#reformieren!
Giacomo Marramao

Throughout the Reformation Year 2017, this site offers trendsetters and thought leaders a place to present their notions of change and innovation. What are the potentials and needs for current and future-oriented “reformations”?

The European Union today sees itself in the grip of a double challenge in the form of two antithetical models of globalization: America’s principle of individualistic competition and the communitarian-authoritarian principle of Asia. Thanks to its great cultural and political history, Europe has the possibility of developing an alternative tertium between the two models by taking from its tradition the idea of an individual who does not only acquire and compete, but is also capable of solidarity and of a non-paternalistic-authoritarian community, which draws on the creative resources of the particular.
 

To pursue such an alternative would mean to pave the way for a “great politics”, capable of mastering the problem of immigration by creating a form of citizenship possible beyond the dualism between the “republican model of assimilation” and the multi-cultural “mosaic model”, between the neutral universalism of the French model of the “Republic” and the anti-universalism of the “Londonistan model”. Only a politics such as this would have the power to exploit the universal potential of religion by defusing the destructive, excluding moment of its identitary obsessions through the prospect of a universalism of differences and a policy of translation amongst the various ethics and ways of life (cf. G. Marramao, The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State, Verso, London/New York 2012).

Apart from a few significant exceptions, however, the political class of Europe seems to be light years removed from such a task.

​Biographical details.