European legacy

Found in Slavoj Zizek’s Violence, page 139:

A couple of years ago a particular debate raged in Europe: should Christianity be mentioned as the key component of European Heritage in the preamble to the draft of the European constitution? A compromise was reached in which Christianity was listed along with Judaism, Islam, and the legacy of Antiquity. But where was modern Europe’s most precious legacy, that of atheism? What makes modern Europe unique is that it is the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post. This is most emphatically a European legacy worth fighting for.