Contribution short abstract:

Taking the failures of two long-term researched cases of “Western modernity", the post-war Austrian nation state and CERN, as a contrastive starting point, I want to ask what concepts of caring identity, love, friendship, desire and relating might be integrated into a more-than-modern Europe.

Contribution long abstract:

I have been conducting two very different ethnographies in the past fifteen years on European identities. The first empirical field focussed on post-imperial cultures of Austro-Hungary, especially on Austria and its literary scene within the European context after WWII (Dippel 2015, Dippel/Bopp-Filimonov 2020).

The second ethnographic field focussed on the European Organization of Nuclear Research, CERN, at the borderlands of Switzerland and France (Dippel 2017, Dippel 2021). Epistemically, both cultures are shaped by Leibniz’s monadologic philosophy in their ideas of binarism, harmony, community, and hierarchy and order. Both fields can be considered post-imperial cultures. Both experience(d) a decline in impact and power. Both replace the idea of empire with the position of an umpire, blinding their self-centeredness.

Austria still preserves the cultural heritage of a society, which thought itself the center of the universe (A.E.I.O.U. - Austria erit in orbe ultima), and fails to reconsider its neutral position. CERN is the epitome of science as a universal, studying the universe's origins. “Europeanness” is embedded within the master narrative of CERN (Mobach/Felt 2022), serving as a global community model.

Taking the failures of these cases of “Western modernity" as a contrastive starting point, I want to ask what concepts of caring identity, love, friendship, desire and relating might be integrated into a more-than-modern Europe. Europe is provincialized and surrounded by deadly borders. What projections of love are still alive that let the heartlands of Europe fail, and (not even) fail better, when trying again to understand what Europeanness could mean?