European Union (9b995f6f)

The European Union appears in the book not simply as a collection of states but as an ambitious project of political unification. Its aspiration to include people across geographical and cultural boundaries is also treated as a problem: the drive toward an unlimited political whole may suppress the historical differences that such a whole cannot easily absorb. The discussion develops this tension into a controversial diagnosis of how anti-Semitism can persist within the language of European openness and tolerance.

Unification and the Political Non-All

The book frames European unification through the distinction between a bounded political people and an unlimited, non-All. It contrasts this European trajectory with the United States, described as a society in which multiple agents remain particular and no single agent embodies the whole. Europe, by contrast, is said to be moving toward an unlimited political non-All through unification: an order imagined as open to everyone, irrespective of geography or culture, with Cyprus and Turkey offered as examples of how far that horizon might extend.

This inclusiveness is not presented as uncomplicated. In the account, a unified Europe can take shape only through the progressive erasure of divisive historical traditions and legitimations. The project’s universal scope thus carries a historical cost: it risks treating specific memories and conflicts as impediments to a common political identity.

Historical Memory and the Argument about Anti-Semitism

The book connects the pressure to erase historical limits with Holocaust revisionism and the moral equalization of victims of the Second World War. These tendencies are described as consequences of a politics that dissolves distinctions into abstract suffering and victimhood. Against that background, the discussion presents Jean-Claude Milner’s argument that Europe’s aspiration to unlimited unification requires a figure cast as its limit.

In Milner’s account, the position once assigned to the Jew in European ideological thought is now occupied by the State of Israel. The book argues that criticism of Israel can therefore assume the form of anti-anti-Semitism: solidarity with victims of the Holocaust is affirmed while Jewish particularity, expressed through a clearly delimited nation-state, is reproached as an obstacle to a world of fluid identities and dissolving traditions. This is offered as a structural interpretation of contemporary European ideology, not as a neutral description of every European institution or criticism of Israel.

The Union’s Significance in the Book’s Critique

The European Union matters here as the political expression of a wider post-national ambition. The critique does not reject inclusion as such; it asks what must be forgotten or excluded for unlimited inclusion to appear possible. In this reading, the rhetoric of openness can conceal a demand that particular historical identities relinquish their claims, while the identity that resists dissolution is marked as the problem to be overcome.

The argument culminates in a warning about the underside of modernity’s confidence in unlimited realization. If every limit is treated as removable, the book suggests, the pursuit of universal unification may generate a new form of exclusion rather than abolish exclusion altogether. The European project thus serves as a case through which the text examines the tension between universal political belonging, historical memory, and the persistence of anti-Semitism.