Cosmopolitan Europe E-Book

Ulrich Beck

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 705

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

1: Introduction: The European Malaise and Why the Idea of Cosmopolitan Europe Could Overcome It

1    Rethinking Europe

2    What is meant by cosmopolitan Europe?

3    European self-delusions

Notes

2: The Reflexive Modernization of Europe

1    From the first to the second modernity: Europeanization revisited – from the perspective of the theory of reflexive modernization

2    Europe and the reflexive modernization of state and society

3    The inclusive Europe

4    Europeanization as regime of side effects

5    Europeanization as transformative regime

6    Europeanization as self-propelling regime

Notes

3: Cosmopolitan Empire: Statehood and Political Authority in the Process of Europeanization

1    The national either/or Europe and its predicaments

2    State and empire

3    European Empire and the transcendence of the nation-state

4    European sovereignty as a positive-sum game

5    The cosmopolitan organization of diversity: the European Empire and its contradictions

Notes

4: European Social Space: On the Social Dynamics of Variable Borders

1    On the Europe-blindness of sociology: critique of the fixation of Europe research on the state

2    Horizontal Europeanization: questions, indicators, empirical developments

3    Empirical cosmopolitan social theory of Europeanization

Notes

5: Strategies of European Cosmopolitanization

1    European cosmopolitanization as a meta-power game

2    Strategies of Europeanization

3    Deformations of cosmopolitan Europe

4    Strategies of European cosmopolitanization

5    What makes cosmopolitanization strategies realistic?

Notes

6: Inequality and Recognition: Europe-Wide Social Conflicts and their Political Dynamics

1    Critique of methodological nationalism in the sociology of inequality and research on the welfare state

2    Mobile borders, mobile patterns of inequality?

3    European regions as conflict patterns of European inequalities

4    Mobile ‘We’ and mobile ‘Others’?

5    The recognition–inequality dilemma: on the intersection of conflicts over inequality and conflicts over the recognition of difference

6    To what extent can and should a cosmopolitan Europe promote solidarity?

Notes

7: On the Dialectic of Globalization and Europeanization: External Contradictions of Cosmopolitan Europe

1    The cosmopolitan deficit: critique of the Eurocentric outlook in the debate on Europe

2    World risk society: outline of a theory

3    The Iraq War and its lessons for cosmopolitan realism

4    What European cosmopolitanism can contribute to global cosmopolitanism

Notes

8: Cosmopolitan Visions for Europe

1    Three scenarios of the future Europe

2    Reflexive constitutionalism: constitution and civil society in Europe

3    Cosmopolitan democracy: possibilities for legitimating the European Empire

4    The principle of the cosmopolitan integration of Europe

5    Power and weakness in world risk society – Europe's cosmopolitan realism in a new world order

6    In the European interest: Europe's cosmopolitan interest and cosmopolitan responsibility

7    Dilemmas of cosmopolitan Europe

Beyond arrogance and self-betrayal: culture of shared ambivalence

Notes

References and Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

Table 4.1:  Germans studying abroad, 1991–2000

Table 4.2:  Total number and percentage of national, European and international mergers and acquisitions

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1:  Constitutive features of states and empires in comparison

Figure 3.2:  Variations in the international organization of political order

Figure 5.1:  Typology of state strategies in the process of Europeanization

Figure 5.2:  Typology of capital strategies in the process of Europeanization

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Index

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This translation copyright © Polity Press 2007. First published in German as Das kosmopolitische Europa by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, © 2004

The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut

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ISBN-10: 0-7456-3562-8

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Preface

Europe as a model must be rethought. It worked for fifty years but now it has outlived its usefulness. A new era of border-transcending and border-effacing cooperation began, if not at first, then emphatically with the eastern enlargement of the European Union. Yet what exactly has occurred? Where is Europeanization leading us and what has been its driving force to date? The euphoria (and the scepticism) over the new, enlarged Europe cannot disguise the fact that Europe still remains to be understood and conceptualized. This historically unique and distinctive form of intergovernmental and inter-societal community escapes all traditional categories and concepts. Europe exemplifies particularly clearly how historically unreal and blunt our political concepts and the theoretical concepts of the social sciences have become – for both remain trapped in the conceptual straightjacket of methodological nationalism.

What holds the enlarged Europe together? A new perspective on Europe – the cosmopolitan outlook! This book is a response to the new founding moment of the European Union and it presents and develops a concept for it, namely, ‘cosmopolitan Europe’. It is an attempt to understand and to provide a new theoretical and practical specification of Europeanization in light of the theory of reflexive modernization.

This reconfiguration of thought and research cannot succeed in a single step. This book is part of a larger project of Ulrich Beck, a trilogy on ‘cosmopolitan realism’, which it also brings to a close. In the first volume of this trilogy, Power in the Global Age, Ulrich Beck explores the legitimacy of political authority under conditions of global interdependence. The second book, The Cosmopolitan Vision, deals with foundational questions and develops the principles of a cosmopolitan enlightenment. This third and final volume, Cosmopolitan Europe, which is co-authored with Edgar Grande, throws light on the unknown Europe in which we are living.

That this trilogy could even be begun and be completed with the present volume is a piece of luck that is due to the extraordinary support of many people. In the first place, we must mention the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft which provides financial support for a collaborative research centre in Munich on the topic of ‘reflexive modernization’, whose director is Ulrich Beck and to which Edgar Grande has belonged from the beginning. This book demonstrates in an exemplary way how such a special research centre can stimulate scientific cooperation across disciplinary boundaries even when it is not formally organized as a research project. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft has, in addition, funded two empirical research projects of Edgar Grande within the framework of its special concentration programme ‘Governance in Europe’, from which ideas and findings have flowed into this book. Ulrich Beck owes an additional debt of gratitude to the Volkswagen-Stiftung for a grant that enabled him to work on these book projects over a long period.

Finally, we would like to thank our students in Munich, London and Toronto with whom, in recent years in numerous seminars and lectures, we discussed our ideas on cosmopolitan Europe in a globalizing world, and who repeatedly forced us to sharpen our view of Europe. Almut Kleine has survived many new revisions of the complete text virtually without losing her patience, which goes far beyond what one can reasonably expect even from the most obliging person. Oliver Buntrock undertook the laborious task of assembling the bibliography. Our warmest thanks to them both.

Ulrich Beck

Edgar Grande

1Introduction: The European Malaise and Why the Idea of Cosmopolitan Europe Could Overcome It

1    Rethinking Europe

The world is out of joint. No, this is not a reference to ‘globalization’ or to the ‘terrorist threat’, to the ‘eastern enlargement of the European Union’ or to Europe's ‘shrinking population’, but referred to an explosion in population, to the scandal that ‘servants were becoming kings’, that the Reformation was leading to the collapse of a global order and that the first signs indicated that the new form of state was indeed having disciplining effects. Even allowing for the fact that the symptoms of crisis of the current European transformation are different, it is striking how similar the forms of speech in use at the beginning of the twenty-first century are to those used by people responding to the loss of certainty in the early modern period, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century (Schulze 2004). The more societies are confronted with transformations that threaten their very foundations, the more fearfully people cling to what is familiar and the more likely they are to misunderstand the new realities. Even changes for the better then provoke anxious resistance.

Even the most advanced sciences and scientists were not immune to this infatuation with error intended to protect the foundations of one's thought – far from it. For example, the invention of the printing press was dismissed as a passing fad. Those who viewed the sciences as the source of renewal stood corrected: the ‘friend of truth’ had to ‘guard with all his strength against all innovation’. For ‘omnis novitas periculosa’ (Lentulus), all innovation is dangerous! Moreover, according to Bacon, ‘whatever has not already been invented and understood, can never be so hereafter’ (Novum organum). The phenomenon that dramatic changes inspire intellectual and normative stasis has already been remarked by Jacob Burckhardt: ‘Major historical changes are always purchased at great cost, often after people imagined they had got them on the cheap’ (Burckhardt 1957: 89).1

However, the differences in reactions and mentalities among countries were as pronounced then as they are today. In France and England, there were elements of a ‘libertine climate of thought’. The changes were accepted but at the same time attempts were made to comprehend them and relate them to older realities. The German reaction was quite different: ‘The German discussion was framed by a kind of fundamental moral critique of the existing, “bad”, world.’ People felt endangered, for example, by ‘a Turkish threat of apocalyptic proportions’ (Schulze 2004: 10).

Like the printing press at that time, today the European Union is similarly misunderstood, for the simple reason that it is still perceived within the outdated political and scientific framework of the nation, whereas the realities which are producing Europeanization represent the classic historical counter-example to the political and social ontology of the nation-state. Because the European Union seems to have been exhaustively researched, the principle that whatever has not yet been discovered and understood cannot be discovered and understood in the future either also seems to hold for research on Europe. This book demonstrates precisely the opposite. Europe stands for the most misunderstood thing in the world, for a powerful negation – neither state nor society, at least not in the sense in which the United States, for example, is both a state and a society.

In contrast to the great European minds who developed their philosophical and political vision of Europe long before they could have had an inkling of what Europeanization would actually entail, today we are confronting the experience of Europeanization without knowing how to conceptualize and understand it. Europe in movement – Europe as movement – escapes our understanding because this permanent process of transformation contradicts the conception within which Europe hitherto seemed to be self-evidently situated, namely, the conceptual horizon of national societies and states. To be sure, social and political history is not the same thing as the history of ideas. Europeanization is also shaped by interests and institutions, and whether this experiment will fail or not does not depend on its false understanding of itself alone. Nevertheless, interpreting a permanent, thoroughgoing transformation like Europeanization for which we lack interpretive categories that are able to represent it as meaningful, and even necessary, multiplies the burden of innovation without revealing its chances of success.

That Europe is trapped in a malaise is by now a truism. However, it is more difficult to explain how this malaise could be overcome. In our view, it would be premature to discard the very idea of Europe as outdated. On the contrary, today Europe is the last politically effective utopia. The maxim ‘in dubio pro Europa’ remains valid, although Europe for the most part tends to think and behave in national terms. How can the really existing utopia overcome this debilitating malaise?