| |||
|---|---|---|---|
Europe and the World: World War I as a Crisis of Universalism
About The Department of European Languages and Studies at UC Irvine is organizing a conference on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I to discuss the significance of the war for world history. While the rise of nationalism motivated many of the conflicts that sparked the war, the ideological claims on all sides also invoked universalist ideals about civilization and culture. A first theme in the reevaluation of World War I involves the conflicts between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that have continued to frame inner-European relations in the last century. But while the moves toward European unification today still depend upon an Enlightenment cosmopolitan project that many see as a blueprint for a European form of peace that can gradually expand outward to the rest of the world, the universalist aspirations of this project have since been called into question on many fronts. As Dipesh Chakrabarty, citing Hans-Georg Gadamer, writes, Europe “since 1914 has become provincialized,” and this statement conceives World War I as a fundamental turning point, the beginning of a transitional era in the 20th century in which Europe lost both its imperialist political hegemony and its central ideological position as the locus of civilization and modernity. The history and goals of imperialism, while having in some sense displaced European conflicts into the colonies for two centuries, also ensured that European wars would spill over into that colonial space as well. If World War I contained imperialism as a backdrop, Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt have shown that the “world” wars represented a culmination of the imperialist model that extended it back into Europe. The goal of this conference will be to evaluate the significance of World War I as a defining moment in the relationship of Europe to the rest of the world, both politically and culturally. The plan of the conference will be to discuss the conflicts, first, within Europe between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as a universalist political project and, second, between imperial politics and universal ideals outside of Europe that have defined World War I as the transition point to a new structure of global relations and postcolonial understandings of cultural identity. The premise of the conference is that these two issues are integrally linked through the issue of universalism. In the first place, papers will address the way in which 1914 signaled the collapse of decades-long European initiatives for international mediation and arbitration intended to solve conflicts peacefully. While the Peace of Westphalia is often cited as the foundation for a nation-state system that maintained stability for 250 years by suppressing religious conflict, this very rise of nationalism has also been blamed for the wars of the 20th century. Instead of ending a series of small wars and establishing Europe as a model of peace, cooperation, and prosperity, Europe became the epicenter of the most extensive and violent wars ever seen. What are the reasons for both the relative peace before 1914 and the intensity of conflict afterwards? Curiously, the idealism with which the combatants greeted the 1914 call to arms as an opportunity to defend “civilization” on the one side and “Kultur” on the other, as jingoistic as it had become in the war context, can be interpreted both as a culmination of nationalist movements but also as an indication for the way in which nationalism had become tied up with the universal claims of European modernity. In fact, the cosmopolitan vision laid out by Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas continues to motivate the contemporary project of European Union as a continuation of a Kantian project of world peace. On the other hand, a central component of the ideological conflict between France and German-speaking Europe since the Napoleonic Wars was the dispute over whether the universalism of a “Western” project, however defined, might simply be a cover for imperialist ambitions. While this critique was one that Germany and France used against each other during and after World War I, it could also describe the colonialist relationship of Europe to the world. A new look at the run-up to World War I can perhaps shed light on this long-term significance of nationalism. Was there, as Hannah Arendt suggests, an inherently benign form of liberal nationalism that was then distorted into a new culture of pan-nationalist movements in the 19th century that led to the virulence of 20th century wars? Or was the inherent conflict potential of nationalism as a new kind of secular political theology always in fact present, but merely postponed by the fact that Europe could for centuries export its conflicts elsewhere by channeling ideological and economic differences into a competition for colonies? This last question suggests that World War I was a turning point not just in Europe but within a world-historical development of the history of colonialism, and this relation of World War I to this colonial history will be the second primary theme of the conference. The European cosmopolitan project continued the Enlightenment project of a law based on reason rather than power that promised to shift global relations away from pre-modern “despotic” structures both in Europe and in the rest of the world. The paradox of this move was that its universalist and emancipatory aspirations coincided with the spread of a de facto European political and intellectual hegemony that even extended to the foundations of postcolonial theory, which, as Chakrabarty points out, depends just as firmly on a tradition and trajectory of European Enlightenment thinking as the structures that it contests. The second set of questions for the conference involves the significance of World War I for the history of colonialism. The outcome of the war clearly created European winners and losers within the colonial race, permanently shutting Germany out of the competition outside of Europe and perhaps thereby fostering its pursuit of imperialist hegemony within Europe. But as the war also undermined the unity of European hegemony from the perspective of colonized peoples and opened up new forms of nationalist thinking, for instance in the Arab world, World War I also signals the beginning of postcolonialism. To what extent and in what ways did World War I serve as a catalyst for anti-colonialism? Did the intertwining of nationalist and cosmopolitan perspectives in World War I rhetoric form the basis for anti-colonialist discourse and aspirations? How does World War I fit into the broader trajectory of Europe’s colonialist history? Would the avoidance of European war through peace initiatives have entailed the stabilization and prolongation of colonialism? While the focus of the conference will be on World War I as a turning point in European relations, both within Europe and with the rest of the world, these questions have important consequences for our current understanding of Europe and its continuing role in a global context. The conference is free and open to the public. __________________ Sponsors Organized by the UC Irvine Department of European Languages and Studies and sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Los Angeles, the Consulate General of Germany in Los Angeles, the University of California Office of the President, the UCI Institute for International, Global and Regional Studies, the UCI Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, the UCI Humanities Commons, the UCI Department of History, the UCI Humanities Dean’s Office, the UCI Office of Research, and the UCI Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries. __________________ Contact David T. Pan, dtpan@uci.edu
| |||
