Europa wagen!

The very title of this book (“Dare being European!”) signals the engagement with Europe as an imperative. Its three larger sections reflect this engagement in some of its educational, historical and present-day dimensions. In these reflections, interventions and essays there is a strong emphasis on the actual intellectual substance of discourses on Europe with explicit references to the rather surprisingly poetic rendering of European concerns.

The implication of the texts is an appeal, namely to take up current and future discourses on Europe more pro-actively and to counteract constructively tendencies that undermine the project of European integration, such as renewed nationalism, ill-conceived and outdated conceptions of sovereignty. We need to entertain a different understanding of ‘defending Europe’, which does not primarily mean to secure the borders of the European Union but to defend Europe from within, including its cultural values, and reform and enhance its democratic structures.