Rudolph Binion教授演讲摘要

      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 acontinent 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 inthat 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.