Nietzsche’s Europeanism: A Critical Genealogy

Abstract

Since his scholarly rehabilitation in the 1950s, Friedrich Nietzsche, once associated with National Socialism, has been rediscovered as a ‘good European’. For most commentators, he is the quintessential, philosophical critic of the nation-state, a lone cosmopolitan voice calling for the unification of Europe in an age of nationalism, imperialism, and war. Though a necessary corrective to those initial, vulgar fascist readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy, this revaluation is now itself in need of revaluation. To date, most scholars have interpreted Nietzsche’s European turn as a break with his earlier views, particularly his hopes for Germany’s cultural rebirth under the sign of Richard Wagner’s music in the early 1870s. For them, Nietzsche’s (re-)invention as a ‘good European’ is part and parcel of his emancipation from Wagnerian national myth-making. Among other things, it is considered to have facilitated his positive reassessment of the (French) Enlightenment, his self-professed ‘anti-antisemitism’, and his emergence as a cosmopolitan free spirit. My thesis provides a sustained, in-depth critique of this reading. Its aim is to revise the standard interpretation of the ‘good European’ by dint of a historically informed analysis of the origins, nature, and objectives of Nietzsche’s Europeanism. It demonstrates, first, that the European turn in his thought owes much to his earlier preoccupation with German cultural renewal. Rather than a repudiation of his early nationalism, I contend Nietzsche’s Europeanism ought to be understood as an extension or expansion of its principles onto a continent. Likewise, it is a mistake to equate Nietzsche’s reorientation towards Europe with an entirely hostile attitude toward Germany which, in many respects, remains the focus of his palingenetic vision. Second, my thesis shows that Nietzsche’s conception of Europe is quite distinct from that of other nineteenth-century champions of the European ideal. Unlike these liberal, emancipatory, and progressive forms of Europeanism, Nietzsche’s idea of Europe is inextricably tied to the illiberal, anti-democratic concerns that define his political thought. It also needs to be clearly distinguished from more recent notions of European identity and unity.