Volume 20, No. 2, Fall 2025

FORTHCOMING

The Idea of Europe

Kant's Treatise on Peace as a Draft for an International Peace Order
Ulrich W. Diehl | Heidelberg, Germany

Immanuel Kant's treatise on perpetual peace has been highly influential in international law, but it is hardly studied by politicians anymore. In his treatise, Kant has extended the idea of the social contract to relations among nations in order to contribute to lasting peace among them and their peoples. This essay outlines the key concepts and main principles Kant proposed, and I investigate how they could still be received and understood by the regimes and peoples of the three current hegemonic powers, China, Russia, and the United States. It is sometimes assumed that humanity is currently moving from a bipolar to a multipolar world order. However, there are two important factors that cause tensions around the idea of a so-called liberal world order governed by the rules of international law: Hegemonic powers do rarely follow these rules and instead adhere to historical myths about their own importance and special role among other nations. In the case of the United States, this historical myth is the rather messianic idea of American exceptionalism. Although the European Union is economically, militarily, and politically dependent on the United States, it tends to conceive of itself not as a mere vassal of the United States, but rather even as the vanguard of Western civilization.

Keywords: Kant, Immanuel; perpetual peace; international law; hegemonic powers; liberal world order; People's Republic of China; Russian Federation; United States of America.

Who is European Now? From Karl Jaspers to the War Against Ukraine
Mats Andrén | University of Gothenburg, Sweden

After the Second World War, Karl Jaspers and others from the community of philosophers and intellectuals were eagerly reflecting on Europe, Europeanness, and the future of Europe. After 1989, philosophers returned to pondering these questions yet again. My essay addresses how the idea of Europe has been reflected at these historical times, with a focus on three speeches, namely, one given by Karl Jaspers, one by José Ortega y Gasset, and one by Jacques Derrida. From this exploration, key themes are selected including special attention to the idea of Europe in the wake of Russia's war against Ukraine that started on 24 February 2022.

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End of History or post-European Era and New Century of Wars? Francis Fukuyama vs. Jan Patočka
Václav Němec | Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

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Revisiting Friedrich Nietzsche's "Good European" with Karl Jaspers
Ruth A. Burch | Ludes University, Lugano–Pazzallo, Switzerland

The aim of this presentation is to revisit Friedrich Nietzsche’s Good European with Karl Jaspers to the end of elaborating an assessment of their contribution towards shifting limits regarding contemporary culture and community that is in crisis. I argue that good Europeans explore the creation of new categories, delimitations and possibilities. Nietzsche conceives his self of the free spirit not as a nationalist but as a good European who is keen to abolish the nation-state, who is a European of a cosmopolitan taste, and who "knows the sea, adventure, and the Orient." Nietzsche is not essentializing and defending the Germanisation for, according to him, there is and was no German culture. Rather, for Nietzsche, in Germany there have always been a few exceptionally cultivated individuals. As cultural philosophers Nietzsche and Jaspers are not only concerned with Europe but also with the entire world. Jaspers speaks in this context of world philosophy. In Jaspers, philosophy is a practice that aims at the creation of both existential and political freedom resulting from truth obtained in the loving struggle in authentic communication.

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Europe between Athens and Rome: Phenomenological Discourses on Europe in Hannah Arendt, Reiner Schürmann, and Jan Patočka
Golfo Maggini | University of Ioannina, Greece

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Europe Beyond the Wrecking
Laura Tușa-Ilea | Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania

In this essay, I propose an idea of how to conceive Europe that takes into account the failure of a model of Promethean expansion which led to the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century. Moreover, just as the flourishing civilizations of the Druids and of Troy disappeared, so too new values may emerge starting from the disquieting perspective of the end of the actual civilization. Paradoxically, instead of recreating bunkers or time shelters, as the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov calls them, this very constitutive situation, on the contrary, proposes by way of integrating the “myth of the Minotaur”—who is the abandoned and expelled one—"catalogs of the perishable" (Gospodinov), "life on the edge" (Volodymyr Yermolenko and Tetyana Ogarkova), "ethics of the passerby" (Achille Mbembe), and "intellectual nomadism" (Elif Shafak). By opening dialogues with writers and thinkers such as Amin Maalouf, Milan Kundera, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka, the essay proposes an idea of homeland—not in the form of identity politics, but of fictional politics capable of leaving behind more enduring traces than the specters of contemporary wars.

Keywords: Greek polis; intellectual nomadism; political failure; need for roots; life on the edge; histories of the Unhappened; the Minotaur myth.

The Idea of Europe and Beyond: Husserl, Patočka, Derrida, Spivak
Eddo Evink | Open University, Netherlands

This essay aims to articulate a few answers to the question of what remains of the idea of Europe. After a brief outline of this idea in the work of Edmund Husserl, the thoughts on Europe by Jan Patočka and Jacques Derrida are discussed and then compared to the views of Gayatri Spivak. Finally, several insights into the idea of Europe emerge from comparing these different viewpoints.

Keywords: phenomenology; deconstruction; responsibility; postcolonialism; post-Europe.

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