Monique Castillio

 

Abstract

The Cold War has achieved a world order based on a balance of terror, a terrifying but ideologically and militarily transparent order: two enemy camps facing each other. The end of this dualistic geopolitics has brought to light a new, more frightening world, a world crossed by versatile, mobile and unpredictable threats, a world looking for guidance.

What becomes then of the universalistic vocation of Europe as a ‘spiritual engine’ of world history? This universalistic vocation finds its modern philosophical foundation in Kant’s work: for Kant, the European nations are united, in depth, by a common ideal which consists in achieving “the way for a distant international government for which there is no precedent in world history” (Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View).

Today, Kant’s anticipation of the fate of Europe is little known and even misread. The American journalist Robert Kagan identifies Kantian pacifism with the political and military weakness of Europe; the British political scientist Robert Cooper identifies it with a post-heroic postmodernity. Kantian cosmopolitanism is considered obsolete. Europeans themselves cultivate pluralism, and sometimes even relativism, so as not to be suspected of hegemonic universalism.

We have forgotten that Kant does not conceive universalism as domination, but as influence (Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch). From an anthropological point of view, human universality rests on ‘the faculty of perfecting oneself’ (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View), matching the natural character of our species. From a historical point of view, the overcoming of civilization by moralization signifies the dynamics of surpassing civilization by civilization itself. The European civilization is only by chance showing the way, since it is also surpassed, from the inside, by the universality which crosses it.