"The insurrection of particularities": A disarmed Europe in the face of history

In the first part of this analysis, we began by contrasting the two visions of Europe as seen by its founders, in the aftermath of the Second World War, particularly Robert Schuman, and as it exists today, deprived of its founding impetus and obscuring its Christian and Greco-Roman roots. Here is the second part, based on an analysis by the philosopher Chantal Delsol, who has just published a book on the "Old Continent".

In The Insurrection of Particularities, Chantal Delsol draws a severe conclusion of a gradual departure from this founding spirit. According to her, contemporary Europe has substituted an ideology of neutrality for heritage, administration for culture, and abstract individualism for Christian anthropology. By claiming to base itself exclusively on universal norms detached from all tradition, it has progressively delegitimized the concrete affiliations – nations, cultures, religions, ways of life – which nevertheless structured the European space.

From this evolution arises what Delsol calls an “insurrection of particularities”. Peoples and identities rebel against a Europe perceived as distant, normative, and indifferent to particularities. Where Schuman saw nations as necessary mediators for peace, contemporary Europe tends to consider them as survivals to be overcome. This rejection produces a paradox: by wanting to abolish differences in the name of the universal, it провоkes their return in the form of tensions, identity retrenchments, and fractures.

This cultural crisis is now compounded by a major geopolitical crisis, brutally revealed by the war in Ukraine. The return of a high-intensity conflict on European soil acts as a revealer: Europe, which had built itself on the refusal of war, discovers that it has also forgotten how to think about power, defense, and conflictuality. The illusion of a definitively pacified continent, governed solely by law and commerce, collapses in the face of historical reality.

The Ukrainian conflict highlights the limitations of European military capabilities, long neglected in the name of a pacifism that has become structural. Dependent on NATO and, ultimately, on the United States for its security, Europe struggles to conceive of itself as an autonomous strategic actor. This military weakness is not merely technical: it is the symptom of a deeper, cultural and political disarmament. A continent that no longer knows what it is, nor what it wants to defend, logically struggles to accept the idea of force.

This fragility also appears in other geopolitical issues, such as the debates sparked by American ambitions regarding Greenland. The "Old Continent", once the world's center of gravity, sometimes seems to become an object of covetousness rather than a sovereign subject of history. Here again, strategic weakening reflects the erosion of civilizational consciousness.

For Chantal Delsol, Europe has forgotten what made it unique: the ability to articulate the universal and the particular. By breaking with Christianity as a cultural foundation — not as a state religion, but as a vision of man and the world — it has lost its principle of internal unity. The insurrection of particularities is therefore not an accidental deviation, but the logical consequence of this amnesia.

The confrontation between Schuman and Delsol thus reveals a decisive alternative. Where post-war Christian democracy made memory - of "Never again" - a driving force for construction, contemporary Europe seems to want to base itself on forgetting. However, a continent that no longer knows where it comes from, nor what it wanted to avoid, finds itself vulnerable, both internally and in the face of external power dynamics. Perhaps the war in Ukraine tragically invites us to rediscover Schuman's founding intuition: a Europe aware of its limits, faithful to its heritage, capable of uniting without erasing, of defending itself without denying the soul that gave it birth and the history that shaped it.

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The "Old Continent" between founding memory and civilizational disarmament