Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nThis is of course the opening sentence of Germany\u2019s Basic Law, but it is more than just that. The exact same sentence is also the first article of the European Union\u2019s Charter of Fundamental Rights. And the ideal of human dignity is also the anchor of the UN\u2019s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the model for numerous post-war European constitutions. (Though not the Austrian! Not for Hans Kelsen. Though if you ask me, it is never too late.) The assertion that human dignity is \u2018inviolable\u2019, as the origin of law, posits an ideal of Enlightenment universalism that for our purposes is identical with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. It affirms that human dignity is inalienable, and that the authority of law is relative to it. This places the universalist or cosmopolitan tradition much closer to a radical, abolitionist democracy than is commonly recognized, but I\u2019ll put this fact aside and instead ask two questions:<\/p>\n
First, is this principle, expressing the ideal of Enlightenment Universalism, in fact an expression of Europe\u2019s racism and colonialism? Should we defend and reenact the ideal of human dignity as the answer to Europe\u2019s past monumental crimes during the period of Empire \u2013 from the crimes of the Holocaust to those of colonialism? Or is such humanism in fact the cause of these crimes? Must the German Grundgesetz<\/em>, like the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, be \u2018decolonized\u2019?<\/p>\nSecond, if we do stand by the principle, do European liberal thinkers genuinely<\/em> stand by it \u2013 and by genuinely I mean: even when that principle challenges their interest, their identity, their innermost commitments? Or does the wish to ground our commitment to human dignity in historical responsibility also mark the limits of this ideal \u2013 thereby threatening to render it to myth?<\/p>\nI want to deal with the question slowly.<\/p>\n
Take another look at this sentence: Die W\u00fcrde des Menschen ist unantastbar<\/em>. At first glance, it looks less like myth than a straightforward falsity. Human dignity is violable, and it is being violated as we speak. But if it is not a false proposition, what might make it seem like one is also what makes it so poetic, even prophetic. One of the great innovations of the biblical Hebrew prophets was a stylistic one (it sounds like I\u2019m drifting, but I\u2019m not): they used to state the counterfactual, even the impossible, as actually true.<\/p>\nThis stylistic innovation had everything to do with their humanistic discovery. A proposition that asserts descriptively something that at best seems prescriptive (\u2018human dignity is inviolable\u2019) not as an imperative, but as a truth, is strictly speaking either false, or reaching out to describe a higher reality. When you understand that, you understand something very deep in the Hebrew Prophets, in Plato and in Kant, which gives the laconic sentence, \u2018Human dignity is inviolable\u2019 the aesthetics of the sublime. The being that is capable of making that statement \u2013 and experience the feeling that its poetic gesture creates \u2013 has dignity, and commands respect.<\/p>\n
You might think that what we sometimes call reality \u2013 the one in which we buy milk in the supermarket, in which Jewish families are massacred and burnt on the border of Gaza, in which a whole Palestinian population is being starved and bombed \u2013 that this reality renders this ideal a myth, and its poetics to populist kitsch. The decision which it is depends on us.<\/p>\n
Now we might ask ourselves: if the ideal of human dignity is valid, what makes it so? I will not address that here but instead ask what cannot<\/em> make it valid. If the idea that human dignity is inviolable is grounded in the decision<\/em> of Europeans, Germans, Italians, Austrians to live by that principle, then that explains precisely why human dignity is actually violable. An unconditional claim cannot depend on anybody\u2019s decision: it\u2019s all very well that, say, the German people have decided to treat human dignity as inviolable; but we know that they can also decide otherwise.<\/p>\nThis realization brings us to an important point: that the principle of inviolable human dignity cannot depend on national sovereignty, on the decision or the will of a people. On the contrary: human dignity marks the limit of national sovereignty. This point is important because it shows the continuity between abstract talk of dignity and two very concrete European tendencies.<\/p>\n
The first of these is for states to self-restrict their sovereignty through their own prerogatives \u2013 by entering federative constellations, for example, or by submitting to international law or international and European courts. In line with its recognition of human dignity, Europe has moved from national to international to cosmopolitan law \u2013 that is, from a form of law founded on states\u2019 ultimate national sovereignty, to a form of law that respects it, to one that questions it.<\/p>\n
The second tendency is for constitutional patriotism, by which I mean here a very broad idea: the recognition that belonging to a sovereign nation requires neither the right blood nor the right language, history or culture: you belong to the German, Austrian or Italian people by virtue of having German or Italian or Austrian citizenship.<\/p>\n
When, in 2019, Timothy Snyder stood here and called on Europe to be more than its myths, he warned Europeans that \u2018your little, implausible national myths\u2019 allow you \u2018not to see\u2019 what was so unique about Europe, namely \u2018that the European Union is the one successful answer to the most important question in the history of the modern world.\u2019 That question is: \u2018What to do after\u00a0empire? What to do with\u00a0empire?\u2019<\/p>\n
There are, Snyder said, two bad answers \u2013 make nation states, or have more empire. \u2018The European Union is the only new fruitful, productive answer to that question.\u2019 I repeat that, because to respect human dignity by checking national sovereignty, and to replace the nation with a strong concept of citizenship, are the two essential, innovative ingredients of Europe\u2019s answer to that monumental question.<\/p>\n
This answer replaced the Hobbes-Schmittean attachment to a sovereign Leviathan as the answer to \u201cwar of all against all\u201d, and asserted that dignity<\/em> and not fear<\/em> must be the foundation of human polity. To protect dignity through the rule of law, sovereignty has to be questioned, criticized, even deconstructed \u2013 not asserted through sovereign national Leviathans. When Hobbes spoke of the Leviathan, that symbol of a mighty mythical monster, he knew why: because sovereignty requires the idolization of myth. The most important inheritance of Jewish thinking in this continent, ethical monotheism, was always tied to the critique of myth and its idolization: it is worth remembering this tradition that was living in Europe before the war, before its empire crumbled, and worked against the myth of soveregnity in Cohen, Cassirer, Buber and Arendt.<\/p>\nBut note: whereas here lies the essential expression of Europe\u2019s successful answer to its past \u2013 the \u2018most important question of the modern world\u2019 \u2013 namely the replacement of national mythical Leviathans \u2013 European thinkers actually embraced the exact opposite<\/em> of these principles insofar as Europe was looking outside: to the victims of its empire.<\/p>\nIf the crumbling European empire eventually learnt to question sovereignty, the idea was also that for the colonized nations, sovereignty was the vehicle of liberation. By the same token, after the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of European Jewry, the idea was that Jews had to defend themselves and restore their dignity, as a nation, through national soveregnity \u2013 through the creation of a Jewish state.<\/p>\n
And we must be clear: At this moment in history, they were not wrong.<\/p>\n
When applied to Europe\u2019s victims, Europe\u2019s answer can seem like the intellectual baggage of empire, or like the remains of a colonialist ideology that asks to go on imposing itself even after empire has ended. Does Europe\u2019s successful answer to the past of empire apply to empire\u2019s past victims?<\/p>\n
And here is another question: can Europe\u2019s answer to its past survive if we contradict that answer as far as its victims are concerned? If we recognize that others have the right to violate human dignity, we also recognize our duty to respect their right to do so. Human dignity is then important for us, but not inviolable. That\u2019s the crucial point; once you recognize that<\/em>, externally<\/em>, you also recognize something internally \u2013 you simply cannot claim human dignity as inviolable within the continent either. To offer a variation on Snyder\u2019s point: this is the most important question about the answer given to the most important question in modern history.<\/p>\nFor postcolonial thinkers, limiting liberated nations through the cosmopolitan idea of humanity seems like a form of neo-colonialism: imposing the answers of Europe on its victims, preventing their emancipation. When it comes to the Holocaust, the objection is exactly the same. Try suggesting that an Israeli constitution ought to start not with the sovereignty of the Jewish people but with a commitment to human dignity: you will be accused of antisemitism for suggesting to use European cosmopolitan ideals to question Jewish sovereignty, and the Jewish and democratic state \u2013 inviting charges of antisemitism.<\/p>\n
For one side, then, universalist politics seems like racism, or colonialism; for the other, like antisemitism. And since all sides here view sovereignty as the zero-sum condition of their very existence, these doctrines are now not just in conflict but on a collision course: it is not because the sides are so different from another that the situation is so violent and the debate so heated, but because they are so similar.<\/p>\n
For many on the left, certainly the postcolonial left, the Palestinian people are the ultimate embodiment of the struggle against European colonialism. Whoever questions their right to armed resistance, for example by condemning Hamas\u2019s attack on civilians, \u2018relativizes\u2019 or \u2018contextualizes\u2019 colonialism. What right do Europeans have, so the argument goes, to criticize the use of force by those who are not protected by law in the first place?<\/p>\n
On the other hand, in Germany but not just in Germany, we see the same though opposite idea: that Jews, represented by the state of Israel, embody human suffering and the right to self-defense. Whoever demands that the country subscribe to a neutral liberal-democratic constitution \u2013 asserting a state for all citizens \u2013 and be accountable to international law in fact relativizes the Jews\u2019 right to self-defense. Whereas Europe\u2019s answer to its crumbling empire was to deconstruct sovereignty by asserting dignity as its limit, its victims\u2019 answer was to assert national sovereignty as inviolable. Each side pretends to embody something ultimate, absolute, that relativizes the human dignity of those belonging to the other group.<\/p>\n
This was clear in the responses among left intellectual circles to Hamas\u2019 systematic, sadistic massacre of whole families, rape and burning. There can be no ignoring this: the tendency on campuses ranged from exhilaration at this act to tolerating it \u2013 or at least insisting that the Palestinians had the right of \u2018armed resistance\u2019 vis-\u00e0-vis their \u2018colonizers\u2019. If you argued that this was at best excusing genocidal antisemitism and at worst supporting it, the common response was that Hamas is not an antisemitic organization, because the attack targeted Israelis, not Jews as such. But Hamas\u2019s charter of 1988 clearly states: \u2018The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems kill the Jews, and when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say O Moslems, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.\u2019<\/p>\n
There used to be a tendency to ignore this clause or claim that Hamas has given up on it. But it is very plausible that this exact line about the Day of Judgment was present in the minds of those who conducted the massacre. On 7 October quite a few of them seemed to have thought exactly that: that the Day of Judgment had arrived. Tolerating this is widespread, and it is important to say that this toleration proceeds exactly from the idea of the sovereignty of the colonized. The same people \u2013 students, faculty \u2013 who excused the massacre now chant \u2018from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free\u2019. Make no mistake: they do not mean \u2018democratic for all\u2019, but \u2018free from Jews\u2019 \u2013 or, to be precise, they suspend judgment, in order to avoid the allegedly neo-colonialist assumption that they have the right to decide for the Palestinians.<\/p>\n
National sovereignty is treated as the inviolable vehicle of liberation. As Yanis Varoufakis put it: \u2018I was asked whether I condemn Hamas and said no. But I condemn all violence against civilians. I also don\u2019t condemn the Israeli settlers. Also not Benjamin Netanyahu. I condemn us Europeans.\u2019 If you ask me, this is not a way to take historical responsibility as European, but to hide behind it, and make a mockery of it.<\/p>\n
The other end of the spectrum operates by the exact same logic. It is most visible in the false tendency among a certain European liberal center to treat the Holocaust as a \u2018universal\u2019 signifier. As one author has put it, Holocaust commemoration has become \u2018universal\u2019 or \u2018cosmopolitan\u2019 memory. In this view, the event is a symbol, not of a specific past horror, but of any systematic violation of human rights. By the same token, the Holocaust is no longer the exclusive property of the national groups directly involved in the historical event \u2013 Jews on the one hand, Germans, and Europeans more broadly on the other; rather, Holocaust commemoration plays a crucial role reinforcing international law and human rights, becoming \u2018a potential symbol of global solidarity\u2019.<\/p>\n
At first glance, this may seem like a friendly thesis about memory or history as calling for universal commitments. On closer inspection, it should become clear that it has given universalism a bad name, by presenting universalism or memory as a colonial project. The way the Holocaust is commemorated is in the service of particular national projects. This \u2018universal\u2019 symbol therefore excludes from \u2018global solidarity\u2019 those for whom this symbol is anything but accessible. Since Holocaust commemoration has been interpreted as the argument for Jews\u2019 national sovereignty, it does not promote international human rights, especially not for those whose human rights could seem to stand in the way.<\/p>\n
One of the most significant examples of this tendency is the attitude of the German government to the International Criminal Court in the Hague (ICC). The institution of international law and international tribunals authorized to prosecute war crimes developed in the immediate context of Nazi crimes. This is a strong reason for Germany, taking historical responsibility, to be one of the ICC\u2019s main sponsors. The German Foreign Office has gone out of its way in the past to defend the ICC against meddling by the Trump administration, stating that \u2018any attempt to undermine the independence of the court should not be tolerated\u2019. But when the prosecutor in The Hague started an initial investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories, Germany contended that the court had no jurisdiction. Israel, it argued, is not a party to the Rome Statute, which regulates the court\u2019s mandate, and Palestine is not recognized as a state. When the ICC\u2019s justices rejected that opinion \u2013 and with good reason: Palestine, they decided, had been recognized as a \u2018State Party\u2019 to the Rome Statute regardless of whether it is a state or not, meaning that the court has jurisdiction \u2013 a spokesperson for the German Foreign Office stated that \u2018our position on this case is unchanged. According to our legal position, the International Criminal Court and its Office of the Prosecutor do not have jurisdiction.\u2019 The German Foreign Minister repeated the same statement.<\/p>\n
To understand how grave these statements are, it is necessary to put aside the question of the court\u2019s jurisdiction. This is about the court\u2019s authority<\/em>, which to recognize means to take the Court\u2019s decision as sufficient to change Germany\u2019s legal position \u2013 thus limiting its sovereignty. The German government\u2019s claim that the court has no jurisdiction in Palestinian territories, despite the Justices\u2019 decision that it does, denied not just the jurisdiction of the Court over Palestinian territories. It also denied its autonomy and authority.<\/p>\nThis is a good example of the powerful influence of the familiar though unofficial Staatsr\u00e4son doctrine \u2013 which can only be unofficial, since were it not, it would conflict with the constitution. This is what it looks like when the commitment to Europe\u2019s answer to its past, if grounded in history, meets its limit and becomes not just not universal but anti-universal. With its talk of Staatsr\u00e4son Germany asserts its own sovereignty to oppose the autonomy of the court, in order to protect Jewish sovereignty from the court\u2019s authority. Since Germany is a chief sponsor of the Court, this constitutes a serious threat to this institution.<\/p>\n
That was four years ago. We can now see the effects of this questioning of the power of international law. Does the ICC have authority in the territory, as Gaza is flattened and starved, and Israeli cabinet ministers speak about entering Rafah, since \u2018we will not do half a job, but require full annihilation\u2019? If you ask me, it\u2019s too bad that Varoufakis, as a European, doesn\u2019t condemn such a statement.<\/p>\n
This, then, is the question: Is Europe to think of the answer that it has given to the most important question of modern history as its own answer only? As one that may be good here, but that elsewhere isn\u2019t just wrong but also illegitimate<\/em>? Or is that already to betray Europe\u2019s answer \u2013 writing the first sentence in the history of this answer\u2019s decay, also within Europe, and handing over the argument to Europe\u2019s enemies?<\/p>\nConsider the opposition to this talk, here on Judenplatz. Is the idea illegitimate that saving Israel and Palestine from falling into a yet-worse dystopia requires us to imagine a transition of the region in the direction of a European constellation, following the same patterns of that great European answer, with sub-sovereign nations joining a (con)federative common constitution for the whole region? Is this federative idea, which requires taking seriously Immanuel Kant\u2019s warning that peace talks and peace agreements ought not become lies \u2013 lies that lead to zero-sum wars that undermine the very possibility of peace \u2013 is this idea illegitimate?<\/p>\n
If the European answer is delegitimized in this way, how does that reflect on Europe? How does allowing the dehumanizing logic of total war in Israel and Palestine affect Europe\u2019s own Jewish and Muslim citizens? Does this not hand over the argument to the populist nationalist right, which is on the rise all around us, asserting national sovereignty, questioning international law, and claiming a citizenship based on ethnic affiliation?<\/p>\n
This, then, would be my call to Europe: insist on the reality of your ideals. They are all the more important because of historical responsibility, but ultimately, as cosmopolitan ideals, they cannot be understood as being dependent on or limited by historical responsibility. At this dark, difficult juncture at which politics and thinking have now arrived, we must reject the tendency on all sides to undermine Europe\u2019s ideals by a very irresponsible way of understanding historical responsibility. That is the only way to maintain Europe\u2019s historical commitments, and to prevent these commitments themselves from becoming national forms of mythical thinking.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
This speech was hosted by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, and Vienna Festwochen. It was delivered on 7 May 2024 despite attempts by Vienna\u2019s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde to cancel the event: a leader of the Kultusgemeinde claimed that, had he been \u201830 years younger\u2019, he would have come to the talk to \u2018throw eggs on Boehm\u2019, which could have plausibly been interpreted as an invitation for others to act. The talk, which required police and Verfassungsschutz protection, was conducted amid protester disruption.<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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<\/p>\n![Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nThis is of course the opening sentence of Germany\u2019s Basic Law, but it is more than just that. The exact same sentence is also the first article of the European Union\u2019s Charter of Fundamental Rights. And the ideal of human dignity is also the anchor of the UN\u2019s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the model for numerous post-war European constitutions. (Though not the Austrian! Not for Hans Kelsen. Though if you ask me, it is never too late.) The assertion that human dignity is \u2018inviolable\u2019, as the origin of law, posits an ideal of Enlightenment universalism that for our purposes is identical with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. It affirms that human dignity is inalienable, and that the authority of law is relative to it. This places the universalist or cosmopolitan tradition much closer to a radical, abolitionist democracy than is commonly recognized, but I\u2019ll put this fact aside and instead ask two questions:<\/p>\nFirst, is this principle, expressing the ideal of Enlightenment Universalism, in fact an expression of Europe\u2019s racism and colonialism? Should we defend and reenact the ideal of human dignity as the answer to Europe\u2019s past monumental crimes during the period of Empire \u2013 from the crimes of the Holocaust to those of colonialism? Or is such humanism in fact the cause of these crimes? Must the German Grundgesetz<\/em>, like the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, be \u2018decolonized\u2019?<\/p>\nSecond, if we do stand by the principle, do European liberal thinkers genuinely<\/em> stand by it \u2013 and by genuinely I mean: even when that principle challenges their interest, their identity, their innermost commitments? Or does the wish to ground our commitment to human dignity in historical responsibility also mark the limits of this ideal \u2013 thereby threatening to render it to myth?<\/p>\nI want to deal with the question slowly.<\/p>\nTake another look at this sentence: Die W\u00fcrde des Menschen ist unantastbar<\/em>. At first glance, it looks less like myth than a straightforward falsity. Human dignity is violable, and it is being violated as we speak. But if it is not a false proposition, what might make it seem like one is also what makes it so poetic, even prophetic. One of the great innovations of the biblical Hebrew prophets was a stylistic one (it sounds like I\u2019m drifting, but I\u2019m not): they used to state the counterfactual, even the impossible, as actually true.<\/p>\nThis stylistic innovation had everything to do with their humanistic discovery. A proposition that asserts descriptively something that at best seems prescriptive (\u2018human dignity is inviolable\u2019) not as an imperative, but as a truth, is strictly speaking either false, or reaching out to describe a higher reality. When you understand that, you understand something very deep in the Hebrew Prophets, in Plato and in Kant, which gives the laconic sentence, \u2018Human dignity is inviolable\u2019 the aesthetics of the sublime. The being that is capable of making that statement \u2013 and experience the feeling that its poetic gesture creates \u2013 has dignity, and commands respect.<\/p>\nYou might think that what we sometimes call reality \u2013 the one in which we buy milk in the supermarket, in which Jewish families are massacred and burnt on the border of Gaza, in which a whole Palestinian population is being starved and bombed \u2013 that this reality renders this ideal a myth, and its poetics to populist kitsch. The decision which it is depends on us.<\/p>\nNow we might ask ourselves: if the ideal of human dignity is valid, what makes it so? I will not address that here but instead ask what cannot<\/em> make it valid. If the idea that human dignity is inviolable is grounded in the decision<\/em> of Europeans, Germans, Italians, Austrians to live by that principle, then that explains precisely why human dignity is actually violable. An unconditional claim cannot depend on anybody\u2019s decision: it\u2019s all very well that, say, the German people have decided to treat human dignity as inviolable; but we know that they can also decide otherwise.<\/p>\nThis realization brings us to an important point: that the principle of inviolable human dignity cannot depend on national sovereignty, on the decision or the will of a people. On the contrary: human dignity marks the limit of national sovereignty. This point is important because it shows the continuity between abstract talk of dignity and two very concrete European tendencies.<\/p>\nThe first of these is for states to self-restrict their sovereignty through their own prerogatives \u2013 by entering federative constellations, for example, or by submitting to international law or international and European courts. In line with its recognition of human dignity, Europe has moved from national to international to cosmopolitan law \u2013 that is, from a form of law founded on states\u2019 ultimate national sovereignty, to a form of law that respects it, to one that questions it.<\/p>\nThe second tendency is for constitutional patriotism, by which I mean here a very broad idea: the recognition that belonging to a sovereign nation requires neither the right blood nor the right language, history or culture: you belong to the German, Austrian or Italian people by virtue of having German or Italian or Austrian citizenship.<\/p>\nWhen, in 2019, Timothy Snyder stood here and called on Europe to be more than its myths, he warned Europeans that \u2018your little, implausible national myths\u2019 allow you \u2018not to see\u2019 what was so unique about Europe, namely \u2018that the European Union is the one successful answer to the most important question in the history of the modern world.\u2019 That question is: \u2018What to do after\u00a0empire? What to do with\u00a0empire?\u2019<\/p>\nThere are, Snyder said, two bad answers \u2013 make nation states, or have more empire. \u2018The European Union is the only new fruitful, productive answer to that question.\u2019 I repeat that, because to respect human dignity by checking national sovereignty, and to replace the nation with a strong concept of citizenship, are the two essential, innovative ingredients of Europe\u2019s answer to that monumental question.<\/p>\nThis answer replaced the Hobbes-Schmittean attachment to a sovereign Leviathan as the answer to \u201cwar of all against all\u201d, and asserted that dignity<\/em> and not fear<\/em> must be the foundation of human polity. To protect dignity through the rule of law, sovereignty has to be questioned, criticized, even deconstructed \u2013 not asserted through sovereign national Leviathans. When Hobbes spoke of the Leviathan, that symbol of a mighty mythical monster, he knew why: because sovereignty requires the idolization of myth. The most important inheritance of Jewish thinking in this continent, ethical monotheism, was always tied to the critique of myth and its idolization: it is worth remembering this tradition that was living in Europe before the war, before its empire crumbled, and worked against the myth of soveregnity in Cohen, Cassirer, Buber and Arendt.<\/p>\nBut note: whereas here lies the essential expression of Europe\u2019s successful answer to its past \u2013 the \u2018most important question of the modern world\u2019 \u2013 namely the replacement of national mythical Leviathans \u2013 European thinkers actually embraced the exact opposite<\/em> of these principles insofar as Europe was looking outside: to the victims of its empire.<\/p>\nIf the crumbling European empire eventually learnt to question sovereignty, the idea was also that for the colonized nations, sovereignty was the vehicle of liberation. By the same token, after the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of European Jewry, the idea was that Jews had to defend themselves and restore their dignity, as a nation, through national soveregnity \u2013 through the creation of a Jewish state.<\/p>\nAnd we must be clear: At this moment in history, they were not wrong.<\/p>\nWhen applied to Europe\u2019s victims, Europe\u2019s answer can seem like the intellectual baggage of empire, or like the remains of a colonialist ideology that asks to go on imposing itself even after empire has ended. Does Europe\u2019s successful answer to the past of empire apply to empire\u2019s past victims?<\/p>\nAnd here is another question: can Europe\u2019s answer to its past survive if we contradict that answer as far as its victims are concerned? If we recognize that others have the right to violate human dignity, we also recognize our duty to respect their right to do so. Human dignity is then important for us, but not inviolable. That\u2019s the crucial point; once you recognize that<\/em>, externally<\/em>, you also recognize something internally \u2013 you simply cannot claim human dignity as inviolable within the continent either. To offer a variation on Snyder\u2019s point: this is the most important question about the answer given to the most important question in modern history.<\/p>\nFor postcolonial thinkers, limiting liberated nations through the cosmopolitan idea of humanity seems like a form of neo-colonialism: imposing the answers of Europe on its victims, preventing their emancipation. When it comes to the Holocaust, the objection is exactly the same. Try suggesting that an Israeli constitution ought to start not with the sovereignty of the Jewish people but with a commitment to human dignity: you will be accused of antisemitism for suggesting to use European cosmopolitan ideals to question Jewish sovereignty, and the Jewish and democratic state \u2013 inviting charges of antisemitism.<\/p>\nFor one side, then, universalist politics seems like racism, or colonialism; for the other, like antisemitism. And since all sides here view sovereignty as the zero-sum condition of their very existence, these doctrines are now not just in conflict but on a collision course: it is not because the sides are so different from another that the situation is so violent and the debate so heated, but because they are so similar.<\/p>\nFor many on the left, certainly the postcolonial left, the Palestinian people are the ultimate embodiment of the struggle against European colonialism. Whoever questions their right to armed resistance, for example by condemning Hamas\u2019s attack on civilians, \u2018relativizes\u2019 or \u2018contextualizes\u2019 colonialism. What right do Europeans have, so the argument goes, to criticize the use of force by those who are not protected by law in the first place?<\/p>\nOn the other hand, in Germany but not just in Germany, we see the same though opposite idea: that Jews, represented by the state of Israel, embody human suffering and the right to self-defense. Whoever demands that the country subscribe to a neutral liberal-democratic constitution \u2013 asserting a state for all citizens \u2013 and be accountable to international law in fact relativizes the Jews\u2019 right to self-defense. Whereas Europe\u2019s answer to its crumbling empire was to deconstruct sovereignty by asserting dignity as its limit, its victims\u2019 answer was to assert national sovereignty as inviolable. Each side pretends to embody something ultimate, absolute, that relativizes the human dignity of those belonging to the other group.<\/p>\nThis was clear in the responses among left intellectual circles to Hamas\u2019 systematic, sadistic massacre of whole families, rape and burning. There can be no ignoring this: the tendency on campuses ranged from exhilaration at this act to tolerating it \u2013 or at least insisting that the Palestinians had the right of \u2018armed resistance\u2019 vis-\u00e0-vis their \u2018colonizers\u2019. If you argued that this was at best excusing genocidal antisemitism and at worst supporting it, the common response was that Hamas is not an antisemitic organization, because the attack targeted Israelis, not Jews as such. But Hamas\u2019s charter of 1988 clearly states: \u2018The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems kill the Jews, and when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say O Moslems, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.\u2019<\/p>\nThere used to be a tendency to ignore this clause or claim that Hamas has given up on it. But it is very plausible that this exact line about the Day of Judgment was present in the minds of those who conducted the massacre. On 7 October quite a few of them seemed to have thought exactly that: that the Day of Judgment had arrived. Tolerating this is widespread, and it is important to say that this toleration proceeds exactly from the idea of the sovereignty of the colonized. The same people \u2013 students, faculty \u2013 who excused the massacre now chant \u2018from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free\u2019. Make no mistake: they do not mean \u2018democratic for all\u2019, but \u2018free from Jews\u2019 \u2013 or, to be precise, they suspend judgment, in order to avoid the allegedly neo-colonialist assumption that they have the right to decide for the Palestinians.<\/p>\nNational sovereignty is treated as the inviolable vehicle of liberation. As Yanis Varoufakis put it: \u2018I was asked whether I condemn Hamas and said no. But I condemn all violence against civilians. I also don\u2019t condemn the Israeli settlers. Also not Benjamin Netanyahu. I condemn us Europeans.\u2019 If you ask me, this is not a way to take historical responsibility as European, but to hide behind it, and make a mockery of it.<\/p>\nThe other end of the spectrum operates by the exact same logic. It is most visible in the false tendency among a certain European liberal center to treat the Holocaust as a \u2018universal\u2019 signifier. As one author has put it, Holocaust commemoration has become \u2018universal\u2019 or \u2018cosmopolitan\u2019 memory. In this view, the event is a symbol, not of a specific past horror, but of any systematic violation of human rights. By the same token, the Holocaust is no longer the exclusive property of the national groups directly involved in the historical event \u2013 Jews on the one hand, Germans, and Europeans more broadly on the other; rather, Holocaust commemoration plays a crucial role reinforcing international law and human rights, becoming \u2018a potential symbol of global solidarity\u2019.<\/p>\nAt first glance, this may seem like a friendly thesis about memory or history as calling for universal commitments. On closer inspection, it should become clear that it has given universalism a bad name, by presenting universalism or memory as a colonial project. The way the Holocaust is commemorated is in the service of particular national projects. This \u2018universal\u2019 symbol therefore excludes from \u2018global solidarity\u2019 those for whom this symbol is anything but accessible. Since Holocaust commemoration has been interpreted as the argument for Jews\u2019 national sovereignty, it does not promote international human rights, especially not for those whose human rights could seem to stand in the way.<\/p>\nOne of the most significant examples of this tendency is the attitude of the German government to the International Criminal Court in the Hague (ICC). The institution of international law and international tribunals authorized to prosecute war crimes developed in the immediate context of Nazi crimes. This is a strong reason for Germany, taking historical responsibility, to be one of the ICC\u2019s main sponsors. The German Foreign Office has gone out of its way in the past to defend the ICC against meddling by the Trump administration, stating that \u2018any attempt to undermine the independence of the court should not be tolerated\u2019. But when the prosecutor in The Hague started an initial investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories, Germany contended that the court had no jurisdiction. Israel, it argued, is not a party to the Rome Statute, which regulates the court\u2019s mandate, and Palestine is not recognized as a state. When the ICC\u2019s justices rejected that opinion \u2013 and with good reason: Palestine, they decided, had been recognized as a \u2018State Party\u2019 to the Rome Statute regardless of whether it is a state or not, meaning that the court has jurisdiction \u2013 a spokesperson for the German Foreign Office stated that \u2018our position on this case is unchanged. According to our legal position, the International Criminal Court and its Office of the Prosecutor do not have jurisdiction.\u2019 The German Foreign Minister repeated the same statement.<\/p>\nTo understand how grave these statements are, it is necessary to put aside the question of the court\u2019s jurisdiction. This is about the court\u2019s authority<\/em>, which to recognize means to take the Court\u2019s decision as sufficient to change Germany\u2019s legal position \u2013 thus limiting its sovereignty. The German government\u2019s claim that the court has no jurisdiction in Palestinian territories, despite the Justices\u2019 decision that it does, denied not just the jurisdiction of the Court over Palestinian territories. It also denied its autonomy and authority.<\/p>\nThis is a good example of the powerful influence of the familiar though unofficial Staatsr\u00e4son doctrine \u2013 which can only be unofficial, since were it not, it would conflict with the constitution. This is what it looks like when the commitment to Europe\u2019s answer to its past, if grounded in history, meets its limit and becomes not just not universal but anti-universal. With its talk of Staatsr\u00e4son Germany asserts its own sovereignty to oppose the autonomy of the court, in order to protect Jewish sovereignty from the court\u2019s authority. Since Germany is a chief sponsor of the Court, this constitutes a serious threat to this institution.<\/p>\nThat was four years ago. We can now see the effects of this questioning of the power of international law. Does the ICC have authority in the territory, as Gaza is flattened and starved, and Israeli cabinet ministers speak about entering Rafah, since \u2018we will not do half a job, but require full annihilation\u2019? If you ask me, it\u2019s too bad that Varoufakis, as a European, doesn\u2019t condemn such a statement.<\/p>\nThis, then, is the question: Is Europe to think of the answer that it has given to the most important question of modern history as its own answer only? As one that may be good here, but that elsewhere isn\u2019t just wrong but also illegitimate<\/em>? Or is that already to betray Europe\u2019s answer \u2013 writing the first sentence in the history of this answer\u2019s decay, also within Europe, and handing over the argument to Europe\u2019s enemies?<\/p>\nConsider the opposition to this talk, here on Judenplatz. Is the idea illegitimate that saving Israel and Palestine from falling into a yet-worse dystopia requires us to imagine a transition of the region in the direction of a European constellation, following the same patterns of that great European answer, with sub-sovereign nations joining a (con)federative common constitution for the whole region? Is this federative idea, which requires taking seriously Immanuel Kant\u2019s warning that peace talks and peace agreements ought not become lies \u2013 lies that lead to zero-sum wars that undermine the very possibility of peace \u2013 is this idea illegitimate?<\/p>\nIf the European answer is delegitimized in this way, how does that reflect on Europe? How does allowing the dehumanizing logic of total war in Israel and Palestine affect Europe\u2019s own Jewish and Muslim citizens? Does this not hand over the argument to the populist nationalist right, which is on the rise all around us, asserting national sovereignty, questioning international law, and claiming a citizenship based on ethnic affiliation?<\/p>\nThis, then, would be my call to Europe: insist on the reality of your ideals. They are all the more important because of historical responsibility, but ultimately, as cosmopolitan ideals, they cannot be understood as being dependent on or limited by historical responsibility. At this dark, difficult juncture at which politics and thinking have now arrived, we must reject the tendency on all sides to undermine Europe\u2019s ideals by a very irresponsible way of understanding historical responsibility. That is the only way to maintain Europe\u2019s historical commitments, and to prevent these commitments themselves from becoming national forms of mythical thinking.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\nThis speech was hosted by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, and Vienna Festwochen. It was delivered on 7 May 2024 despite attempts by Vienna\u2019s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde to cancel the event: a leader of the Kultusgemeinde claimed that, had he been \u201830 years younger\u2019, he would have come to the talk to \u2018throw eggs on Boehm\u2019, which could have plausibly been interpreted as an invitation for others to act. The talk, which required police and Verfassungsschutz protection, was conducted amid protester disruption.<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n[ad_2]\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] When I was invited to give this \u2018Speech to Europe\u2019 on Judenplatz, there was a personal reason why I was delighted to accept. 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