European Values

And yet we also know that every document of Europe is a document of resistance as well.  European values are not either enlightenment, humanism and universal human rights, or concentration camps, Zyklon B and the Holocaust. European values are both. To succumb to the belief that European values are encapsulated only by the first set of nouns is to fall into the trap of Eurocentrism and European exceptionalism – whose logical conclusion was that other horrific iteration of European values. But to subscribe to the view that European values are only concentration camps, Zyklon B and the Holocaust is to reject the emancipatory legacy which is also part of Europe and its history. Only by understanding that Europe is both simultaneously can we find a way out of our current predicament.

—Srećko Horvat, Poetry from the Future, (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 85.