Rudolph Binion教授演讲摘要
程亦婷整理
European Identity
European Identity can mean either two different things: first, what identifies Europeans collectively; second, the feeling among Europeans. I hope to be able to sort out its perceived identity and its felt identity and to add something new to explain the second of
the two.
The idea of Europe as a single entity generally traced back to the
Roman Empire. But the Roman Empire was
Mediterranean, not European and the prototype of European identity can hardly
have been political. The Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation sounded grand but it had lost all of its dubious
power and dusty prestige long before it declared itself dead in 1806. Napoleon was attempting to unite the
continent by force, but it turned out to be an upsurge of nationalism in the
Europe. Hitler’s cruder attempt to unite
Europe by force on racial principles met with swifter and even bloodier
failure. Nor have dynastic marriages
been able to consolidate much of the European family for long. Nor, finally, have the diverse European
states able to get their political act together by mutual consent: projects for
a sovereign EU keep proving visionary.
In sum, whatever it is that makes for European oneness, it not only isn’t
political, but it resists being politicized.
That unpolitical family feeling among Europeans is frequently said to
have built up in medieval Europe out of certain basics, namely, Latin, Roman
Law, Christianity, feudalism, and somewhat look-alike villages each clustered
around a fortress, a marketplace, a church, and a burial ground. But one problem with the argument is that
most of the supposedly singularizing European facts were mainly west-European
and did not hold for all of western Europe at that. Another bigger problem is logical: common
institutions and usages cannot very well generate and sustain a shared
consciousness unless by the same token their gradual disappearance erodes that
shared consciousness. Among all the
identifying features of medieval Europe, Christianity holds pride of place. Yet neither in its origin nor in its
self-conception was Christianity European.
It was an Oriental mystery cult that spread from Asia to Africa. And Christianity was usually imposed by
authority throughout Europe. Besides,
Christianity divided inside to west Rome and east Byzantine and therefore was
not of inner bonding.
Obviously, something more than has already been mentioned was needed
to account for the deep-lying sense of continental identity. What was that “something
more”?
That “something more” was a European trauma, a mass trauma of epic
proportions: the Black Death. This
ghastly, pitiless pandemic came from Asia Minor to Sicily at the end of 1347 and
then promptly spread to the continent.
In 1347-1352 a continent open-ended to the north and east that was the
territorial stronghold of Christianity, and that was threatened by the Oriental
infidel on its south-central edges, was stricken with a deadly pestilence form
the Orient that hit suddenly, unexpectedly, swiftly, and indiscriminately in all
walks of life. By the time it recessed
in 1352, it had traced the entire present-day map of Europe, Iceland alone
excepted. The traumatic Europe-wide
impact of the Black Death pulled Europe together psychologically. This statement involves two concepts. One is that of psychological coherence within
a group such that its members can act together without realizing it. Psychohistorians call this phenomenon group
process. The other concept is that of
trauma itself over and beyond its narrow received meaning. The word trauma (from the Creek) originally
denoted a purely physical wound, then by extension also a crippling mental
blow. The most momentous aftereffect of
a trauma in the psychohistorical repertoire is for the traumatized individual or
group to relive it unawares. Such
so-called traumatic reliving has been the driving force behind much of history,
particularly of its demonic episodes.
The Black Death was relived undisguised in the first instance in that
it recurred locally across Europe over the centuries with much the same
symptoms, albeit with generally declining death tolls and diminishing
frequency. Europeans relived the
traumatic Black Death figuratively too, in high culture and folk culture alike,
above all through the wildly popular and singularly grisly Dance of the
Dead. The Dance of the Dead was first
performed to the tune of churchyard sermons, then also set to poetry all over
Europe and in the end traced on the walls of all the churches and charnel houses
in Europe. The pestilence was
definitively laid to rest in 1772 with over 100,000 new victims right where it
had first halted in 1352: in the area of Moscow. But Europeans thus terminated their physical
reliving of the pestilence only to resume their figurative reliving of it.
Of greater import for European today, is the indelible birthmark that
Europe’s constitutive trauma left on the continental consciousness that it
created. The pandemic spread its poison
throughout Europe, threatening the very survival of the population that it
thereby joined together psychologically.
Accordingly, the lasting bond that it created among Europeans amounts to
a crisis solidarity in face of a deadly common danger.
History dies hard, if ever.
Europe’s present, failing effort at political integration reflects the
traumatic historic source of felt European identity. The current, ill-starred initiative for
political integration, like all its predecessors, came from Western Europe,
where the plague hit first. Europeans’
widespread instinctive mistrust of Turkey as a candidate for admission into
federative Europe has a conspicuous referent in the trauma of 1347—1352 in that
it was from what is today Turkey that the plague came to Europe. Overall, Europeans’ gut feeling of being
European is mired in the morbidity whence it issued. In the last resort, all life is a losing
battle against death, so that Europe’s traumatic legacy is nothing special. In fact, it can be seen as the very model of
the traumatic pathology to which human history is dangerously subject, and the
more dangerously the longer that pathology goes misunderstood, overlooked, or
ignored.