With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc, the reunification of Germany was a major episode in the history of modern Europe - and one widely held to have been opposed by that country's centuries-old enemy, France. But while it has been previously believed that French President Francois Mitterrand played a negative role in events leading up to reunification, this book shows that Mitterrand's main concern was not the potential threat of an old nemesis but rather that a reunified Germany be firmly anchored in a unified Europe. Updated with a new introduction and other materials, the book blends primary research and interviews with key actors in France and Germany to take readers behind the scenes of world governments as a new Europe was formed. Tilo Schabert had unprecedented, exclusive access to French presidential archives and here focuses on French diplomacy not only to dispel the notion that Mitterrand was reluctant to accept reunification but also to show how successful he was in bringing it about.

Two words describe a "modern" world: limits and limitless. Traditionally, humans recognized limits of their power. Modernity meant a break. Its protagonists aspired to bring worlds of their imagination into reality. They taught a new anthropology. Humans could ascend to a God-like status. Schabert analyzes the history of the project and its result: a civilization in a perennial crisis. Symptoms of the crisis have been exposed, today mostly in ecological terms. Schabert takes his material from many fields: philosophy, cosmology, natural sciences, literature, social studies, economics, architecture, and political thought. While modernity is endlessly disrupted, a world beyond modernity can be traced, especially in the modern theory of constitutional government. Constitutional governments are formed by limitations within a civilization that is meant to have no limits. What appears to be paradoxical has its own logic, as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Montesquieu, John Adams, the Federalist Papers, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and Woodrow Wilson have shown. Schabert carefully explicates their constitutional thought. It realized the limits through which modernity holds a promise.

Powers of chaos accompany any order of the human world, being the force against which this order is set. Human experience of history is two-fold. There is history ruled by chaos and history ruled by order. "History" occurs in a continuous flow of both histories. The dialectics of life unto nothingness/creation, struggles for order/order achieved is unceasingly actual. In exploring it, within a wide interdisciplinary and transcultural range, this book reaches beyond a conventional "philosophy of history". It deals with the chaotic as well as the cosmic part of the human historical experience. It stages this drama through the tales that religious, mythical, literary, philosophical, folkloristic, and historiographical sources tell and which are retold and interpreted here. From early on humans wished to know where, why, and wherefore all started and took place. Couldn't the dialectics between chaos and order be meaningful? Couldn't they assume a productive role as to the world's precarious event? Power, strife, guilt, divine grace and revelation, literary symbolization, as well as storytelling are discussed in this book. Philosophy, political theory, theology, religious studies, and literary studies will greatly benefit from its width and density.

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe-including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China-The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones-and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us-to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc, the reunification of Germany was a major episode in the history of modern Europe - and one widely held to have been opposed by that country's centuries-old enemy, France. But while it has been previously believed that French President Francois Mitterrand played a negative role in events leading up to reunification, this book shows that Mitterrand's main concern was not the potential threat of an old nemesis but rather that a reunified Germany be firmly anchored in a unified Europe. Updated with a new introduction and other materials, the book blends primary research and interviews with key actors in France and Germany to take readers behind the scenes of world governments as a new Europe was formed. Tilo Schabert had unprecedented, exclusive access to French presidential archives and here focuses on French diplomacy not only to dispel the notion that Mitterrand was reluctant to accept reunification but also to show how successful he was in bringing it about.