Civilization, Modernity and Europe: The Making and Unmaking of a Conceptual Unity

Civilization has historically played a role in the articulation of a common European identity and inheritance. As an Enlightenment concept, civilization was pregnant with both inclusive and exclusive implications. It also provided a strong ideological rationale for many of the moralizing and modernizing agendas pursued by European states on the continent and overseas throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At times encompassing a world of disparate colonies and multi-ethnic settler communities while at others a portion of a continent, Europe has never been a consistently stable geographic category. Nevertheless, the articulation of identities rooted in tropes of civilization and modernity did come to foster a common discourse shared among European elites. This paper intends to examine the implications of this shared langue employed by elites and its role in imagining a collective European framework and patrimony.  In breaking with essentialized ideas of modernity rooted in social, economic and political structures, I argue that the discourse of modernity has been one of the essential aspects in the narration of Europe, shaping both universal and Eurocentric readings of history, social development and the world at large. This paper will, moreover, conclude with an assessment of what globalization means for European identity at present and whether the advent of a globalized modernity and the ideological bankruptcy of Europe’s “civilizing mission” entails the end of a particular idea of European selfhood and history.