History of European Culture

Chrześcijaństwo wieków XIII – XVIII intensywnie wpajało wiernym poczucie nieskończonej winy i grzechu. Ale czy było skuteczne? Czy zdołało przestraszyć wszystkich, czy tylko elity? Klasyczne dzieło historyka francuskiego Jean Delumeau wpisuje się w debatę na temat korzeni naszej cywilizacji i jest od przeszło dwudziestu lat gorąco dyskutowane.

Przedstawiam podsumowanie tej dyskusji i garść własnych refleksji.

Obszerne  streszczenie książki na mojej stronie  oraz na Academia.edu

https://jacek.kwasniewski.org.pl/recenzje-ksiazek/

The history on 19th century anticlericalism has mainly been written form a national perspective highlighting the differences between the countries in Europe. The following overview on recent historiography will show that on the contrary the similarities were actually predominant and thereby help to overcome the separation of the national historiographies. The article analyses the few existent comparative studies and the literature on Spain, France and Germany showing that here there are three main approaches: the culture and social history of anticlerical politics, anticlericalism as a discourse on identity and as a secular movement.

Building on recent investigation of the European culture wars in the second half of nineteenth century the article expands the constructivist thesis of secularization on genuine religious questions. Based on examples from France, Germany and Spain it is shown that anticlericalism was not necessarily anti- or areligious but frequently consisted of a search for new concepts of religion and sacralizations. Thereby anticlericalism is proved to be part of the pluralization of the religious field.

9th Euroacademia International Conference
‘Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers’

31st of May – 1st of June 2019, Dublin, Ireland


CALL FOR PANELS AND PAPERS

DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: 2nd of May 2019

Conference Description

Europe became in the 20th century an elaborated yet contested notion as the particular field of European studies emerged while extensive and diverse research was directed recently towards an intensified search for what Europe is about. The creation of the European Union made things even more specialized and increased the stake of methodological rigor as more and more Europeans are affected by the decisions taken in Brussels. The number, diversity and quality of research projects focused on European issues is unprecedented, yet, as it is usually the case with specialization, it gradually led to discursive communities that rarely meet and debate their approaches in open floors together with peers from other continents, academic traditions and cultures. It is the aim of this conference to build a bridge among specialists from different regions, academic traditions and cultures that share a common interest in studying and addressing Europe as a reflexive concern.

The 9th International Conference ‘Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers’ aims exactly to refresh a broader approach and understanding of Europe by enlarging the platform of regular conferences and workshops for a wider arena of participants and disciplinary backgrounds in order to put on stage a worldwide monadology for such concerns. The conference aims also to enable critical alternatives to the disciplinary orthodoxies by creating a framework for interaction and dissemination of diversity that has to become once more a European trademark.

What is Europe and its place in the world? Is there something particular that sedimented in time and through a controversial history a European way? How does Europe see itself and how do others see it? Is Europe inclusive or club-based exclusive? Is Europe becoming a normative power or just envisages itself as one? Is the European multiculturalism a fact or an ideal? Is the European Union a reflection of Europe or an appropriation of it? Is Europe becoming a post-national cosmopolitan order or a persisting community of national states? How does the current US political context challenges Europe? Is the EU able to resist the rise of populist and nationalist movements? What are the implications of Brexit? These are just few questions out of an enormous space for inquiry that are to be addressed and confronted within the topic of the conference. Join us!

The conference is organized yet by no means restricted to the following tentative panels:

Theorizing Europe: Thinking Europe and Europeanness ~ Europe as would be world power ~ Europe and its internal and external others/outsiders ~ Europe and identities ~ Fortress Europe? ~ EU and appropriations of Europe ~ Europe and the Mediterranean assortment ~ Europe and the inclusive/exclusive nexus ~ Europe and the US ~ Europe and anti-Americanism ~ Europe as seen from its Eastern neighbors ~ Europe as viewed from far away: narratives of the Europeans outside ~ Europe as viewed from Asia ~ Europe and Africa ~ Non-familiar faces of Europe ~ Knowing Europe in a different way: from Latin America to Australia ~ Europe and the EU as a normative power ~ EU regulatory practices in context ~ The multiple faces of Europeanization as a process ~ Europe and the persistence of the East-West Slope ~ Europe and crises ~ Europe and cosmopolitanism ~ Europe and the post-national orders ~ Europe in the world ~ European narratives of the past: the mnemonic/amnesic nexuses ~ Europeanization versus globalization ~ Europe and conflict resolution ~ European social models: welfare states and neoliberal suspicions ~ Europe and innovation ~ The politicization of Europe ~ Europe and the Trump ‘Era’ ~ Assessments of the European security ~ Implications of Brexit

Participant’s Profile
The conference is addressed to academics, researchers and professionals with a particular research interest on Europe from all parts of the world. Post-graduate students, doctoral candidates and young researchers are welcome to submit an abstract. Representatives of INGOs, NGOs, Think Tanks and activists willing to present their work with impact on or influenced by specific understandings of Europe are welcomed as well to submit the abstract of their contribution. Euroacademia favors multidisciplinary approaches, critical thinking and new research methodologies.

The conference will take place in the conference premises of the exclusive 4* The Croke Park Hotel, in Dublin, close to the city center and within a short distance from all major cultural attractions.

Deadline: 2nd of May 2019
For on-line applications and complete details of the event before applying please see the conference website:
http://euroacademia.eu/conference/9eio/

The article is dedicated to traditional festivities called Moros y Cristianos, or in a literal translation: Moors and Christians, which are widespread in a number of autonomous communities in Spain, including Valencia, Andalusia, Murcia, Castille la Mancha and many others. The name literally means Moors and Christians and is used with reference to festivities commemorating real or legendary battles between two civilizations during the Spanish Reconquista (or: reconquest) with Christians finally taking over the Iberian Peninsula. For a few centuries it has been serving as a modus operandi for depicting an eternal conlict between Christianity and Islam in the street culture, hence: reconstructing images of civilizational oddity of Muslims.

SUMMARY
In the course of our examination we will detect philosophical and generally educational influences and associations of Michael Psellos in the later centuries from the Renaissance to the brink of the 17th century scientific revolutions.
Our working hypothesis that the origins of ideas, theories and cultural tendencies that in a later century were considered innovative and revolutionary, can be traced in earlier, supposedly dark and conservative times through the paths, transformations, and the broken lines of historical examination while they have also been more or less constitutive factors of modern culture. These theories and ideas can be linked to the following thematic units: A) Sciences and the philosophical approach of nature: theory and technique, B) Man and world, C) Language, art and creativity.
Key words: Neoplatonism, Byzantine philosophy, Chaldean Oracles, Natural philosophy, Renaissance, Modern science, Culture

During the Congress of Vienna, which was formally opened on Nov. 1, 1814 and terminated in June 1815, the heads of states and representatives of almost all European countries assembled in Vienna to hammer out a peace treaty that would put an end to the wars that had been plaguing the continent for years. While in Vienna, these leaders and those who accompanied them could attend performances of opera, singspiel, farces, parodies, and ballets at any of the many theaters of which the city was proud. This paper surveys the theaters in operation at the time, analyzes the composers, performers, works presented on stages, and examines the audiences and their evaluations of what was offered.

These misconceptions make the Europeans ignore following basic historical truths:
1. Islam, Turkey, and the Ottoman Civilization are inherent part of the European Culture and History.
2. The European Identity was mainly formed on today’s Turkish territory.
3. Europe was civilized because of the expansion of the Ancient Oriental cultures.
4. Modern European preconceived theories and approaches (Greco-Romano-centrism) were composed in times of limited knowledge and scarce sources, and were politically motivated (as form of anti-clericalism).
5. The aforementioned erroneous approaches were not rejected (as they should) after the discoveries of the Orientalists, which were also based on erratic, preconceived, colonial approaches and attitudes.
6. Not only Oriental civilizations’ traits and global impact have been kept unknown to average people but the Classical Greek and Roman civilizations have been presented gravely deformed and viciously distorted.
7. Through the above mentioned historical forgery, nefarious patterns, models and prototypes are selected by the ruling classes and academia of Europe, and projected among the average Europeans with disastrous results.

In the present article, we will complete our brief analysis of the catastrophic patterns, models and prototypes chosen from the ill-perceived, and largely imaginative Classical World of the modern, racist, European Greco-Romano-centric academia and politicians.
First published in the American Chronicle, Buzzle, AfroArticles on 14th January 2008

If finally the Turks decide to adhere to the European Union, Turkey will become a member state of the real and existent European Union. The 27-member super-state consists in a real challenge of our times, and represents the latest phase of a real historical Europe. This true Europe is contradicted by the German Minister Markus Söder’s fictitious Europe.

This historically inexistent and irrelevant ‘Europe’ of Mr. Söder is the result of the widely diffused in Europe false History – an academic fabrication compiled originally by the colonial Anglo-French academia. Their interests in this regard involved the promotion of a great number of misconceptions and aberrations that would be necessary to keep average Europeans unaware of Europe’s true History and Identity; this nefarious situation is a prerequisite for the most efficient implementation of the targets of the Apostate Free Masonic Lodge that controls almost totally the Classicist and Orientalist academia of France and England, and the ruling Anglo-French elite.
First published in the American Chronicle, AfroArticles and Buzzle on 15th January 2008
Republished on 29th January 2010 in:
http://illyria.proboards.com/thread/29049/turkey-fictitious-europe

The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld analyzes the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state.

1516 Léonard de Vinci traverse les Alpes avec La Joconde

1816 « l'année sans été »

1916 Verdun, la Somme

2016…

Quand l’Europe est menacée, elle cherche dans son histoire d’autres repères. Mais suffit-il d’énumérer des références prestigieuses, des moments fondateurs et des personnalités hors du commun pour refonder l’Europe grâce à la culture quand la politique semble échouer? L’histoire culturelle de l’Europe ne doit pas relever de la seule logique patrimoniale. Les Européens d’aujourd’hui ont plus besoin d’une démocratie qui fonctionne que d’un discours commémoratif. La vie du forum (ou de l’agora) ne peut pas se dérouler de façon permanente à l’ombre du panthéon.
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On a souvent repris la formule attribuée, à tort, à Jean Monnet à propos de l’Europe : « Si c’était à refaire, il faudrait commencer par la culture ». Il ne suffit pas de rappeler ce principe.  Comment la culture peut-elle aider à dépasser les graves difficultés que rencontre l’Europe, en cet été 2016 : terrorisme, dette, Brexit, montée des « populismes » ? Comment l’histoire de l’Europe s’est-elle focalisée sur des dates clefs, des personnalités exceptionnelles et un patrimoine ? Que retenir de notre passé pour s’engager dans un avenir commun ? Didier Francfort apporte ici une réflexion dans laquelle la culture européenne appelle à un nouvel engagement politique plus qu’à une célébration patrimoniale.