The Delusion of Europe

The Ideology of Mourning what Never Existed

The true tragedy of modernity is very different from the usual lament recycled by the liberal West: that we are losing a once-great cultural richness, that Putin and the threat of nuclear war or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism are pushing us towards the death of the Enlightenment ethics which shaped and unified Europe. What is being confronted is something far more devastating than this. As Freud wrote in 1915, the original division of the subject – the point at which we are irreconcilably alienated from ourselves – is when we lose something that never even existed to us. What we are dealing with today is not simply accepting the loss of a treasured identity, but accepting the loss of an identity which we never possessed in the first place.

The original act of repression (Urverdrängung) that constitutes the unconscious itself (c.f. Laplanche’s New Foundations for Psychoanalysis) is the repression of something which never existed, retroactively installed from the point of repression itself; a truly ‘negative’ discrepancy where we must mourn not only the loss or disappearance of something that we once held as dear to us, but the far more disconcerting realisation that what we have lost is not in fact something that we ever truly possessed. By extension, the hysterical position is one in which we still believe that there is something that we have lost, when it is in fact nothingness itself – an inarticulable ‘gap’ between being and itself – which threatens the very frame of subjective self-identity. The hysteric retroactively installs a fictive unity or fulness in the past, maintaining the belief that what has been lost was something that was once possessed.

An uncomfortable truth is that this hysterical logic is today most actively embodied in the idea of Europe. Is there a better example of this inability to accept that what was lost never even existed than modern European democracy, which has erected a retrospective image of an illusory former plenitude, of some unutterable unity which is today fading into obscurity?

The dominant ideology of the West today is an ideology of the past – of the past as a virtual, political construct. With Keir Starmer’s election as Prime Minister, it was inevitable that he would attempt to thaw out EU-UK relations, to take a friendlier approach than his Tory forerunners. Starmer’s EU summit earlier this year intended to do precisely this, to re-establish working relationships with Europe and to unify against the ‘storm that gathers over our continent’: Russia. In his own words, gathered with European leaders at the birthplace of Winston Churchill (Blenheim Palace), Starmer optimistically stated that it was time to “reset” Europe-UK relations in order to urgently unify in our fight against the Eastern threat.

A latent irony emerges here: what exactly is meant by “reset”? What point in time of ‘European unity’ would Starmer ideally rewind to? The unfortunate fact is that Europe has never been unified in the sense expected of it now. The history of Europe is nothing but that of internal conflict. Starmer’s Churchillian references and tributes may attempt to frame a renewed push for unity as seen by Europe during WWII (or indeed WWI). Yet this Churchill-inspired politic is built upon a Derridean undertone: this unity is the incomplete spectre of a constitutive, formal difference. What are these two wars if not reflections of the defining discrepancy in the discourse of European unity?

After all, not only was it European nations (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire) that precipitated these hitherto unparalleled levels of destruction, but even the Allies were only loosely held together through significant disunity and tension. Hitler’s rise to power was in part due to the inability of the Allies to act cohesively, and even after the War had started, major players such as France and Britain often found themselves on the brink of disastrous disagreement. The attack on Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 was one such example: the British navy pre-emptively destroyed French naval ships stationed near Oran, French Algeria. The intention of the attack was to prevent the capture of French naval fleets by Germany, yet the attack’s lack of Allied approval led to widespread anti-British sentiment in France, threatening their collective opposition to Nazi Germany during one of the War’s most critical moments.

The breakaway collaborationist government of Vichy France, formed on 10 July following the Mers-el-Kébir attack, further disturbed the ideal of a steadfast and unquestionable Allied unity. For two years to follow, British forces under Churchill’s direction invaded Vichy-controlled territories, forcing them to surrender territories in mainland Africa and Madagascar. Even towards the end of the war, Churchill forced French troops to retreat at gunpoint – and to ‘fire if necessary’ – following their violent occupation of Syria, known as the Levant Crisis, which itself threatened to break out into direct British-French conflict. ‘Europe’ is for Starmer as convenient an idea as the irrational notion of unity itself. The geographical meaning of Europe is the obverse of a purely discursive construction, an empty signification which retroactively posits its own referent.

A more popular example of the ideology of the past is the slogan that helped Trump win two elections: Make America Great Again. What, however, I meant by the term Again? It is clear that Trump has no specific period in mind – whether it is the history of wealth production generated by the Transatlantic slave trade and the brutal civil war in part intended to dismantle it, or the intense and destructive period of post-war foreign influence (which Trump ironically seems to partially denounce), or the series of financial catastrophes inherent to the inefficiencies of global capitalism. On the contrary, Trump’s Again, the past to which he refers, is decisively virtual. Its captivating and populist effectiveness lies precisely in the point that it does not exist. It is a truly ideological past – the past which, as Laplanche describes in psychoanalytic terms, is posited in the very moment of reflection. The figure of the ‘once great America’ is uttered not as a determinate point, but furnished as a malleable and retroactive tool for a confused present.

Starmer and Trump, superficially opposed under the overarching umbrella of liberal capitalism, stand as two avatars of the ‘use-value’ attributable to the past: they overturn our modernist understanding of the past as stable and fixed. Instead, the past possesses a malleability, an internal incompleteness which allows it to take on a variety of ideologically convenient forms. If it is true, as Bruno Latour argues, that we have never been ‘modern’ (that we have never successfully distinguished a discourse of the natural and a discourse of the social), then by extension this malleability of the past suggests an additional paradox: we may never have been modern, but we have been postmodern for a very long time.

The unique antagonism of global capitalism is situated on a temporal paradox: On the one hand, its domination lies in its ‘progressive’ orientation (an orientation towards the future) which allows it to subsume technological advancements and new social formations, exploiting them to its own advantage: the experimental and de-centralised proliferation of artificial intelligence is already best being utilised to predict market trend and as a growth-tool for corporations such as Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon etc.; the category-defying event of the LGBTQ+ movement is already ‘axiomatised’, neutralised in the service of Netflix, Prime and other privately owned monopolies which can do whatever they want as long as they performatively honour pride month. Yet at the same time, global capitalism appears to structure its discourse retrogressively. In a double-movement, a future-oriented market adaptability is maintained by a past-oriented Nirvana-syndrome (‘let us return to when things were better, less divided…’).

It was in the first place Marx who recognised that economic forces of production and circulation ‘played with’, rearranged, and conditioned the basic coordinates of the social. Yet one of the new symptoms of capitalism is precisely this temporal play which it deploys, creating out of the past a rationale for its own orientation. The question of genesis vs structure is violently suppressed by capitalism: structure posits its own genesis.

Sci-fi films often express our collective fascination with the idea of memory manipulation, dreaming up fictive devices which could reformat thoughts to make our recollection of the past fit with whatever serves dominant financial interests. Yet what films such as Men in Black miss is one of the clear paradoxes of Western ideology: we do not require magical cortex-cleansing devices in order to structure the past according to subjective preferences. The past lends itself to its own reconstruction. Much like human desire is built upon a ground or memory which never really took place (e.g. the Oedipus), the former unity of our deteriorating empires is a self-generative narrative carried by the empty, malleable core of liberal capitalism.

What, then, is to be made with the idea of Europe? Is Europe as an ideological category the spectre haunting a more global disorientation? Can a sense of retrospective identity be located in the greater plurality of political difference, as many cultural optimists still insist? The past, in particular the past of Europe, is always politically coloured. One of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis is that the past is constructed by the priorities of the present. The stoic idiom that ‘the past is behind us, it cannot be changed – it is time to look towards the future’ does not hold up, neither where psychoanalysis nor capitalism is concerned.

In Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, delusional fantasies of Europe take on the same fetishist form as in today’s widespread political disorientation. The Europe-fetish develops amongst a group of Australian and American survivors of a Chinese-Russian nuclear fallout. As survivors of the war face inevitable demise at a global rise in radiation levels, their sorrow is not directed at themselves, but at an impersonal, collective memory of an Europe that will never again be experienced. Yet this symbolic mourning is nevertheless coloured by the clarity of its irony: the fact that the real Europe – a blissful unity of cultural spirit – is a loss that never existed. On the Beach is in this sense a truly Freudian story: even the knowledge that the Europe being fantasised about, the singular event of Europe that will never again be experienced, is not the same Europe that was lost, does not prevent this retroactive fantasy from persisting.

In periods of crisis, we have defended the idea of Europe as the kernel of cultural enlightenment. And yet in the moments preceding crisis, it is even the semblance of European unity which is most clearly missing. Liberal capitalism hails Europe as its greatest achievement, and yet misses the great irony in this idolatry: the greatest enemy to the tradition of European unity has been capitalism itself. Even ‘purely spiritual or ideological’ conflicts (such as the 30 Years’ War) were primarily directed by private financial interests. In the name of Europe we have left Europe in permanent suspense, leaving it perpetually unsettled and directed by economic structures and ideological distortion. In other words, when we speak of Europe, it is never truly about Europe that we speak.

We should begin to see not merely in the opposition to Europe, nor in the defence of Europe, but in the very discourse of Europe – as a generative concept of methods of political justification – an almost unescapable repressive mechanism: a repression not of any given political position, but of the coordinates of critical and speculative inquiry itself. If we can see the profound irony in any appeal to Europe or even the West (whether pro or contra) in our political projects, we can slowly glimpse the necessity of a third alternative. That alternative is one which speaks the language of the common good, the language of a universal event irreducible to crypto-fascist oligarchies or oppressive capitalist democracies (between which the divide is becoming almost non-existent). The language, in short, of a possibility of which the only remaining signifier is the communist hypothesis.