Re:Thinking Europe

What is Europe? This question is ever more pressing, as present day Europe wallows in crisis - its deepest since the process of European integration took off in the 1950s. The current state of affairs sets the stage for this book. It brings together leading international thinkers and scholars of different generations in a feverish quest to better understand Europe's present state. In their essays these authors engage in the paradoxes and puzzles of European identity and culture. They present new answers to the eternal question regarding 'the essence of Europe'. An anthology of influential texts from the making of present-day Europe completes the book as a very European exercise in thinking and re-thinking Europa, its culture, history and present.

Yoeri Albrecht is the director of De Balie in Amsterdam. He is also the president of Vereniging Veronica, owner of (among others) the Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau and co-initiator of the European Press Prize. Mathieu Segers (1976) is Professor of Contemporary European History and European Integration at Maastricht University.

Preface: Re-creating Europe - Yori Albrecht Introduction - Mathieu Segers European Unity and its Vicissitudes (1959) - Isaiah Berlin CONTEMPORARY ESSAYS Homogeneity and Diversity - Tom Holland On the Identity of the West - Larry Siedentop The Cowardly Lion in Quest of Peace - Stella Ghervas Afterglow of a Dead World - Benno Barnard Anatomy of Resentment - Ivan Krastev Thinking Europe -- No Future? - Philip Blom My EUtopia: Empathy in a Union of Others - Kalypso Nicolaïdis Culture and the EU's Struggle for Legitimacy - Claudia Sternberg HISTORICAL TEXTS Thoughts on the Future (1943) - Jean Monnet Extracts from a speech in the Main Auditorium of Cologne University (1946) - Konrad Adenauer Extracts from a press conference (1960) - Charles de Gaulle The Tragedy of Central Europe (1984) - Milan Kundera The Bruges Speech (1988) - Margaret Thatcher Extracts from a speech in the European Parliament (1994) - Václav Havel Extracts from a speech in the European Parliament (1995) - François Mitterrand The Special Quality of Europe is Culture (2001) - György Konrád The Europe of Melancholy (2006) - Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa New Alliances and Recomposition Logic (2008) - Édouard Balladur Remarks to the Turkish Parliament (2009) - Barack Obama Germany in and with and for Europe (2011) - Helmut Schmidt BIOGRAPHIES