I agree with most of that, but the solution as I perceive it (value ontology) is not unlike a Nietzschean angle to Schopenhauers basic stance. Subjectivity and character and particular-ness are required, are to be approached in a way more akin to Nietzsche, but the global vision is more skeptical, as there are no more Napoleons, if there is to be no war in Europe. But the future is taking on strange shapes. This does not sound trivial. Who knows what kind of armed conflicts will erupt in Europe. In Germany, the Pegida protest of tomorrow has been prohibited because of a terrorist threat. The current tension may still be put down by government coldness and force, but I am sure the Germans can use some wisdom in how they are going to deal with the pressure as it increases. But it will be behind the scenes, engineered solutions, it will not come from the populace as such, but from the mastermind of German efficiency.
The solution is indeed an ontological revision, an ontology that combines ethics and being, and which thus predicates “the world” and this world in the sense of differences and border-zones. I just came to the insight that border zones are energetic and formative ‘wellsprings’, that the place where one ethos/nation/religion collides with another, the potential for the exaltation of both occurs. This is a matter powerfully balancing the valuing the other in terms of selfvaluing against the selfvaluing in terms of the other, and this on both sides, to produce naturally synthetic terms of moral advance. The problem is not difference, but blind difference, which is caused by an absence of knowledge of the ground of the difference – and this is encouraged by preventing all justification in terms of difference, enforcing similarity as a basis, thus drawing a curtain between the citizen and himself.
“War is the father of all things” - but it can also be the threat of war, as we saw in the cold war, that is that kernel. But we can even go beyond. We can employ the differences against each other in a fierce competition under an umbrella of mutual interest - a ‘capitalism of states’ wherein capitalism does not pervade the states in the sense of eroding borders, but rather capital as a way to assert rigidity and difference, as all successful industrial states do. In any case the concept of natural enmity needs to be gradually re introduced into European politics - in order to prevent a blind war, the adversaries will have to face one another undiplomatically and honestly, which is what Russia has been pushing for. A pan-European rivalry, rather than some sly artificial ‘union’, would bring us to an effective industrial economic and cultural unity. We can have benefits among each other but no pretense to have equal interests in each other.
To be plentiful and produce, our nations must be able to freely choose their partners; one party’s freedom of choice is the others incentive. Capitalism has embodied this principle, pan-national politics has not yet attained to it. But it is inevitable, the only other alternative is breakdown and that will most likely lead to the sort of violences described. So Germany needs to economically engage at its borders Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. All of these connections could lead to industries. It’s not entirely unlike microprocessor architecture, I imagine; the intelligence goes into isolating the different processes so that they do not melt together, and the progression is in isolating without taking space. Territorial conflicts will not be the norm in such an economy, war is in terms of shared or not shared interests, and the difference between a sick and healthy Europe is in secretive strife versus open competition. Revokation of game theory.