Europe

Europe appears in the book less as a stable geographical setting than as a political form under dispute. Its unification promises an expansive community open across inherited boundaries, yet that promise can depend on suppressing historical differences and designating an excluded figure as the obstacle to unity. The central argument is that Europe cannot overcome exclusion merely by proclaiming universal inclusion: it must confront the social antagonisms and historical exclusions concealed by that proclamation.

Europe and the Non-All

The book contrasts two accounts of democracy. In its account of the United States, democracy is organized through a plurality of agents, none of which can claim to embody the whole; even a majority, when it speaks as a particular group, takes on the character of a minority. Europe, by contrast, is associated with a tradition of democracy understood through the rule of a unified People. These are not simply national styles: they mark different ways of drawing the boundary between the political whole and the parts that compose it.

The argument then complicates that contrast. The project of European unification is described as moving toward an unlimited political community, with possible membership extending across geographical and cultural boundaries, as far as Cyprus and Turkey. But an all-inclusive Europe cannot be built by inclusion alone. Its progress is also associated with the erasure of historical traditions and memory, as though the differences that shaped its component societies could be set aside in favor of a common political identity. Europe’s promised universality therefore contains a tension: the more it imagines itself as open to everyone, the more urgently it may seek a boundary against which to define that openness.

Historical Memory and the Figure of Exclusion

The discussion links that tension to Holocaust revisionism and the moral equalization of suffering in the Second World War. When historical distinctions are flattened into a generalized account of victimhood, specific limits and responsibilities can disappear. The result is not simply broader compassion; it can also be a politics in which historical memory is displaced by an abstract sameness of suffering.

In the analysis of Jean-Claude Milner, Jews occupy the position of a structural obstacle in the European ideological imagination: a particularity that the imagined universal community cannot fully absorb. The book traces changing accusations attached to that figure. Early modern antisemitism condemned Jews for maintaining a distinct way of life rather than dissolving into secular citizenship. Later chauvinist imperialism cast them in the opposite role, as cosmopolitan and rootless figures supposedly dissolving particular national identities. In the contemporary setting discussed by the book, the charge returns in a new form: the State of Israel is treated as an insistence on particular identity that obstructs a universalizing Europe. The argument presents these reversals as transformations of an exclusionary structure, not as evidence that the accusations are true. It identifies Hitler as the most radical point in the longer tradition of imagining Jews as a problem requiring a solution.

A Critique of the Explanation

The book does not leave Milner’s account unchallenged. It argues that his analysis gives insufficient attention to markets, money, and the way social antagonism can be displaced onto the figure of the Jew. In that displacement, conflict internal to society is represented instead as a struggle between a harmonious social whole and an external intruder. The imagined resolution is to remove the figure blamed for imbalance, leaving the relations that produce the antagonism itself unexamined.

This criticism also changes how European unification is understood. Antisemitism need not be read only as the necessary counterpart of an unlimited Europe. It can also reveal that Europe is being imagined as a bounded whole which requires a constitutive exception. The proposed alternative is a non-All Europe: not a completed unity without divisions, but a political form in which no single identity has to function as the excluded limit of the whole. In this account, particular identities are not simply dissolved by global capitalism. They can be maintained alongside an increasingly unified field of capital, forming part of the order rather than standing outside it.

Europe, Israel, and Conflicting Political Claims

The analysis uses the relationship between Europe, Israel, and Palestinians to show why competing political descriptions cannot be reconciled by retreating to a supposedly neutral middle ground. One public position treats criticism of Israeli policy and European solidarity with Palestinians as a continuation of antisemitism by other means. Another describes the occupation of the West Bank as a continuation of European colonialism and argues that appeals to the Holocaust can be used to legitimize that expansion. The book insists that both dangers must be recognized: antisemitism can persist within contemporary political discourse, while historical suffering can also be invoked to shield present political actions from criticism.

Its conclusion is that criticism of antisemitism and criticism of Israeli policy are not mutually exclusive tasks. Treating either as a substitute for the other conceals the connection between them. The same analysis questions the image of Europe as simply tolerant and multicultural when Muslims are cast as its threatening cultural Other. These opposed exclusions expose the instability of claims that Europe has already achieved universal openness. The alternative is neither to endorse one accusation against the other nor to collapse their differences, but to examine how each can become a symptom of what the other leaves unaddressed.

Europe as a Revolutionary Horizon

Europe also figures as a horizon in the discussion of the October Revolution. The revolution is described as having understood itself as the beginning of a wider European revolutionary process, one that could survive and fulfill itself only through an expansion beyond the Soviet Union. When that expansion failed, the revolutionary dynamic turned inward. Forced collectivization and industrialization are interpreted as substitutes for the spread of revolution abroad and as attempts to reshape Soviet society from within.

This account resists two simple judgments: that Stalinism was merely an accidental departure from the revolution, and that the revolutionary project was totalitarian at its core from the beginning. The book instead holds together the revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. In that frame, Europe is not only the name of a political unity in crisis; it is also the unrealized international horizon against which the inward transformation of the Soviet state becomes legible.