Cosmopolitan Europe

Europe is Europe’s last remaining realistic political utopia. But Europe remains to be understood and conceptualized. This historically unique form of international community cannot be explained in terms of the traditional concepts of politics and the state, which remain trapped in the straightjacket of methodological nationalism. Thus, if we are to understand cosmopolitan Europe, we must radically rethink the conventional categories of social and political analysis. Just as the Peace of Westphalia brought the religious civil wars of the seventeenth century to an end through the separation of church and state, so too the separation of state and nation represents the appropriate response to the horrors of the twentieth century. And just as the secular state makes the exercise of different religions possible, so too cosmopolitan Europe must guarantee the coexistence of different ethnic, religious and political forms of life across national borders based on the principle of cosmopolitan tolerance. The task the authors have set themselves in this book is nothing less than to rethink Europe as an idea and a reality. It represents an attempt to understand the process of Europeanization in light of the theory of reflexive modernization and thereby to redefine it at both the theoretical and the political level. This book completes Ulrich Beck’s trilogy on ‘cosmopolitan realism’, the volumes of which complement each other and can be read independently. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the key social and political developments of our time.

The project of European integration has undergone a succession of shocks, beginning with the Eurozone crisis, followed by reactions to the sudden growth of irregular migration, and, most recently, the Coronavirus pandemic. These shocks have politicised questions related to the governance of borders and markets that for decades had been beyond the realm of contestation. For some time, these questions have been spilling over into domestic and European electoral politics, with the rise of "populist" and Eurosceptic parties. Increasingly, however, the crises have begun to reshape the liberal narrative that have been central to the European project. This book charts the rise of contestation over the meaning of "Europe", particularly in light of the Coronavirus crisis and Brexit. Drawing together cutting edge, interdisciplinary scholarship from across the continent, it questions not merely the traditional conflict between European and nationalist politics, but the impact of contestation on the assumed "cosmopolitan" values of Europe.

Inter-marriage both reflects and brings social change. This book draws on a unique survey of randomly selected samples of national and European binational couples to demonstrate that the latter are core cells of a future European society. Unrestricted freedom of movement has enabled a rise in the number of lower-class and middle-class binational couples among Europeans. Euro-couples fully integrate in their host cities but secure less support in solving everyday problems than do national ones, partly because of a relatively small network of relatives living close-by. Embeddedness in a dense international network and a cosmopolitan outlook also distinguish them from national couples. The book challenges the view of cosmopolitanism as exclusively middle-class and highlights contrasts between lower-class and middle-class binational couples. Furthermore, it shows that social cosmopolitanism among binational couples is not matched by a commensurate weaker national identification that would enhance support to a more federal Europe. This book is primarily addressed to the general public interested in contemporary European society and to academics interested in inter-marriage. Since the chapters are quasi stand-alone pieces devoted to specific topics, it provides suitable reading material for social stratification, social networks, civil society, popular culture, and European integration undergraduate and graduate courses.

In the turbulent period following the First World War the young Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union, offering a vision of peaceful, democratic unity for Europe, with no borders, a common currency, and a single passport. His political congresses in Vienna, Berlin, and Basel attracted thousands from the intelligentsia and the cultural elite, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud, who wanted a United States of Europe brought together by consent. The Count's commitment to this cooperative ideal infuriated Adolf Hitler, who referred to him as a "cosmopolitan bastard" in Mein Kampf. Communists and nationalists, xenophobes and populists alike hated the Count and his political mission. When the Nazis annexed Austria, the Count and his wife, the famous actress Ida Roland, narrowly escaped the Gestapo. He fled to the United States, where he helped shape American policy for postwar Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi's profile was such that he served as the basis for the fictional resistance hero Victor Laszlo in the film Casablanca. A brilliant networker, the Count guided many European leaders, notably advising Winston Churchill before his 1946 Zürich speech on Europe. A friend to both Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle, Coudenhove-Kalergi was personally invited to the High Mass in Rheims Cathedral in 1961 to celebrate Franco-German reconciliation. A provocative visionary for Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi thought and acted in terms of continents, not countries. For the Count, the United States of Europe was the answer to the challenges of communist Russia and capitalist America. Indeed, he launched his Pan-European Union thirty years before Jean Monnet set up the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the European Union. Timely and captivating, Martyn Bond's biography offers an opportunity to explore a remarkable life and revisit the impetus and origins of a unified Europe.

The invocation of ‘the market’ has been omnipresent in media discussions of ‘crisis Europe’. On the one hand, ‘the market’ is presented as that to which EU member states must collectively respond. It is the very purpose of a post-national government and that which dictates individual and collective identities. The expansion of market is that which guarantees and constitutes peace in Europe. On the other hand, ‘the market’ is that which government must seek to tame. It is the servant of government and ought not be permitted to undermine collective identities and solidarities associated with the juridical imaginary of social contract and sovereign nation-state. It is, from this perspective, the expansion of the social institutions of nation-state into the post-national arena that will constitute a lasting peace in Europe. Cosmopolitan Government in Europe uses a Foucauldian lens to consider the ethics of the scholarly and institutional discourses associated with these apparently divergent market and legal cosmopolitan visions of Europe. It reflects on attempts to reconcile or move beyond these discourses, particularly through the invocation of more pluralist modes of governance, but claims that such moves have been largely unsuccessful in both practice and theory. It argues that the very ambiguity in the relationship between the ideal subjects that these market and legal visions promote – respectively, post-national ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘citizen’ – is that which permits a space for resistance and politics. Thus, the book argues for a pragmatic politics which is cognizant of the violent potential inherent in any cosmopolitan attempt to govern Europe, while recognising the contemporary dangers associated with the dominance of a market cosmopolitan Europe. This work is an important and timely intervention in contemporary debates about democratic Europe and its shortcomings and will be of great interest to scholars of international political theory, European studies and international political economy.

The past hundred years of Europe are distilled in the experiences of the citizens of Strasbourg. From the turn of the twentieth century until 1945, Europe's ruling idea of nationalism rendered Strasbourg/Straßburg the prize in a tug-of-war between the two greatest continental powers, France and Germany. Then, in the immediate post-war period, ideals for European unity set up various European institutions, some headquartered in Strasbourg, which have gradually created a partially supranational Europe. At the end of the 1950s, a third theme arises: the large-scale settling in Strasbourg and other such richer, western European cities of persons from poorer lands, frequently ex-colonial territories, whose appearance and cultural practices render them essentially "different" to local eyes: expressions of racism thereby jostle with professions of multiculturalism. Now in the globalisation era, the issue of "immigration" has broadened yet further into transnationalism: the experience of persons who are embedded in varying manner in both Strasbourg and in their land of origin. Based on in-depth, lively interviews with 80 men and 80 women ranging from 101 to 20 years, and from all over the world (France, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, Portugal, Italy, ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Cameroon, and Afghanistan amongst other countries), the author draws out of these compelling testimonies all sorts of compelling insights into issues of identity, race, nationality, culture, politics, heritage and representation, giving a unique and valuable view of what it means (and has meant over the past century) to be a European.

This book provides a fresh examination of the cosmopolitan project of post-war Europe from a variety of perspectives. It explores the ways in which European cosmopolitanism can be theorized differently if we take into account histories which have rarely been at the forefront of such understandings. It also uses neglected historical resources to draw out new and unexpected entanglements and connections between understandings of European cosmopolitanism both in Europe and elsewhere. The final part of the book places European cosmopolitanism in tension with contemporary postcolonial configurations around diaspora, migration, and austerity. Overall, it seeks to draw attention to the ways in which Europe’s posited others have always been very much a part of Europe’s colonial histories and its postcolonial present.

Examines the democratic legitimacy of international organisations from a republican perspective, diagnoses the EU as suffering from a democratic disconnect and offers 'demoicracy' as the cure.