Europe has been weakened of late. It was once seen as a solid entity, associated with democracy, human rights, peace, and the reunification of the continent. In current debates, the term “Europe” is ambiguous: sometimes it refers to European culture or civilization, and sometimes to an international institution that certain currents call the “wrong Europe”—as opposed to the “Europe we believe in” (Bénéton, Brague, and Delsol 2019)—, accused of being excessively driven solely by the logic of the market, or conversely, too bureaucratic, procedural, and inefficient. At any rate, institutional Europe must rethink the way it functions so that it does not compromise its core project: peace and prosperity.
This precariousness of the very concept of Europe and Europeanness stands in contrast to the atmosphere in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe, like in Western Europe after the Second World War, saw Europe become associated with an aspiration, a dream, a utopia that took the form of a project (Nowicki and Radut-Gaghi 2016). Proud to “return to Europe” and relieved after half a century of being relegated to outside its borders, the inhabitants of Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw finally felt at home. The writings of philosophers from “the Other Europe”—such as Barbara Skarga, Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Patočka, and many other passionate pro-Europeans—illustrate this well.
Let us recall the core of the discourse of this milieu…