Nobody Cares, Guys: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)

“On May 31st 2003, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida—two of Europe’s best-known writers/philosophers/intellectuals—published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung an article entitled ‘Unsere Erneuerung. Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas’ (‘Our Renewal. After the War: The Rebirth of Europe’) in which they argued that America’s new and dangerous path was an urgent wake-up call for Europe: an occasion for Europeans to rethink their common identity, draw upon their shared Enlightenment values and forge a distinctive European stance in world affairs.

Their essay was timed to coincide with the appearance all over Western Europe of similar essays by equally renowned public figures: Umberto Eco in La Repubblica; his Italian colleague the philosopher Gianni Vattimo in La Stampa; the Swiss President of the German Academy of Arts, Adolf Muschg, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater in El País; and a lone American, the philosopher Richard Rorty, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. At almost any point in the previous century an intellectual initiative on this scale, in such prominent newspapers and by figures of comparable standing, would have been a major public event: a manifesto and call to arms that would have rippled through the political and cultural community.

But the Derrida-Habermas initiative, even though it articulated sentiments shared by many Europeans, passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored its authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. The governments of a significant number of European states, including France, Germany, Belgium and later Spain, undoubtedly sympathized in general terms with the views expressed in these essays; but it did not occur to any of them to invite Professors Derrida or Eco in for consultation. The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition—and no-one came.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)