Europe’s political existence derives from warring against Muslim enemies

Evidence

Schmitt arrives at the political as the historical event of a struggle and of a war. Derrida explains that for Schmitt, it is “war waged against a determinate enemy (hostis) … [that] would be the condition of possibility of politics.” It is this war, this determinate struggle, that, over the course of the last millennium, was at the source of Europe’s political existence, a Europe that thinks itself Christian, that grants itself its Christianity and its Christendom, its “Christian politics,” insofar as it is engaged in this struggle. “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens orTurks.” Clearly, what defines itself here is first of all the “being-political” of Europe, and only secondarily, though without derivation from the Christian sources, the being-Christian of Europe. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 282

Categorization

• XREF: This is the genealogical anchor—the claim that European political identity is constituted by its millennial war against Islam, which the wider Islamophobia-antisemitism cluster echoes.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion—Europe is primarily political (defined by enemy-war) and only secondarily Christian—is a dense, paradigm-rearranging formulation of the enemy-constitution thesis.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the ‘being-political before being-Christian’ claim sharpens the modern debate over whether Europe is defined by secular Christendom or by its enemy relations.