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stead of days; it has been the cause of change more fundamental than
mere palace revolts; it has not produced new prophets or new reli–
gions but political activity. Politics as a collective activity explicitly
oriented toward changing institutions, philosophy as an illimitable
questioning, and, above all, their cross pollination and solidarity ap–
peared here. Here also was born the project of individual and collec–
tive autonomy, carried along by the struggles of peoples to achieve
democracy, a project whose content has come to be of concern to all
sectors of society as an institution (above and beyond narrowly "po–
litical" issues). And it was in Europe also that, for the first time, the
questioning of established institutions, which implies their being
relative, brought about the recognition that all cultures are in fact
equal.
Understood in this way, Europe in fact is not a geographic or
ethnic entity. One of the strongest moments of European creation
took place in New England, at the end of the eighteenth century,
and its reverberations are still being felt, even though Europe itself
has not been terribly lively now for almost two centuries. Japan, the
dissidents of the Peking Wall, millions of people scattered all over
the globe belong to that moment of European creation, but not white
South Africa.
Europe, of course, has not engendered only that quest for free–
dom.
It
was also the social-historical scene in which capitalism was
created, a mad but effective project for the unlimited expansion of
"rational" control. And it was the matrix in which imperialism was
born, the idea of control on a planetary scale. And, finally, it gave
birth as well to a twisted, inverted, monstrous form of the capitalist
project, totalitarianism. No European should display false modesty
with regard to that last little matter. Everywhere and always, men
have been capable of infinite cruelty to each other, but Auschwitz
and the Gulag belong exclusively to us.
Europe didn't invent war, hatred, racism, servitude, wars of
extermination, or forced acculturation: history overflows with these
things. Europe has practiced them, as have other societies, but Eu–
rope's unique quality is that it has answered and fought all of those
horrors from within its own borders.
The project of autonomy, born in Europe, cannot be said to
be a reality because to call Western societies "democratic" is either
an abuse of language or mystification. "European" societies remain
mixed, with
dual institutions,
where social strife, domination by bu–
reaucratic capitalism, imperialism with regard to the Third World co-
