, the changing and moving "present": it is part and parcel of the movement of ideas. And the problem of how ideas move nowadays has preoccupied my mind (note the implicit meaning of the word pre-occupy) for a long time.

Let us begin with the obvious. A certain kind of "Europe" is taking shape. I put "Europe" within quotation marks. This "Europe" which is taking shape, is a "Europe" of institutions. It is a result of the achievements of the fifties rather than of the forties and of the sixties; of the Schuman Plan and of the Western European Union and of the Common Market, of WEU and EPU and ECSC and EFTA, of Europ and Euratom and Europlan and Eurovision, of OEEC and OECD and TEE.There is nothing in history which is inevitable, and the history of no continent shows this better than the history of Europe: but certain things are irreversible (an interesting thought for philosophers: why, historically speaking, "inevitable" and "irreversible" are not at all the same) and this development of "European" institutions is one of them.