The Frenetic European Claim to Epistemic Sovereignty via Ecological and Political Internationalism and Globalism
A critique of Thunberg’s approach
There is a recurring pattern in which certain European movements and actors engage with global conflicts in a way that presents itself as internationalist, while at the same time retaining a deeply European claim to epistemic sovereignty: the claim to define the terms, narratives, and symbolic meanings of struggles that exceed a post–World War II perspective of European historical experience.
This form of engagement does not simply express solidarity. It can become a process in which conflicts are reorganized through a one-sided European framework of interpretation, transforming complex historical and relational realities into symbols within contemporary European political debates.
In this process, the conflict itself risks becoming secondary to the struggle over who possesses the authority to define its meaning, and consequently to shape its political and social utilization.
This dynamic can be observed in different fields. The global attention surrounding Greta Thunberg’s ecological activism created a highly choreographed symbolic movement around environmental questions. Political actors and certain technological approaches were frequently presented as solutions to one dimension of ecological destruction. The complexity of the problem was condensed into its most visible manifestations: traffic, mobility, energy production, and heating systems. The broader ecological crisis became represented through a limited set of political demands, while the structural dimensions of destruction remained largely outside the frame.
Ecological struggles, however, cannot be reduced to one dimension of ecocide. They cannot address climate disruption while simultaneously excluding the broader question of faunacidal injustice and prescribed species hierarchy, and the systemic hegemonical relations in which humans categorically position themselves toward other forms of life. Nor can ecological questions be reduced to European moral and economic positioning.
In such performative mass mobilizations, political action risks becoming detached from the deeper structures shaping relations between humans, animals, ecosystems, economies, and histories of domination. In our text “Tierrechte und Umweltschutz” (E-Reader: Gruppe Messel, Jahrgang 4, Nr. 3, 2022; https://simorgh.de/about/tierrechte-und-umweltschutz-2/ ; https://d-nb.info/1257735012 [19.07.26]), we have discussed how ecological questions require a fundamental transformation of the relationship between human societies and the living world, rather than becoming another field for extending given ideological representations through symbolic positioning that ultimately reaches the limits of imaginative and relational reasoning in relation to the Mitwelt.
A similar question emerges when this type of symbolic movement enters the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The issue is not whether people should express concern about terror, war, inflicted and experienced suffering, and injustice/s — these concerns are essential. The question is how European actors position themselves in relation to histories that involve profound European responsibility and historical entanglement.
A meaningful engagement with this conflict requires confronting multiple histories simultaneously: the history of European antisemitism, the history of European Jewish life and persecution, the development of racial and religious power structures, and the persecution and mass murder of European Jews under German National Socialism and völkisch ideology. At the same time, it requires confronting the histories of European imperial intervention, colonial structures, displacement, and violence affecting Palestinians and other Arab populations, as well as the wider historical realities of the Middle East.
Neither of these histories can be absorbed into a European symbolic struggle without reducing the complexity of the people, societies, and histories involved.
When contemporary European mass movements approach such conflicts primarily through their own frameworks of moral and political identity, they risk reproducing the very structure they claim to oppose: the elevation of a particular perspective into a universal one.
The problem is therefore not international engagement itself. The problem begins when engagement becomes a claim to epistemic sovereignty and when a situated perspective assumes the authority to become the general perspective.
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