The Europe-Delusion: Mourning what Never Existed
5 February 2025

2 May 1945, The liberation of Germany from National Socialism by the Soviet Union; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The article is a psychoanalytic and philosophical interrogation of the past in which the unity of Europe is posited, and from out of which it is defended. It argues that this past is a certain idyllic a priori that never existed and that its deployment as an empty signifier creates a monstrous future for politics.
The true tragedy of modernity is very different from the usual lament recycled by the liberal West: that we are losing a once-great cultural richness, that Putin and the threat of nuclear war or the spread of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ (the malleable and irrational function of what Laclau calls an ‘empty signifier’ [1]) are pushing us towards the death of the Enlightenment ethics which shaped and unified Europe. What is being confronted is something far more devastating than this. As Freud came to recognise between 1905 [2] (The Three Essays) and 1918 [3] (The Wolfman Case), the original division of the subject – the point at which we truly come into social existence on the condition that we are irreconcilably alienated from ourselves – is when we lose something that never even existed to us. In other words, when a treasured object-of-desire is revealed to be not a something, but a nothing, a non-existent referent-point, or when an original memory is (as Laplanche said [4]) “entirely constructed” retroactively from an empty memory-trace. What we are dealing with today is not simply accepting the loss of a treasured identity, but accepting the loss of a retroactively constructed identity which we never possessed in the first place.
An uncomfortable truth is that this hysterical logic of longing for a return to what never existed is today most actively embodied in the idea of Europe.
Unlike the more everyday cases of resistance, repression has a certain ontological weight. In an act of repression, it is not merely some fact which is resisted, but rather an idea or impulse which only exists by the fact that it is repressed. In other words, the paradox of repression is that it has a determining effect on the repressed thing. The original act of repression (Urverdrängung) that constitutes the unconscious itself is the repression of something which never existed (Laplanche’s New Foundations for Psychoanalysis [5] is the definitive text on this process). This non-existent ‘past unity’ is retroactively installed from the point of repression itself; a truly ‘negative’ discrepancy where we must mourn not only the loss or disappearance of something that we once held as dear to us, but the far more disconcerting realisation that what we have lost is not in fact something that we ever truly possessed. By extension, the hysterical position is one in which we still believe that there is something that we have lost, when it is in fact nothingness itself – an inarticulable ‘gap’ between being and itself – which threatens the very frame of subjective self-identity. This nothingness is the lack, or absent essence, which Lacan [6] describes as structuring appearances. The constitutive exclusion which forever leaves symbolic formations incomplete, a virtual point of difference that is implied yet never materialised. From a Freudian perspective, the hysteric pathology lies in their rejection of this fictive x. They retroactively install a non-existent fulness in the past, maintaining the belief that what has been lost was something that was once possessed and can be regained.
An uncomfortable truth is that this hysterical logic of longing for a return to what never existed is today most actively embodied in the idea of Europe. Is there a better example of this inability to accept that what was lost never even existed than modern European democracy, which has erected a retrospective image of an illusioned former plenitude, of some unutterable unity which is today fading into obscurity?
The dominant ideology of the West today is an ideology of the past – of the past as a virtual, political construct. The question of the conceptual-ideological structure of the past has been touched on by other PWD authors, including Shaj Mohan, Kamran Baradaran, and Anthony Ballas, under a term which plays with Kantian presuppositions: the idyllic a priori. Mohan speaks of the retrospective drive to idealise religions as they ‘once were’, which veils the uncomfortable fact that “all religions are militarised instruments” [7]. He includes the aggressive potential of the seemingly passive and peaceful religion of Buddhism here, but we can also look at the supposed theological purity of the origins of Protestantism, which furnished the possibility for the global destruction of the 30 Years’ War. Baradaran and Ballas locate the idyllic a priori as a deviation plaguing the modern Left, which “thinks from the idylls of someone or some select people and then sets up this idyll as the impossible teleology” [8]. Mohan reveals the central paradox of such a retroactive idolisation in his interview with Rachel Adams: “The idylls of the past never existed. This is the first thing to note. Idylls are positions of privilege. These are raised, for example, by the critics of colonialism that there were better days before colonialism.” [9].
In a Freudian variation of such idylls, it is clear that the ideology of the past is one which today installs a retrospective identity to Europe which never existed. Europe is an ideological and even aesthetic category grounded not in identity but irreconcilable difference. With Keir Starmer’s election as Prime Minister, it was inevitable that he would attempt to thaw out EU-UK relations, to take a friendlier approach than his Tory forerunners. Starmer’s EU summit earlier this year intended to do precisely this, to re-establish working relationships with Europe and to unify against the ‘storm that gathers over our continent’: Russia. In his own words, gathered with European leaders at the birthplace of Winston Churchill (Blenheim Palace), Starmer optimistically stated that it was time to “reset” Europe-UK relations in order to urgently unify in our fight against the Eastern threat. This threat is presumably Russia, yet the Europe-discourse would just as easily include that which deviates from the West as the Eastern threat, including China’s variation on the State capitalist model, which is ironically not the absolute obverse of European economies, but rather (as Lacan would call it) their Nebenmensch: their intimately mirrored, yet uncannily unassimilable, neighbour.

A latent irony emerges here: what exactly is meant by “reset”? What point in time of ‘European unity’ would Starmer ideally rewind to? The unfortunate fact is that Europe has never been unified in the sense expected of it now. The history of Europe is nothing but that of internal conflict. Starmer’s Churchillian references and tributes may attempt to frame a renewed push for unity as seen by Europe during WWII (or indeed WWI). Yet this Churchill-inspired politic is built upon a Derridean undertone: this unity is the incomplete spectre of a constitutive, formal difference. The secondary moment of difference (or writing, as an imperfect reproduction) is an incompleteness which precedes the primary moment of unity [10]. In other words, the identity of wholeness/presence is already marked by an internal difference, a discrepancy or non-identity to itself, in which this identity is a secondary, fictive construction What are these two wars if not reflections of the defining discrepancy in the discourse of European unity?
After all, not only was it European nations (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire) that precipitated these hitherto unparalleled levels of destruction, but even the Allies were only loosely held together through significant disunity and tension. Hitler’s rise to power was in part due to the inability of the Allies to act cohesively [11], and even after the War had started, major players such as France and Britain often found themselves on the brink of disastrous disagreement. The attack on Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 was one such example: the British navy pre-emptively destroyed French naval ships stationed near Oran, French Algeria. The intention of the attack was to prevent the capture of French naval fleets by Germany, yet the attack’s lack of Allied approval led to widespread anti-British sentiment in France, threatening their collective opposition to Nazi Germany during one of the War’s most critical moments.
The idyllic a priori receives its truly repressive dimension here. The idyll is an exceptional case of Urverdrängung: a political discourse that is constituted by an abjection – a false reference or longing for an impossible past.
The breakaway collaborationist government of Vichy France, formed on 10 July following the Mers-el-Kébir attack, further disturbed the ideal of a steadfast and unquestionable Allied unity. Aside from Vichy aid in the Nazi genocide and their collaboration with Germans to stop French resistance movements, for two years to follow, British forces under Churchill’s direction invaded Vichy-controlled territories, forcing them to surrender territories in mainland Africa and Madagascar. Even towards the end of the war, Churchill forced French troops to retreat at gunpoint – and to ‘fire if necessary’ – following their violent occupation of Syria, known as the Levant Crisis, which itself threatened to break out into direct British-French conflict. ‘Europe’ is for Starmer as convenient an idea as the irrational notion of unity itself. The geographical meaning of Europe is the obverse of a purely discursive construction, an empty signification which retroactively posits its own referent.
A more popular example of the ideology of the past is the slogan that helped Trump win two elections: ‘Make America Great Again’. What, however, I meant by the term Again? It is clear that Trump has no specific period in mind – whether it is the history of wealth production generated by the Transatlantic slave trade and the brutal civil war in part intended to dismantle it, or the intense and destructive period of post-war foreign influence (which Trump ironically seems to partially denounce), or the series of financial catastrophes inherent to the inefficiencies of global capitalism. On the contrary, Trump’s Again, the past to which he refers, is decisively virtual. Its captivating and populist effectiveness lies precisely in the point that it does not exist. The idyllic a priori receives its truly repressive dimension here. The idyll is an exceptional case of Urverdrängung: a political discourse that is constituted by an abjection – a false reference or longing for an impossible past. It is a truly ideological past – the past which, as Laplanche describes in psychoanalytic terms, is posited in the very moment of reflection. The figure of the ‘once great America’ is uttered not as a determinate point, but furnished as a malleable and retroactive tool for a confused present.
Starmer and Trump, superficially opposed under the overarching umbrella of liberal capitalism, stand as two avatars of the ‘use-value’ attributable to the past: they overturn our modernist understanding of the past as stable and fixed. Instead, the past possesses a malleability, an internal incompleteness which allows it to take on a variety of ideologically convenient forms. If it is true, as Bruno Latour [12] argues, that we have never been ‘modern’ (that we have never successfully distinguished a discourse of the natural and a discourse of the social), then by extension this malleability of the past suggests an additional paradox: we may never have been modern, but we have been postmodern for a very long time.
The unique antagonism of global capitalism (as a system of appropriation which stages ‘false antitheses’ and, as even Lenin [13] had foretold, displaces the imperialist tendency of surplus production onto screen-questions of liberalism or conservatism) is today situated on a temporal paradox: On the one hand, its domination lies in its ‘progressive’ orientation (an orientation towards the future) which allows it to subsume technological advancements and new social formations, exploiting them to its own advantage: the experimental and de-centralised proliferation of artificial intelligence is already best being utilised to predict market trend and as a growth-tool for corporations such as Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon etc.; the category-breaking radicality of the LGBTQ+ movement is already ‘axiomatised’, neutralised in the service of Netflix, Prime and other privately owned monopolies which can do whatever they want as long as they performatively honour pride month. Yet at the same time, global capitalism appears to structure its discourse retrogressively. In a double-movement, a future-oriented market adaptability is maintained by a past-oriented Nirvana-syndrome (‘let us return to when things were better, less divided…’).
It was in the first place Marx who recognised that economic forces of production and circulation ‘played with’, rearranged, and conditioned the basic coordinates of the social, and that there was a social-circulatory weight to commodities, or that capitalism posits “a definite social process through which the products must pass and in which they assume definite social characteristics” [14]. Yet one of the new symptoms of capitalism is precisely this temporal play which it deploys, creating out of the past a rationale for its own orientation. The structuralist question of genesis vs structure, of diachrony vs synchrony, or of the origin of a system vs the system itself (the subject of genesis and structure is treated by Derrida’s essay by the same name [15]), is a distinction that is violently suppressed by capitalism: the past is defined partially by its incompleteness. Genesis is the ideological after-effect of a perpetual structure.

Sci-fi films often express our collective fascination with the idea of memory manipulation, dreaming up fictive devices which could reformat thoughts to make our recollection of the past fit with whatever serves dominant financial interests. Yet what films such as Men in Black miss is one of the clear paradoxes of Western ideology: we do not require magical cortex-cleansing devices in order to structure the past according to subjective preferences. The past lends itself to its own reconstruction. Much like human desire is built upon a ground or memory which never really took place (e.g. the Oedipus), the former unity of our deteriorating empires is a self-generative narrative carried by the empty, malleable core of liberal capitalism.
In other words, when we speak of Europe, it is never truly about Europe that we speak.
What, then, is to be made with the idea of Europe? Europe’s problematic status, its internal component of indeterminacy, is testified to by PWD’s previous treatment on the Europe-idea, in which the question of Europe appears alongside a truly universal question: of a new beginning to philosophy [16]. Is Europe as an ideological category the spectre haunting a more global disorientation? Can a sense of retrospective identity be located in the greater plurality of political difference, as many cultural optimists still insist? The past, in particular the past of Europe, is always politically coloured. One of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis is that the past is constructed by the priorities of the present. The wise self-help/stoic idiom that the past is behind us, it cannot be changed, that, as Seneca writes, “the past is certain […]is the one over which Fortune has lost control, is the one which cannot be brought back under any man’s power” [17] does not hold up, neither where psychoanalysis nor capitalism is concerned.
In Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach [18], delusional fantasies of Europe take on the same fetishist form as in today’s widespread political disorientation. The Europe-fetish develops amongst a group of Australian and American survivors of a Chinese-Russian-US nuclear fallout. As survivors of the war face inevitable demise at a global rise in radiation levels, their sorrow is not directed at themselves, but at an impersonal, collective memory of a Europe that will never again be experienced. Yet this symbolic mourning is nevertheless coloured by the clarity of its irony: the fact that the real Europe – a blissful unity of cultural spirit – is a loss that never existed. On the Beach is in this sense a truly Freudian parody: even the knowledge that the Europe being fantasized about, the singular event of Europe that will never again be experienced, is not the same Europe that was lost, does not prevent this retroactive fantasy from persisting. Above all else, Nevil Shute’s novel is a critique of the fetishism of ideology, of idolisation as retrospectively creating the very thing it idolises.
In periods of crisis, we have defended the idea of Europe as the kernel of cultural enlightenment. And yet in the moments preceding crisis, it is even the semblance of European unity which is most clearly missing. Capitalism in its liberal and conservative variations calls on an image of Europe as its greatest achievement or as comprising some obscure moment of past unity, and yet misses the great irony in this idolatry: the greatest enemy to the tradition of European unity has been capitalism itself. Even ‘purely spiritual or ideological’ conflicts (such as the 30 Years’ War) were primarily directed by private financial interests. In the name of Europe we have left Europe in permanent suspense, leaving it perpetually unsettled and shaped by the refuse and antagonisms of economic-ideological distortions. In other words, when we speak of Europe, it is never truly about Europe that we speak.
We should begin to see not merely in the opposition to Europe, nor in the defence of Europe, but in the very discourse of Europe – as a generative concept of methods of political justification – an almost unescapable repressive mechanism: a repression not of any given political position, but of the coordinates of critical and speculative inquiry itself. If we can see the profound irony in any appeal to Europe or even the West (whether pro or contra) in our political projects, we can slowly glimpse the necessity of a third alternative. That alternative is one which speaks the language of the common good, the language of a universal event irreducible to crypto-fascist oligarchies or oppressive capitalist democracies (between which the divide is becoming almost non-existent). The language, in short, of a possibility of which the only remaining signifier is the communist hypothesis.
What is this hypothesis? Is it another re-iteration of the possibilities of communist discourse, or is it, as Badiou stresses, the recognition of an event which is irreducible to – and radically disruptive to – the exploitative coordinates of the logic of political economy?
Social antagonisms do not reflect an inefficiency which externally limits capitalism, but an internal inefficiency which drives capitalism itself. In a short 2022 pamphlet, Badiou [19] frames the internal disparities and irregularities which speak not of the opposition of capitalism to other modes of economic planning, but of the recurrent inability of capitalism to truly be the free form of democratic economic competition which it claims is just around the corner. The true utopianism, as Eagleton writes in his defence of Marx, is not Marxism, but the contemporary-liberal notion that “a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.” [20]; a belief, in other words, that with a few little adjustments, capitalism will be perfect, rather than a system which eternally produces the antagonistic social categories which simultaneously threaten the very liberty it expounds.
The communist hypothesis [21] is for Badiou the most rigorous embodiment of an Event: the rupture of an ontological multiplicity which reconstructs the imperfect logical relations in which it emerges. But it is not an Event which is being defended here: far too many attempted rejections of capitalist subjugation in the last few decades (the Occupy Movement, the GameStop Frenzy, or Palestinian support in the West) have revealed that the most radical Event is all-too-often simultaneously a smooth continuity, a re-doubling of the very system being opposed. Instead, by the third alternative, the communist hypothesis, I mean a conceptual re-framing of the issue. For Lacan, freedom is not contained in any single act, but in a reframing of the paradoxes inherent to acts of freedom (that they inversely furnish a more direct exploitation). The direct call for a spontaneous, self-liberated form of freedom would be nothing other than to reverse our freedom into the freedom of the master, of the Other: “it is the freedom of the Other, which the discourse of the right to jouissance posits in the subject of its enunciation.” [22] The communist hypothesis, in a similar manoeuvre, must reframe a false opposition: to speak of the former freedom, the former unity of an idea, is to reproduce the very coordinates of oppression, of the impossibility of this idea. The Europe-Delusion is a symptom of the common ground of liberal and conservative discourse, neither of which are in service of the commune.
NOTES
1. As Chomsky noted in the revised version of Manufacturing Consent, the ‘War on Terror’ (or the fight against Islamic fundamentalism) was the heir to the now-outdated ‘War on Communism’. From the US-Soviet hostilities over Afghanistan (in which ‘anti-freedom’ narratives were required to justify military intervention) to recent military action in the Middle East (including Western funding of so-called terror groups to avoid the rise of secular-democratic threats to US-NATO hegemony), this exchange continues to benefit private Western interests. ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ has taken over the malleable and irrational function of what Laclau calls an ‘empty signifier’: an obscure yet universalising supplement, or x, which is the convenient tool of Western powers to justify aggressive foreign military activity whilst conveniently veiling the real ground of conflict. This threat is, ironically, one which has grown only as a consequence of this same foreign involvement by the West.
2. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud VII, 1905, p.123-246.
3. Freud, Sigmund. From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XVII, 1918, p.1-124.
4. Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques VI : L’Après-Coup. Paris : PUF, 2006.
5. Laplanche, Jean. Nouveaux Fondements pour la Psychanalyse. Paris : PUF, 1987.
6. Lacan, Jacques. Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse. Paris : Seuil, 1973.
7. Shaj Mohan, “Teleography and Tendencies: Part 1 Ukraine”, Philosophy World Democracy, 2022, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/teleography-and-tendencies-part-1-ukraine.
8. Baradaran, Kamran & Ballas, Anthony, “Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall”, Philosophy World Democracy, 2022, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/against-the-political-stasis-or-the-story-of-a-fall.
9. Mohan, Shaj & Adams, Rachel, “But, there is nothing outside of philosophy”: An Interview with Shaj Mohan, Philosophy World Democracy, 2021, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/interviews-1/but-there-is-nothing-outside.
10. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
11. ‘Act cohesively’ is itself misleading: the spread of Nazism was not only the result of a lack of collective intervention to antisemitic doctrines or even the invasion of Poland, but periods of sympathy or indifference from Allied countries. The German-American Bund, US defence of German right to self-government after Hitler assumed power in 1933, Britain’s 1930s ‘appeasement policy’ allowing for German territory expansion, and Vichy France’s collaboration with German police, all depict the inconsistency and internal antagonisms colouring the period of ‘European unity’.
12. Latour, Bruno. Nous n’avons Jamais été Modernes, Paris : Éditions La Découverte, 1991.
13. Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Petrograd (Lenin Internet Archive), 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ .
14. Marx, Karl Capital: Volume III, London : Penguin, 1981, p.1020.
15. Derrida, Jacques. “Genesis and Structure and Phenomenology”, in Writing and Difference. Routledge, 2001.
16. See “The Other Beginning of Philosophy”, Philosophy World Democracy, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning.
17. Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, Minneapolis: Global Grey, 49/2018.
18. Shute, Nevil, On the Beach, London: Pan Books, 1957.
19. Badiou, Alain, Remarques sur la Désorientation du Monde, Paris : Gallimard, 2022.
20. Eagleton, Terry, Why Marx was Right, London: Yale University Press, 2011.
21. Badiou, Alain, L’Hypothèse Communiste, Paris : Lignes, 2009.
22. See Lacan, Jacques, “Kant avec Sade”, in Écrits, Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1967, p.249.