At the end of this year - and decade - current events and memory intersect around a few images, revealing how the "question of Europe" is evolving. The effect is rather discordant. It is the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, which seems to verify the advance towards a "post-national" future, even at the cost of compromises in terms of democratization and extension of rights. But it is also the racist drift of public opinions, of which the "minaret vote" is a sign (precisely because Switzerland, which is not officially a member of the EU, reflects our image back to us). To which must be added the equivocal assessment of the twenty years of reunification of the European continent. Nothing simple, nothing homogeneous, nothing fatal. But a nagging question: what prevails today, the first steps of a new citizenship or identity regressions? The reflections I propose are quite pessimistic. But they want to suggest that there are always more possibilities for evolution, or bifurcation, than one imagines in advance.

Let's go back to 1989. For half of Europe, it was a real revolution: opening of borders, overthrow of a power machine, transformation of social relations, mutation of discourses, often at the initiative of the citizens themselves. Lenin's definition: "those at the top could no longer govern, those at the bottom no longer wanted to be governed" as before, applies perfectly. But this revolution was not perceived in the same way from the inside and the outside. And its aftermath did nothing to clear up misunderstandings. This is evidenced by a persistent difficulty in treating the "new members" of the Union on an equal footing, enjoying the same capacities as the "founding members", and a symmetrical tendency of the nations of Eastern Europe to act as reactive forces, in perpetual quest for recognition. This misunderstanding is all the more strange because, in many respects, the transformations of the political landscape from one end of Europe to the other proceed from the same causes and lead to the same divisions (increasingly irreducible, it must be said, to the old notions of right and left).

To a large extent, these anamorphoses result from the combined effect of Cold War ideologies and economic globalization. The revolutions of the East had nothing essentially to do with the generalization of the market, let alone with the aspiration to unbridled individualism. They demanded national independence, ideological pluralism, and public freedoms. But the reconversion of the nomenklaturas to the role of brokers of transnational capitalism, the obsession with the Russian threat, and the perception of the end of the Cold War as an absolute victory of the principles of economic liberalism led to privileging the military alliance with the USA, and to reproducing the model of subordination of the State to the market which appeared as the most "Western". There was little chance that it would be otherwise since, at the same time, the States that had developed the "European social model" (the result of a whole history of class struggles, wars and reconstructions, colonizations and decolonizations, but also a response to the communist challenge), were in the process of dismantling it. The reunification of Europe therefore coincided with the adoption of an agenda of deregulation and generalized privatization, whose legal consecration certainly failed with the withdrawal of the 2004 treaty, but which continued continuously in practice.

The lesson to be learned is particularly this: while "Europeans" tend to see their history as endogenous, a play in which they are the only actors (which also means that they represent it as the confirmation of an identity, the culmination of a collective adventure, and the repair of mutually inflicted wounds), this history is largely commanded from elsewhere. It does not take place in Europe, but in a province of the world, whose autonomy is increasingly relative. This is true from the point of view of social power relations as well as from the point of view of resources or cultural influences. Among the consequences of this evolution towards a partly unacknowledged neoliberalism, two are notable, whose logics should not be confused, but whose superposition contributes to making xenophobia today a determining factor in politics in Europe.

The first is that the working class (in the broad sense, oscillating between wage labor and precariousness) confronted with the devastation of the living environment, the dismantling of social security, the annihilation of qualification prospects, the extension and institutionalization of unemployment, the compression of incomes, tends to identify the defense of its status - of which often only the memory loaded with bitterness remains - with the exclusion of migrants. Their arrival and permanent settlement, generation after generation, symbolize the irresistible nature of capitalist globalization. As if, in the decomposition of this citizenship which had the national-social State as its framework, and in the absence of a credible alternative, the fetishization of the national form and the conversion of the foreigner into an enemy could ward off the disappearance of the social content.

The second phenomenon is quite different: it is the confiscation of politics in Europe by governments and notably those of the (relatively) most powerful nation-states, such as England, France, and Germany. Paradox, certainly, when we applaud the strengthening of the powers of Strasbourg and when many of the norms on which the environment, professional activities, training programs, and legal remedies of European citizens depend, are elaborated on a quasi-federal basis. Major risk, in reality, at a time when the entry of economic cycles into a phase of uncertainty without foreseeable end calls urgently, in terms of control of financial operations and revival of investments, for continental initiatives that will be inapplicable without popular support and without transnational legitimacy. This confiscation is explained by the fact that the political and administrative class that distributes itself between the places of power always postulates "the ignorance of the people" and has no other horizon than its own reproduction. But it is also a kind of hold-up that governments have carried out by taking advantage of the enlargement, and by diverting the meaning of the resistances to liberal internationalization.

The combined effect of the despair of the popular classes (prolonged by the anxiety of the middle classes, while the insolence of the new rich triumphs) and the self-immunizing strategy of the rulers is that there is no longer any "constituent" power, not even really any "legislative" power in Europe. Statism without a State, I had proposed in the past. But it is also that nationalist discourse invades everything, as illustrated by the French manipulation of the "debate" on national identity. The essential other, non-"European" or non-"Christian" (fantasmatic figure, but carried by real individuals, designated targets of violence) is the most visible obsession. But let us not be mistaken, xenophobia targets the foreigner in general. It targets difference. In many respects, anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim racism is only the extension of a fundamental mistrust that does not admit itself as such towards the neighbor, towards the deviant - if indeed one can draw clear lines of demarcation here.

Does this mean that we are witnessing the end of the project of overcoming nationalisms? In any case, it is the end of its utopia. But, it will be said, in the absence of utopia, Europe disintegrates. Unless citizens, forming like a party or a network across borders, engage in a long march for the reconstruction of its perspectives - a kind of utopia without utopianism, devoid of any illusion if not of any objective. Apart from the "communist hypothesis", which resolves everything at once, the formulations one thinks of oscillate obviously between the inaccessible and the well-known: fighting against the monopoly of politicians and experts; restoring to popular representation its capacity to control the rulers and to forge alliances at all levels of the political institution; inventing modes of production, social security and employment systems that are based on the circulation of individuals and the priority of common goods; pushing back xenophobia, starting with an international campaign for civil rights and the recognition of minorities; imagining a public education that restores equal opportunities, generalizes the translation of idioms and the mobility of all students... In short, democratizing democracy and preventing as much as possible the innovation strategies of capitalism, which are developed behind our backs.

Perhaps it is the business of a generation rather than a decade. Above all, it would require new words, better articulated to resistances and revolts, as well as to the general aspirations of society, whose encounter makes historical revolutions. The very idea, however, cannot wait too long. We have seen other political constructions collapse, other civilizations decline at the turn of a global crisis. Is it not one? "Recovery" of the markets or not, it seems so.

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