Internal violence strengthens rather than dilutes European solidarity.

Evidence

Clearly neither the genocide practiced by the Nazi state nor its attempt to overwhelm Europe have led to feelings in Western Europe that would cast doubt on where Germany belongs. I do not make this statement in a polemical spirit. On the contrary, I affirm that given the idea of Europe that exists, such violence does not dilute Germany’s Europeanness because violence is—among other things—a complicated moral language. Far from being threatened by internal violence, European solidarity is strengthened by it. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 782

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting claim: violence is not the enemy of Europeanness but among its constitutive moral languages — Nazi genocide and German belonging can coexist, while Turkish Muslims who never harmed Europe are read as alien. Dense enough to sit with for days.
• XREF: Connects to critiques of ‘civilization vs. barbarism’ binaries and to how Western identity is forged through internal violence — echoes of Foucault’s analysis of power through exclusion, and the framework of the reader’s earlier work on sacrifice and ritual violence. — connects to: Greater perceived threat of death produces more solidarity among strangers, not more competition. — John Drury and Chris Cocking and Steve Reicher, Everyone for themselves? A comparative…, 110