“We Good Europeans”: Nietzsche’s New Europe in Beyond Good and Evil Nicholas Martin In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche remarks: ‘we who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even sufficiently German, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits – we have it still, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the task and, who knows? the target...’. 1 This paper is an examination of Nietzsche’s notion of what it is to be a ‘good European’. It takes issue with the view that Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘good European’ is to be understood primarily, or even exclusively, as merely the antithesis of certain nineteenth-century phenomena to which Nietzsche was deeply hostile: the State, nationalism and anti- Semitism. While not denying that the notion of the ‘good European’ does serve a negating antithetical purpose, I argue that Nietzsche also gives the notion a positive content which is both disturbing and not without relevance to the development of today’s Europe. In his earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche’s main purpose had been to seek to promote a revitalisation of German culture. He had argued that this could be achieved by excavating the twin artistic and psychological impulses (the Apollinian and the Dionysian) which had allegedly flourished in fifth-century Greece, before they were buried or obscured by the theoretical culture of the West, inaugurated by Socrates. The most suitable means of excavation were the music-dramas of Richard Wagner which harked back, Nietzsche believed, to a pre-Socratic, pre-rational, mythopoeic form of human existence, while simultaneously providing a specifically 1 Beyond Good and Evil (henceforth BGE), Preface (Friedrich Nietzsche. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, second edition, 15 vols (Berlin and New