Europe (In Theory)

EUROPE (IN THEORY) ∫ 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Minion with Univers display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the academic critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an imperialist or neo-colonial West. —HOMI K. BHABHA, The Location of Culture Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A pigs Eye View of Europe 1 1 The Discovery of Europe: Some Critical Points 11 2 Montesquieu’s North and South: History as a Theory of Europe 52 3 Republics of Letters: What Is European Literature? 87 4 Mme de Staël to Hegel: The End of French Europe 134 5 Orientalism, Mediterranean Style: The Limits of History at the Margins of Europe 172 Notes 219 Works Cited 239 Index 267 Acknowledgments I want to thank for their suggestions, time, and support all the people who have heard, read, and commented on parts of this book: Albert Ascoli, David Bell, Joe Buttigieg, miriam cooke, Sergio Ferrarese, Ro- berto Ferrera, Mia Fuller, Edna Goldstaub, Margaret Greer, Michele Longino, Walter Mignolo, Marc Scachter, Helen Solterer, Barbara Spack- man, Philip Stewart, Carlotta Surini, Eric Zakim, and Robert Zimmer- man. Also invaluable has been the help o√ered by the Ethical Cosmopol- itanism group and the Franklin Humanities Seminar at Duke University; by the Program in Comparative Literature at Notre Dame; by the Khan Institute Colloquium at Smith College; by the Mediterranean Studies groups of both Duke and New York University; and by European studies and the Italian studies program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am very grateful to the editors of Duke University Press for their precious help and suggestions. A final thank-you goes to the Na- tional Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsored my research for this book in the summer of 2003. Some material has already appeared, in a di√erent form, in the jour- nals Nepantla: Views from South; Nineteenth-Century Contexts; and Eu- ropean History Quarterly. One final note regards translations: with the exception of English translations consulted and referenced in the works cited, all other translations are mine. Introduction A PIGS EYE VIEW OF EUROPE You know, Europe is a hell of a long way from here. —JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Stone Raft And from now on, who knows who ‘‘I’’ really is! —GESUALDO BUFALINO, L’uomo invaso I had been suspecting it for a while. But it was on the morning of March 26, 1995, that seemingly overwhelming evidence almost convinced me the metamorphosis was on its way: I, Roberto M. Dainotto, no longer was an Italian; slowly but surely, I was becoming European! Hints of an imminent transformation had been around for a while: with the Treaty of Rome of 1957, as its preamble stated, Italians had ‘‘determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’’; and in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty, according to article A, had pushed us toward ‘‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.’’ Neither Rome nor Maastricht, however, could possibly com- pare with the news of March 26. On that day, the European Union (eu) had taken, or so I believed then, the most decisive step ever toward the final accomplishment of my personal fate—my ultimate transubstantia- tion into ‘‘the people of Europe’’: ‘‘Bonn, March 26—In a move that showed the limits as much as the extent of their common purpose, 7 of the 15 European Union members formally dismantled border controls between their countries today—meaning that travelers will be able to journey between them without passports . Italy . [has] also signed the convention setting up the passport-free zone’’ (Cowell A6). If ‘‘feeling European’’ was really a matter of ‘‘travel[ling] constantly across [Europe] on cheap interrail tickets’’ (Byatt 50), it meant that only then could I, finally, feel part of the imagined community of other faraway creatures holding, like me, a European passport. I say ‘‘finally’’ because the citizens of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had already been circulating freely across their borders since 1985, when the Schengen treaty was signed. In fact, even some non-eu members—Norway and Iceland—were let into the passport-free zone, which looked rather like a Nordic alliance. The Italians, on this side of the Alps—which no lesser spirit than Johann Wolfgang von Goe- the justly called ‘‘the dividing line between north and south’’ (31)—had not been invited to join at that time. The anxiety we felt at that initial exclusion is hard to describe. As Giuseppe Turani used to write on the pages of the daily La Repubblica, we badly wanted ‘‘to become like all others . to become a European country, not so Mediterranean, not so pizza-and-mandolin, not so defective’’ (36). And how could we possibly overcome our parochial—let alone ‘‘defective’’—identities if we were denied the ‘‘promised disap- pearance of physical borders’’ that alone granted ‘‘an enhanced meaning of Europe’’ as a cultural identity (Bamyeh 35)? So, when in 1995 Italy—along with the other southern countries of Portugal, Greece, and Spain—finally made it to the borderless Europe, signs of elation were palpable: ‘‘Champagne was on o√er at Milan and Rome airports to mark the country’s full membership of Schengen,’’ the Economist reported (‘‘Europe: Those Fuzzy Frontiers’’). The euphoria, however, did not last long. European clerks in Brussels soon started referring to the Giovanninos-come-lately with an unflattering acronym: Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain—the pigs, no less, as Lindsay Waters reported. We could cross borders now; but ‘‘a southern accent . does not help who carries it around’’ (De Luca 22). The usual, unmistakable glimmer of suspicion still met us in the eyes of our northern cousins, hardly waiting for us with open arms on the other side of the border. In fact, land borders, after a brief token opening of a few days, were soon shut closed again on our face. We were Europeans—only in theory, though! No matter how hard we Italians had managed ‘‘all the way to erase our identity’’ (Go√redo 58); no matter how we tried to forget the pizza and mandolin; no matter how much we worked to ‘‘northernize our habits and customs’’ (Cassano, Modernizzare 123); no matter all the sacrificing of piece after piece of the welfare state and the relentless privatization of all for the sake of ‘‘modernizing’’ and ‘‘Europeanizing’’ (Morlino 237)— we were no longer Italians, but we were not Europeans either. The international press did not take long to register the fact that despite the 2 INTRODUCTION opening of borders, Italy, along with the other pigs, remained nothing more than a southern country in the eyes of Europe. It was, so to speak, di√erent: Northerners have tended to stress di√erences between the political cul- tures of cold and warmer climes. Up north, the primmer attitudes of Protestantism, stricter laws against influence-peddling, older and stron- ger individual rights before the state, judges less in hock to the executive, and a more independent press were all thought to have ensured higher standards of public and political conduct. In the south, where democracy was generally a more fragile plant, family and clan loyalties held more sway than any sense of obligation to the state. (‘‘Is Europe Corrupt?’’ 49) Articles such as this (written, incidentally, on the occasion of the scandals of party finance corruption not in the south but in Germany and France) were reminders of how the old theses of Edward Banfield’s southern backwardness and amoral familism—of ones older, in fact, going back to Montesquieu’s climatology—had trickled down and cemented into commonplaces of both popular and political imaginations. Newspapers’ titles kept beating the same news from Europe: ‘‘Northerners Sni√ at ‘Club Med’ ’’ (Kamm); ‘‘Sober North Vies with Siesta South’’ (Boyes); or, more ominously, ‘‘Europe’s Southern Shadow.’’ In the meantime, Brus- sels’ parliamentarians still talked of a ‘‘two-speed Europe’’; the Franco- German axis still saw a ‘‘southern problem,’’ a pathological ‘‘Mediterra- nean syndrome’’ threatening to infect the whole of Europe (see Borzel 141); and the indefatigable Turani kept reminding us that even in the Europe of open borders, and despite all talks of common identity, Italy remained ‘‘some kind of Disney nation . a Latin American country from the old times . transplanted in the heart of wise, austere and virtuous Europe’’ (Turani 32). The hopes of 1995, in short, were soon to turn into indignation: to hell with virtuous Europe! Ressentiment, admittedly, is not a very noble human instinct—nor is it conducive to serene scholarly research. In order to write this book on Europe from the notoriously vindictive perspective of the clan of pigs, I have tried, then, to ennoble that most bathetic of emotions with the philosophical mantle of Nietzschean genealogy. (It was Nietzsche, after all, who presaged the age of the Euro: ‘‘Only money can force Europe to unite’’ [qtd. in Iiritano 32].) Could a genealogy of the concept of Europe help me explain the peculiar place of the south in that very concept? Where did the idea of the south as pigs of Europe come from? Did A PIGS EYE VIEW OF EUROPE 3 Montesquieu’s climatology survive even the advent of air-conditioning? How could the south, at the same time, be Europe and non-Europe? What follows is therefore an attempt to single out, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorizations of Europe, the surfacing of structures and paradigms that have since informed ideas of the continent and of its cultural identity.

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