I assume then that Kundera did the play for Diderot's work.

Marcos Farias Ferreira*

Apropos Kundera & Brodsky: Uncovering the role
of literary querelles about the meaning of Europe

Literary Querelles as Discursive Practice The dispute that took place in early 1985, in the pages of The New York Times, between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky on Dostoevsky and the much broader subject of Russia’s Europeanness, can be said to be part of the longer tradition of the battle of intellects in the form of literary and political quarrels or querelles – heated exchanges of opinion around more or less critical topics – that sometimes have impact outside the strictly academic quarters and eventually acquire social relevance. In my essay, I will be using the French word querelle instead of quarrel as a means to relate my own argument to the long literary tradition of politico-philosophical overtones often developing and expressing itself in the French language. (As an exile after 1968, Kundera himself has dropped the Czech and started writing in French). The classical examples go back to the querelles of ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ and the ‘battle of the books’, that have left their clear-cut mark in the history of political ideas and still influence contemporary thinkers. In the Russian nineteenth century, the correspondence between Belinsky and Gogol regarding the mission of the Russian writer eventually escaped its private domain and gained a most tragic social relevance. In 1847, the public reading of Belinsky’s letter to Gogol would lead to the arrest and sentencing to death of Dostoevsky. The most well known twentieth century battle of intellects developed between Camus and Sartre, two existentialists, two landmarks of the French left, two men profoundly divided in their appraisal of the Communist experiment taking place in Russia those days. According to Peter Petro, “it is possible to name Dostoevsky as a symbol of this division. Camus seems to have heeded Dostoevsky’s dark vision of the Utopia, Sartre did not” (Peter Petro 1993, 77). As for the title of my essay, and particularly my using in it of the word ‘apropos’ – meaning ‘as regards’ or ‘in respect to’ –, I must stress it comes from my originary engagement with Petro’s article «Apropos Dostoevsky», which I have just quoted. It is then a way of drawing on it while, at the same time, engaging with my particular problematiques regarding Kundera, Brodsky and the discursive definition of Europe and expanding on them according to my own academic background.

* Professor de Relações Internacionais no Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, UTL.

Essay to be presented at the Fourth International Conference “Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations”, organised by the Centre for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow, June 13-16, 2006.







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The origin of the querelle opposing Brodsky to Kundera is the latter’s article «An Introduction to a Variation» published on January 6, 1985, in which the Czech writer expresses his full-blown aversion vis-à-vis Dostoevsky’s universe of “overblown gestures, murky depths and aggressive sentimentality” and turns it into the crux of Russian civilization as opposed to European civilization. Kundera invokes the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian troops to expose the elevation of sentimentality to the rank of value as a defining marker of the Russian civilization that missed the Renaissance and the spirit resulting from it. As Kundera recalls in the article, on the third day of the 1968 occupation, while driving from Prague to Budejovice, he had his car stopped and inspected by three Russian soldiers. Among them, the officer asked him about how he was feeling, without being ironic or malicious – Kundera well realises –, then insisting that in spite of all that the Russians loved the Czechs. Kundera goes on underscoring that “[t]hey all spoke more or less as he did, their attitude based not on the sadistic pleasure of the ravisher but on quite a different archetype: unrequited love” (Kundera 1985, para. 9/56). The problem of Kundera with feelings has to do with how these become criteria of truth and justifications for intolerance and all kinds of otherwise unjustifiable political behaviour; to wit, when they become that which Carl Jung named the ‘superstructure of brutality’. This is the ‘rational irrationality’ falling on Prague, the ‘eternity of the Russian night’ Kundera has in mind while writing that “n a small Western country I experienced the end of the West” (Kundera 1985, para. 54/56). As I stressed above, for Kundera the West is a product of the Renaissance and its spirit “of reason and doubt, of play and the relativity of human affairs”. It is only after this spirit has conquered society that the West truly came into its own. Having missed the Renaissance, the Russian mentality is for Kundera the product of a different balance between rationality and sentiment, a specific balance accounting both for the profundity and the brutality of the Russian soul. In «An Introduction to a Variation», these two opposing universes are represented respectively by Dostoevsky and Diderot, by The Idiot and Jacques le Fataliste. The first work is where Kundera finds the repulsive sentimentality; in the second, he finds “a feast of intelligence, humour and fantasy”, the kingdom of playfulness where everything, even the novel as literary genre, is exposed to doubt. In his words, “[s]ervant and master have made their way across all the modern history of the West. In Prague, city of the grand farewell, I heard their fading laughter. With love and anguish, I clung to that laughter as ones clings to fragile, perishable things, things that have been condemned” (Kundera 1985, para. 56/56).

Brodsky’s answer to Kundera can be found in the ironic article dated February 17, 1985, with the blatant title «Why Milan Kundera is Wrong About Dostoevsky». Although the latter’s aesthetic universe is the starting point for the dispute between the two writers, Brodsky engages with Kundera’s argument not so much on the







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basis of aesthetics but in terms of what he judges as a distorted sense of history and geography. For Brodsky, the ‘handy dichotomies’ on which Kundera bases his aesthetic preferences – feeling vs. reason, Dostoevsky vs. Diderot – are rooted on the geopolitical certitude of the East-West divide separating civilization in Europe from that in Russia and turning them into two opposing worldviews based on clashing values. What for Brodsky is at stake here is the mental simplistic operation at work in every either/or axiom, precluding more complex understandings of human nature and social relations. This kind of reasoning is, moreover, the clear product of a very contested personal choice, in this case the intellectual’s resolve to refashion reality: “[m]ade under the pressure of circumstances, this limited choice starts the echo of an archetypal human predicament.There is nothing wrong with it, except that it imposes the reductive notion of human potential implicit in any limited choice” (Brodsky 1985, para. 22/32). Kundera is then promoted to the category of the ‘unwitting victim’ to the geopolitical certitude of the East-West divide and, eventually, his appraisal of the rationalist turn in post-Renaissance Europe falls prey to the very need to justify the aprioristically conceived divide. Exposing the artificial nature of such a construct, Brodsky underlines that the political regime feeding the ‘eternity of the Russian night’ in the twentieth century is both a product of Western rationalism as it is of Eastern emotional radicalism. What Kundera seems to forget here is that Sovietism is the unparalleled example of the ‘terminal paradox of modernity’ he identifies in his L’art du roman, and that the form of totalitarianism stemming from it perfectly matches the ‘sheer irrationality’ coming with the absolutely total and modern victory of reason. If on seeing a Russian tank on his way to Budejovice Kundera thought of Dostoevsky, Brodsky believes he had more reasons to think of Diderot: “[t]he atrocities that were and are committed in that realm, were and are committed not in the name of love but of necessity – and a historical one at that. The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route” (Brodsky 1985, para. 12/32). Ultimate sign of the irretrievable abandonment of the self vis-à-vis the transcendental forces she cannot master nor understand, the terminal paradoxes of modernity have confined the self to the role of unwanted land surveyor or uncomprehended victim of an absurd tribunal. As it stems from Kundera’s own words, it is History, and the modern development of it, which sees to it that K. be brought face to face with the court, that he be brought face to face with the castle. In such circumstances, what else can he do? (Kundera 1986, 19) Voilà K. raised to the rank of the absolutely modern man, i.e. the victim of the terminal paradoxes of a distinctly Western, European modernity. As Václav Havel has emphasized in «The Power of the Powerless», Sovietism has turned out to be the convex mirror of modern civilization, the avant-garde of modernity and its paradoxical nature; in any case a force arriving from the Asiatic steppes or from an archaic past totally outside the social History of reason.







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More than about Dostoevsky and his universe of murky depths and overblown gestures, the literary querelle opposing Milan Kundera to Joseph Brodsky is actually about the definition of Europe, and the West more broadly, and the unveiling of the alternative contexts of meaning serving as their epistemological and ontological anchors. My central assumption here is that Europe is first and foremost a normative construct, not a geographical or physical category, and that all matters concerning its meaning, identity, purpose and border of order have to be discerned primarily at the level of language. This is why, I contend, this literary querelle has to be seen as constituting more than a mere literary genre; it becomes a most valuable heuristic device in order to understand the power of language in the social construction of reality and the regional identity of Europe. For the specific purpose considered here, the literary argument invoking Dostoevsky and Diderot helps making clear how the querelle is actually about something more, viz. the discursive struggle over the crucial ideas ascribing meaning to Europe. More than describing reality, therefore, Kundera and Brodsky’s utterances on Europe and the West in general work as speech acts intervening in the long-term process of political and social change which materialize the social construction of Europe. For this matter, Europe is far from being a fixed concept; it is instead a contested realm, which social fact uncovers the sheer importance of analysing all aspects related to the ‘politics of speaking Europe’. By the phrase ‘the politics of speaking Europe’ I then set out to identify different types of discursive practices engaged in the contestation and struggle for the definition of Europe, including the apparently non-political literary querelles, often perceived as far removed from the decisive arenas of political decision-making. On the contrary, these querelles are the kind of crucial discursive practices that serve as normative context for political actors to legitimise solutions concerning collective governance on a pan-European scale, who is in and who is kept beyond the borders: who should have rights and who gets deprived of them.

Understanding Europe Socially: A Shifting Context of Meaning A social reading of Europe stands in sharp contrast to all essentialising approaches to its identity and is meant firstly to trigger a broader discussion on the kind of object Europe is. And it is at this particular point, a previous point before all kinds of discussion regarding governance, I argue, that social constructivism becomes especially suitable as the social theory of European integration. Drawing on Alexander Wendt then, it is impossible to ignore that “[w]ithin the community of academic students of international politics today there is a deep epistemological rift over the extent to and ways in which we can know our subject” (Wendt 1998, 101). Epistemology matters crucially in the present context, I would argue, because the possibility of producing knowledge about Europe and deciding, for instance, the kind of object it is depends upon how one believes knowledge can be produced. Epistemology matters because we cannot decide what







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Europe is, whether it is an essential work of nature or an intrinsically unstable cognitive structure, unless one has made it clear how this kind of knowledge is to be obtained. As far as this problematique is concerned, I tend to follow Hollis and Smith when they argue that one must always choose between two ‘stories’ or approaches to the social world (Hollis and Smith, 1990, 1). One is an outsider’s story, working as to uncover the causal mechanisms inter-linking social phenomena and to produce social laws; the other is an insider’s story meant to recover the subjective and intersubjective meanings actors attach to their interactions.To understand the social world is then to make sense of it from within, i.e. to recover the processes and interactions that have turned it into what it is at a particular juncture. In epistemological terms, to understand the social world involves a critical action of de-essentialising what otherwise are but social kinds, subject to on-going constitution and reconstitution, to the on-going elaboration of meanings social actors collectively attach to the material world. In this essay, I set out to understand Europe from within, i.e. from within the realm of the enabling discourse social actors have been producing about it and which becomes crucial in order to legitimise political options such as the enlargement of the EU. It is then the ‘story’ or narrative involved in the understanding of Europe that makes it possible to uncover its ontology as social kind and the concomitant on-going process of negotiation over its meaning. In other terms, the on-going process of negotiation over Europeanness and what it means for a group of societies to recognise one another as European.

The ‘story’ of understanding Europe from within and tracing back its enabling discourse is then closely associated with the specific choice for a social ontology of human consciousness and the kind of ideational factors that make it possible to perceive change and the impact of transformative processes within this particular state system. Following John Ruggie, “[a]t bottom, constructivism concerns the issue of human consciousness: the role it plays in international relations, and the implications for the logic and methods of social inquiry of taking it seriously” (Ruggie 1998, 33). Taking constructivism seriously in social inquiry, and European studies more specifically, is then a matter, I argue, of acknowledging the two-way process of constitution mutually involving structures and actors. The individualist methodology should be carefully avoided, but so should the holist one, in favour of a middle ground acknowledging (and drawing on the fact) that the ‘discourse of Europe’ has the transformative power to change its actors but also that their interactions and relations with the multiple ‘Others’ at the gates have proved to be able to change, in turn, the ‘discourse of Europe’. We should also bear in mind that, for social constructivists, structures are not material but cognitive. Moreover, we should take seriously the way this makes structures vulnerable to the changing ways human consciousness attaches meaning to the material world depending, for instance, on the shifting of perceptions, identities and interests stemming from complex social interactions. The point I want to make







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here comes close to that made by James Fearon and Alexander Wendt when they write that “[c]onstructivism is not subjectivism or pure idealism. Instead, the emphasis on ideas is meant to oppose arguments about social life which emphasize the role of brute material conditions like biology, geography and technology” (Fearon and Wendt 2002, 57). Intersubjective meanings and understandings are the stuff the social world is made of and they are otherwise real in the way they shape social practices and institutions (and in their turn are shaped by them). By setting out to understand Europe socially, I intend to underscore that the materiality of geography does not cause a predetermined cognitive structure called Europe, along with particular institutional features. Rather, it is the cognitive structure resulting in the utterance ‘Europe’ that which enables specific understandings of its geographic setting and of what should follow politically from it. The bottom line is that Europe as cognitive structure, or context of meaning, is what its relevant actors make of it – the political elite primarily, but crucially also intellectuals involved in literary querelles about Dostoevsky and Diderot.

Kundera, Brodsky and the Quarrel about Central Europe The dispute about Dostoevsky, Diderot and the spirit of Europe involving Kundera and Brodsky in the pages of the New York Times in 1985 has then gained relevance in the context of the heated discussion about the literary and political identity of Central Europe, as distinct from Eastern Europe, in which many writers, dissidents and political thinkers have taken part since the 1980’s. In fact, on 26 April 1984, Kundera published, on the New York Review of Books, what is still today his reference article on the subject – «Un Occident kidnappé» translated in English as «The Tragedy of Central Europe» (the original had been published in November 1983, in Le débat) – followed, in 1986, by L’art du roman, where he developed his thesis. In line with what I have mentioned above, the tragedy of Central Europe stands for the arrival of the Red Army and the subsequent assimilation of a string of small, but fiercely European nations into the Soviet empire and its anti-European political universe of Asiatic barbarity and totalitarianism. In «Un Occident kidnappé», Kundera sets out to recover the European properties of the Soviet satellites and expands on the non-European nature of Russia in order to deconstruct what the publics and the politicians in the West seemed to have long assumed: the geopolitical and cultural unity of Eastern Europe as in the form of the then Soviet bloc.The argument is directly inspired by Husserl’s 1935 philosophical testament, the argument of the European crisis and the possibility that the European humanity could soon disappear. The coincidence for Kundera is then that the famous lectures about the crisis of Europe were delivered by Husserl in those two capital cities of the same Central Europe “where, for the first time in its modern history, the West could see the end of the West, or more exactly, the amputation of a part of its own body when Warsaw, Budapest and Prague were swallowed by the Russian empire” (Kundera 1986, 22). In this statement







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though, it is not the question of the Soviet empire anymore; with or without linguistic lapses, it is still the Russian empire – with a new name and new symbols, yet in the same political tradition – that swallows Central Europe, kidnaps a distinctive part of Europe and puts itself at odds with Europeanness. According to Brodsky, the problem with Milan Kundera is that he downplays other recent invasions of his part of Europe, namely the one coming from the West in 1938, and seems to accord to them no special significance for the definition of identity.The Soviet totalitarianism would have been barbaric and anti-European, establishing a clear cut division between Europe and Russia but the same would not apply to Nazi totalitarianism and German Europeanness. It is no surprise that Brodsky ironically deems Kundera to be more European than the Europeans themselves, i.e., too eager to deny the obvious genetic link between Sovietism and the Western history of the discursive practices of reason. In the context of the 1985 literary querelle, Brodsky eventually accuses Kundera of clinging to a limited and fixed concept of Europe, determined by the presentist ideological division and, for that matter, deprived of all sense of historical contingencies. What he wants to expose in Kundera’s discourse of Europe is the fact that “[h]aving lived for so long in Eastern Europe, it is only natural that Mr. Kundera should want to be more European than the Europeans themselves. Apart from anything else, this posture must have considerable appeal for him, because it endows his past with more logical links to the present than are normally available to an exile” (Brodsky 1985, para. 27/32).

Against the dichotomy and the political bipolarity of their time, Kundera and the rest of Central Europe advocates, political dissidents in their majority, tried to make the case for a different kind of divide. Against Churchill and the famous Stettin-Trieste line coinciding with the iron curtain and the two superpower spheres of influence, against the discursive abandonment practised by the West for 40 years, Kundera, Konrad, Mazowiecki and Havel claimed the relevance and centrality of the ‘other’ Europe to understand fully the cultural and political face of the whole continent. In his «Druga Twarz Europy», published in 1979 in the French magazine Esprit, Tadeusz Mazowiecki had tried to think over that divide doing though without the concepts of East and West and coming up instead with the notions of Europe and the ‘other’ Europe. Again Russia is out of the picture of Europeanness, for the criteria to identify the ‘other Europe’ is political insecurity – it is “the European spirit’s tormented face” (Maslowski and Delson 1998, 2) –, the outpost of Europe against the historical descent of Eastern invaders. In «Druga Twarz Europy», the European culture gets an alternative face then: it is Adam Mickiewicz vis-à-vis Balzac or Hugo, and their opposition – or rather their faces reflecting each other as in a mirror – has to do here with the crucial problematique of how to discern the fundamentals of life. For Mazowiecki, an affluent, stable society where the writer can afford to deal with the creative side of life and its free development eventually segregates a ‘disposition of the spirit’ which is very







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different from an enslaved society – both his and Mickiewicz’s – where the writer “simply strives to achieve the right to exist” (Mazowiecki 1979, 129). The Central Europe of Mazowiecki plays the role of boundary of Europe, where existential and political precarity is the product of a clash between Europe’s main powers and Europe’s traditional besiegers.

In spite of the full cultural and political Europeanness of Kundera’s Central Europe, the particular historical tradition of recurrent siege, invasion, conquest, enslavement and territorial dissection justifies a separate identity as “premonitory mirror of the possible destiny of all of Europe, the laboratory of dusk (crépuscule in the French original)” (Kundera 1986, 155). As the Czech writer points out more recently in his Le rideau, an essay in seven parts, published by Gallimard in 2005, the unity of Central Europe is basically non-intentional and its nations have almost always been objects, not subjects of History. Therefore, these nations are close to each other not by will or sympathy but “by means of close experiences and common historical situations that have put them together, at different epochs, in the context of different political entities with moving, never settled borders” (Kundera 2005, 61). According to the same argument, this political non-intentional unity would have produced, in the literary realm, a lineage of grand novelists stretching from Kafka to Hašek, Musil, Broch and Gombrowicz.The literary Central Europe would therefore be based on (1) these novelists’ aversion regarding romanticism; (2) their love for the pre-Balzacien novel and the libertarian spirit; (3) their mistrust vis-à-vis History and the exaltation of the future; (4) their particular modernism as detached from the illusions of the avant-garde (Kundera 1986, 155).

At the Wheatland Foundation-sponsored 1988 Lisbon conference of international writers, Brodsky was as blatant as to affirm that “n the name of literature, there is no such thing as a ‘Central Europe’ [...] There is Polish literature, Czech literature, Slovak literature, Serbo-Croatian literature, Hungarian literature, and so forth. Well, it is impossible to speak about this concept even in the name of literature. It is an oxymoron, if you will”1. Intervening in the debate where Susan Sontag also took part, Czeslaw Milosz eventually accused Joseph Brodsky of the obsession that the concept of Central Europe was Kundera’s invention. For Milosz, this was out of the question for the reason that ‘Central Europe’ was above all an anti-Soviet concept through which writers of different countries expected to contribute to the erosion of the Soviet political claim to that part of Europe. Making his case against Brodsky’s argument, Milosz harshly intervened by stating: “[d]ivide et impera. This is a colonial principle and

1 The full transcript of the Lisbon Conference can be found in Cross Currents 9 (1990), pp. 75-124. The excerpts used in this essay are quoted in Jessie Labov, «A Russian Encounter with the Myth of Central Europe», pp. 8-9.








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you are for that”.What Milosz tried to convey with the Latin phrase was that Brodsky’s denial of the ontology of Central Europe was a discursive practice involved in the core politics of the empire; a crucial part indeed in the colonial politics of subjection, of discipline and punishment, with which Russian writers could not cope. In Milosz’s own words, “I am afraid that there is a certain taboo in Russian literature and this taboo is empire”.

The ontology of Central Europe is a contested issue still today; or even more today, at a moment when the accession of many of its countries to NATO and the EU erasures some of its regional specificities. However, the crucial point in my view is not whether Central Europe is real or not, but the ways in which invoking it or denying it corresponds to specific discursive practices intervening in the ‘discourse of Europe’ and the definition of its borders of order.

The Enabling Discourse In my essay then, the ‘discourse of Europe’ becomes the narrative of the on-going contestation over the meaning of Europe and its border of order even before it becomes entangled in the different realms of daily governance and political decision-making. As William Connolly has endeavoured to demonstrate, contestation over concepts is not a mere detail in the way groups interact; it is not a redundant and merely symbolic feature in contrast with the supposedly crucial bargaining over actors’ interests and preferences. On the contrary, language is the locus of the crucial political struggle between different groups and their opposing projects, a struggle in the construction of the social world (Connolly 1983, 30). This way, and drawing on the Austinian lexicon, what characterises language is not the fact that it is ‘constatative’, as common sense would have it; rather, it is its ‘performativity’, the fact that to speak is already to do something (Kratochwil 1989, 8). Approaching Europe as discourse and context of meaning starts therefore from the basic assumption that to utter ‘Europe’ is to do something, for this utterance subsumes a whole range of speech acts – acts performed through speech. According again to Diez, “the whole history of European integration can be understood as a history of speech acts (following Onuf: rules) establishing a system of governance (which, after all, is about rules that are binding for the members of the system” (Diez 2001, 88). Discourses structure the very struggle for fixing the meaning of Europe, its values and heritage, its border of order. Like all discourses then, the ‘discourse of Europe’ is not causal or rigid but, on the contrary, enabling. It sets limits to what is possible to be articulated as ‘Europeanness’, “but do [discourses in general] also provide agents with a multitude of identities in various subject positions, and are continuously transformed through the addition and combination of new articulations” (Diez 2001, 98). The ‘discourse of Europe’ is enabling in that it sets up a space of contestation over what Europe is, or may become, in whose definition social actors take part and from which they can







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draw on so as to consolidate their bargaining position or persuasion status. In his History of Europe from Attila to Tamerlan, the French writer Emmanuel Berl asserts that the Europeans are those who have associated or associate themselves with a number of collective hsitorical projects and “those who have rejected them have also ceased to be European” (quoted in Carbonell 1999, 14). With this formula, Berl introduces an inherently fluid and unsteady notion of ‘Europeanness’ according to which ‘Europe’ is an idea or enunciation some peoples (or rather their elites) decide to adhere to or, in contrast, to stay away from. This way, Kiev Russia was European, as well as the Russia of Peter the Great, but that of the Mongol khans was not. Likewise, Spain is said to have represented Europe’s vanguard by granting Columbus the caravels he needed for the journey to America, but contradicted such a role in the nineteenth century, when it despised the building of factories.

My point in this essay is that, as a result of the evolution in the domain of discourse, in this beginning of the twentieth first century the ontology of Europe is so entangled with membership of the European Union that ‘Europeanness’ itself becomes difficult to conceive of disconnected from the political criteria for accession established by its institutions. Independently from the cultural background or the geographical context, states and societies aspiring to the European status strive to fulfil the institutional criteria known as the Copenhagen criteria established by the 1993 EU Counsel of Ministers declaration and later complemented by the 2001 Laeken EU Counsel of Ministers declaration. This set of criteria has been constructing a clearly enabling ‘discourse of Europe’ in which ‘Europe’ gets refashioned as the ultimate speech act and the context of meaning within which states’ expectations are embedded and governance itself becomes cognitively structured. It is my point then that we need to see this as a two-way process in which ‘Europe’ as discursive practice sets limits to what is articulated as ‘Europeanness’ while, at the same time, the negotiation for the accession of new members and partners also makes space for new ways of articulating this collective identity. In the preamble of the Laeken declaration, we can read an extremely revolutionary phrasing regarding the ‘discourse of Europe’, according to which the only border that the European Union sets up is that of democracy and human rights. Previously, the Copenhagen declaration had already established that the admission of new members into the EU would be assessed on the basis of these countries’ capacity to set up stable and democratic institutions, their will to protect human rights and minority rights, and finally the existence of a working market economy.Although the background is still the consciousness of a natural European spirit deriving from the self-evidence and naturalness of geography, there is, I sustain, a notorious shift in the discourse meant to ground Europe as future-oriented project with Republican overtones.

Drawing on the dialogic, problematic archetype of Europe, Dominique de Villepin answers to the ‘what is Europe?’ question in L’homme européen by underscoring “[t]he







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adventure of peoples that do not cease to hesitate between the definition of precise borders and the assertion of a broader political project” (Semprún and Villepin 2005, 52). In a way, this formula could well be appropriated to express the very shift in the unstable ‘discourse of Europe’, between the reified readings eager to restrict Europeanness to a mere genetic code (and its meagre patrimonial heritage) and the de-essentialising readings focusing on polity construction and the challenge to identity closure, so dear to Leszek Kolakowski. Doing without all simplistic representations, putting away the naivete of originary myths, the Polish philosopher inspiringly identifies the source of the European spiritual strength in the refusal to admit a sealed identity, the capacity of putting itself in perspective and to abandon, not without pain, its most basic facticity. As I see it, the Copenhagen and Laeken declarations are the expression of that shift in the ‘discourse of Europe’ ceasing to take Europeanness as an endogenous and essential property of states and transmuting it, instead, into a collective institution of states, constituting them with social capacities. This way, Europeanness emerges as the unstable intersubjective stuff both constituting and constituted by states’ identities and interests and attests “[t]he role of shared ideas in producing social kinds, which denaturalises them and thereby expands the potential for progressive change” (Wendt 1998, 117).

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, ‘Central Europe’ as concept has clearly intervened in the discursive battle meant to make the case for some ex-Soviet satellite states to be accepted as European partners. By claiming the Central Europe heritage in the tradition of Kundera and other intellectuals, some of these states expected to be accorded the necessary credentials for a swift accession to the Western institutions, both the EU and NATO, a process that promised to be long and hard in the case of other former communist countries. It was mainly the case of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia and, tellingly, at the time of the Czech-Slovak break-up, the Slovaks were warned that their option for independence could be jeopardising their Central Europe case and therefore their chances of a quicker accession to Europe. It did not happen, and independent Slovakia did not lag behind the other three countries. Eventually, the Central Europe case paid off and, in 2004, the doors of Europe were open for those four plus Slovenia and the Baltic countries, whose Central European connection was easy to sustain.Trying to strike a compromise between the economic criteria for accession and the need not to set up a new wall – that would separate, this time, the Balkans from Europe – the EU postponed Romania and Bulgaria’s accession until 2007, or even 2008, but formally considers their case as part of the 2004 enlargement. The newest leadership in the Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova are also eager to make their case for the Europeanness of their countries and societies and, above all, they shall try to prove their will and resolve to become European in the spirit of the Copenhagen and Laeken institutional criteria. As for Russia, the debate







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should start with the country’s will and vocation to form a political union of its own, an economic bloc and geopolitical power separate from Europe, with its distinctive identity and interests. Apart from that, Russia’s geographic stretch accords to the country a natural tendency to play an independent role in the world, with its sovereign instruments, something the European countries are learning to put together and to formulate at a collective – some would even say supranational level. All in all, the institutional network of European politics based on everyday collective negotiation and compromise does match neither Russian interests nor its world superpower identity. On the other hand, we must not despise the fact that Russia is too big to be absorbed one day by European institutions and to conform to the decision-making procedures and checks and balances they depend on at the moment.

On the contrary, the discursive struggle involving Turkey’s accession to the EU is, I argue, the latest step in this intersubjective negotiation over new ways of giving meaning to Europe as political project. This is then the kind of reasoning that de-essentialises Europe as natural kind, unlike the reasoning grounding primordial discourses of the nation. Consequently, the 2005 Luxembourg EU Counsel of Ministers decision to open accession negotiations with Turkey matches, in my view, the decision of European leaders to avoid what could be a very real identity conundrum in the definition of Europe. Opting to bring Europe to Anatolia and to refashion the collective project in the process of negotiating Turkey’s accession, European leaders do strengthen a republican construction grounded on the allegiance of states and citizens to a set of political values. Drawing on Ole Wæver, to avoid the identity conundrum means therefore that the national and regional levels remain the locus of cultural identity for European citizens who, in turn, progressively transfer their political allegiance and identity to the European level. What this may entail is that “[t]hese citizens may be patriotic in a purely political sense, but they do not necessarily feel that they belong in any organic sense to one big European family. The political state can be rather hollow as long as its shell is hard” (Wæver 1995, 410). The hard shell, I argue, must be that of a de-essentialising Europeanness built on a civic political identity rather than on a primordial ethno-cultural identity connected to a specific religious affiliation.NE

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CARBONELL, Charles-Olivier et al. (1999), Une histoire européenne de l’Europe, Privat,Toulouse. CONNOLLY, William (1983), The Terms of Political Discourse, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.



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DELSOL, Chantal and Maslowski, Michel, eds. (1998), Histoire des idées politiques de l’Europe centrale, PUF, Paris.

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FEARON, James and WENDT, Alexander (2002), “Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Skeptical View” in Carlsnaes et al., eds., Handbook of International Relations, Sage, London, pp. 52-72.

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KUNDERA, Milan (1985), «An Introduction to a Variation», 56 paragraphs (originally published in The New York Times, January 6, 1985), kundera.de variaton/introduction_into_variaton.html.

KUNDERA, Milan (1986), L’art du roman, Gallimard, Paris.

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MAZOWIECKI, Tadeusz (1989), «Un autre visage de l’Europe», in Un autre visage de l’Europe, Noir sur Blanc, Montricher, pp. 127-137.

PETRO, Peter (1993), «Apropos Dostoevsky: Brodsky, Kundera and the Definition of Europe» in Miller and Petersen, eds., Literature and Politics in Central Europe, Camden House, Columbia, SC, 1993, pp. 76-90.

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SEMPRÚN, Jorge and VILLEPIN, Dominique de (2005), L’homme européen, Plon, Paris.
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NegóciosEstrangeiros . N.o 13 Outubro de 2008 pp. 40-52






Apropos Kundera & Brodsky: Uncovering the role of literary querelles about the meaning of Europe