Debate’s immense privilege can only be combatted by facilitating decolonial conversations that challenge our assumptions.

This article was first presented as a paper in Germany. The title of this article, Decolonial Thinking and Europe, raises numerous critical questions and some serious concerns.

Does a white man, living and working in Europe, have the right to write about decolonial thinking? Where and in what place should such conversations take place? Is a Zoom meeting, predominantly attended by participants from European institutions of higher education, the correct space and place? Clearly not, on two accounts: it is an exclusive space. It is a space from which far too many are excluded from the conversation, firstly, because of the global divide between north and south and secondly, the digital divide that divides the world into those who have access to the digital world and those who cannot afford that access, because either they cannot afford the technology and/or cannot afford the data costs. These questions can be further expanded regarding Christianity, talking about decolonial thinking in a Christian context, where Western Christianity has played such an integral colonial role in global Christianity.

Yet, I believe that this conversation is vitally important, and even more so in exactly such a space of privilege. I stress the term vitally, as it has everything to do with life and that which gives life a chance, as the Argentinian political theorist Léon Rozitchner (2012) argues, when he argues that there is power in this life of the majority against the politics of war and neo-liberal democracy.

But one needs to make a few clear demarcations:

Not going to try to define what decolonial thinking is.

Not presenting or introducing a theory of decolonial thinking.

Not going to present a decolonial perspective, as I do not have that right or that privilege.

What can be done?

• As a European, one has a responsibility, in the sense that decolonial thinking calls a response forth, and therefore one cannot but respond. In this sense, one has a responsibility to allow decolonial thought and decolonial questions to address and deconstruct one.

• This responsibility is not to theorise or determine or appropriate decolonial thinking but to allow it to challenge the Western European subjects, in their Eurocentrism and allow it to deconstruct the European bourgeoisie colonial subjectivity.

Therefore, this article will not be a presentation of decolonial thinking, but rather a thinking and/or a reflection about Europe together with an interpretation of European (bourgeoisie) subjectivity, which are both placed in question by decolonial thinking. To reflect on decolonial thinking as a challenge to think about Europe and European subjectivity together with European identity as it is revealed and exposed by responding to decolonial thought.

The time-place of thinking and writing

Who has the right to talk about such matters, in a world where large parts of the world’s population, in fact, the majority, have been structurally silenced and continue to be silenced or are at least not respected as equals? Spivak’s (2010:21–80) famous question, Can the subaltern speak, is as relevant today as when it was first published. The place and time of the writing of this article is Europe, more specifically Germany, and the time is the time that is dominated by news of the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Trying to write about decolonial thinking in Europe in this particular time-place, while being exposed to the mainstream and official media, one cannot help but perceive how little attention or credence the global south’s opinions receive concerning these geopolitical matters, be it on the war in Ukraine or the South African case against Israel.2 This lack of credence that the South receives raises exactly this question: Can anyone, but the West speak authoritatively and ‘rationally’ on these global matters? The scant attention and bias against South Africa in mainstream German media, clearly accentuates this question, that if such a global legal case is brought before any International Court, by anybody but a Western European or North American country, it will not really count in the global rules-based order, which seems to be the new order that has replaced International Law (see Dugard 2023). The dominant West’s (USA, UK and Germany together with France) attitude towards the war was not in the least affected by the preliminary judgement of the International Court of Justice. The court’s ruling has not received the urgency nor the attention (by Western Government or Western Media) that the situation requires. This historic moment accentuates, or one could even say embodies, the theme of this article.