Any "pro-Europeans"—those who support European integration or the "European project"—believe that the European Union embodies cosmopolitanism. They believe it represents inclusivity, diversity, and openness. It rejects racism and nationalism. It is about "coming together" and collaborating amicably. It is a wonderful illustration of how rivals may unite as allies and how variety can coexist with harmony.
The European project has demonstrated "that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders" and "that it is possible to overcome the differences between 'them' and 'us,'" as European Commission President José Manuel Barroso put it when the EU received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 as it battled the Eurozone crisis.
However, thinking of the EU in this sense has a somewhat Eurocentric feel to it. In particular, it confuses Europe with the rest of the world by generalizing about "peoples and nations" in the way Barroso does. After all, only peoples and nations within Europe have come together as a result of the European project, which is the process of European integration since the end of World War II. It was a process that started in the early postwar era with six western European nations and later "widened" to encompass other northern, western, and southern nations as well as, after the end of the cold war, central and eastern nations. Although the rest of the world has never been a part of it, the EU has of course created policies for it.
Although internal restrictions on the free flow of capital, products, and people have gradually been eliminated over the past 75 years, external restrictions have continued. In particular, restrictions on the movement of people have persisted despite the removal of many obstacles to the flow of capital and goods from outside the EU.
Our perception of the EU and its place in the globe has been clouded by the European propensity to mistake Europe for the entire world, sometimes known as "the Eurocentric Fallacy." It has given rise to what I refer to as the "myth of cosmopolitan Europe," which is an idealization of European integration as a sort of cosmopolitan endeavour. The EU can be best seen as a manifestation of regionalism, which is similar to nationalism rather than the reverse of it, as many "pro-Europeans" would have you believe. We can better understand the conflicts within the European project by thinking of the EU in terms of regionalism rather than cosmopolitanism.
I was born and raised in the UK; my mother is Dutch and my father is Indian. So, growing up in a nation on the geographical fringe of Europe with a well-knownly estranged relationship to it had an impact on how I personally relate to European identity and the European Union. In addition to my sense of being British, I also have a secondary sense of belonging to two other countries: one of the original six EU members and one that is not in Europe or the EU but was colonized by Britain. Because of this, even though I've always felt somewhat European, I didn't feel entirely European as I've heard some other people proudly assert. Although the concept of being European caught some of my identity, it was never able to do so completely.
I started working at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think tank for foreign affairs in Europe with locations in seven major cities. I viewed myself as a "pro-European" at the time, someone who is in favor of European integration or the "European project" as it stands now. I believed that the EU was a positive influence on both the continent of Europe and the rest of the world. Nevertheless, as I gained a greater understanding of the EU over the course of my six years at ECFR, I started to feel that a lot of what I had previously believed to be true about its history was in fact myth — the result of the EU's own self-idealization.
As my own opinions of the EU changed, the EU itself was also changing, especially after the Eurozone crisis started around 2010. I developed a harsher opinion of the EU and found it more difficult to remain an EU citizen. Since I am a British citizen and the UK has already left the EU, I should probably use the pronoun "they" rather than "we" when referring to Europeans in order to attempt and convince them that a different Europe from the one we presently have is necessary.
Even while the EU is not a really global undertaking, some European intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas, have maintained that it may nonetheless be seen as a cosmopolitan endeavor. According to Habermas, the end of the historical era centered on the nation state that governed its own territory and the "debordering of economy, society, and culture" that followed hollowed out democracy.
Now that the country state is no longer able to regulate markets and implement redistributive policies, the EU is, or ought to be, a vehicle to restore that authority. However, the notion of a cosmopolitan Europe argues that the EU may transcend it rather than "re-bordering" and re-establishing the "territorial principle" at a higher level.
According to Habermas, the EU can serve as a foundation for, or a first step toward, the transition of international politics into domestic politics, or as a forerunner to a global society. Many proponents of European integration think that domestic politics have already replaced foreign politics inside Europe. However, the concept of a "cosmopolitan Europe" is more expansive. Habermas claims that the EU is a crucial step towards a "politically constituted world society" in other writings. With the "cosmopolitan goal of creating the conditions necessary for a global domestic policy," the EU can thereby reinstate the state's control over markets on behalf of all people, not just Europeans.
It is more true and beneficial to think of the EU as an expression of regionalism rather than as a cosmopolitan institution. Similar to nationalism, but on a wider, continental scale, is regionalism. Consider what it means to claim to be European. By doing this, you are not claiming to be a global citizen, much less a "citizen of nowhere," as the British prime leader Theresa May said in a 2016 speech to the Conservative party conference. Instead, you are indicating that you are a resident of a certain area, one with a specific history and connection to the rest of the globe.
Even while the EU is not a really global undertaking, some European intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas, have maintained that it may nonetheless be seen as a cosmopolitan endeavor. According to Habermas, the end of the historical era centered on the nation state that governed its own territory and the "debordering of economy, society, and culture" that followed hollowed out democracy.
Now that the country state is no longer able to regulate markets and implement redistributive policies, the EU is, or ought to be, a vehicle to restore that authority. However, the notion of a cosmopolitan Europe argues that the EU may transcend it rather than "re-bordering" and re-establishing the "territorial principle" at a higher level.
According to Habermas, the EU can serve as a foundation for, or a first step toward, the transition of international politics into domestic politics, or as a forerunner to a global society. Many proponents of European integration think that domestic politics have already replaced foreign politics inside Europe. However, the concept of a "cosmopolitan Europe" is more expansive. Habermas claims that the EU is a crucial step towards a "politically constituted world society" in other writings. With the "cosmopolitan goal of creating the conditions necessary for a global domestic policy," the EU can thereby reinstate the state's control over markets on behalf of all people, not just Europeans.
It is more true and beneficial to think of the EU as an expression of regionalism rather than as a cosmopolitan institution. Similar to nationalism, but on a wider, continental scale, is regionalism. Consider what it means to claim to be European. By doing this, you are not claiming to be a global citizen, much less a "citizen of nowhere," as the British prime leader Theresa May said in a 2016 speech to the Conservative party conference. Instead, you are indicating that you are a resident of a certain area, one with a specific history and connection to the rest of the globe.
Based on the work of political scientist Benedict Anderson, "imagined communities" is another prominent approach to view countries. Despite the fact that nations are social constructions, nationalism serves to make them appear "natural"—that is, as if they had always existed. According to Anderson, nationalism evolved in the framework of modernity and the Enlightenment, first in the creole communities of the Americas (Brazil, the US, and the former Spanish colonies), and subsequently in Europe. There was a need for a new sense of belonging to replace sacred imagined communities—or, in the case of Europe, to replace the "imagined community of Christendom"—from the 17th century onward as religious certainties waned, monarchs lost the automatic legitimacy they had previously enjoyed, and conceptions of time changed.
According to Anderson, the mass production and commodification of books and newspapers made possible by the printing press, which "made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways," was the key factor in the emergence of nationalism. Publishers started writing books in popular "national print languages" as the market for readers of books in Latin, which had been the dominant language of Europe's religious elites, quickly became saturated. This had the effect of standardizing these languages. This gave the country the opportunity to take on the function of prior religious identities in converting chance into meaning. "It is the magic of nations to turn chance into destiny," writes Anderson.
The concept of "imagined community" can also be applied to Europe. All communities bigger than the first human settlements where people interacted face to face (and possibly even these) are imagined, according to Anderson. However, there may be more ground to cover. In this sense, if "imagined communities" are a function of size, Europe as a region might be even more imagined than individual European countries. Of course, there are nations with larger populations than all of Europe, such China and India, but European nationalism is, at least in comparison to other European states, one more step away from a local identity. Even more so than distinct national identities in Europe, it is imagined or, to put it another way, mediated.
Europe, though, might be a little different form of imagined community than states in another way. A nation, according to Anderson, is a hypothetical political entity that is "imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". Even the greatest of them, covering perhaps a billion living people, has finite, if elastic, bounds that other nations lie beyond, the author notes. Even the most messianic nationalists do not envision a time when all people would unite under their nation, as it was once feasible, instance, for Christians to imagine a world that is entirely Christian.
On the other side, Europe is evasive about its bounds. It also imagines itself in a different way than nations, particularly when it comes to the question of whether its boundaries are finite. This is because it, like nations, has elastic boundaries (for instance, there has always been confusion about where Europe ends and Asia begins).
As I've said before, "pro-Europeans" have occasionally viewed the EU as a vast society that would transform the world in its own image, particularly in the two decades following the end of the cold war. In other words, Anderson attributes previous religious identities with a messianic vision that European regionalism shares in some measure. However, the EU has become more explicit about its boundaries in recent years. As a result, "pro-European" views on sovereignty are also evolving.
Traditional "pro-Europeans" viewed sovereignty as out of date and saw European integration as a way to do away with it. They have, however, come to support the notion of "European sovereignty" over the past ten years. In other words, European regionalism may be moving in the direction of nationalism.
At the outset of the postwar endeavor of European integration, some people could easily see how a European identity can be comparable to nationalism and even mimic its worst traits. The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, for instance, supported European integration, but she noted in a 1948 essay that while there was much talk of a European federation at the time, "The trouble with many European intellectuals in this respect is that now that the long-wished-for European federation is a certain possibility, new constellations of world powers make it only more difficult to achieve."
Arendt anticipated the potential for an ethnic or cultural form of identity centered on a unified Europe.
On the other hand, very few "pro-Europeans" today think of European identity in this way as being similar to nationalism. This is related to the way they have a history of demonizing national identity in general. "Progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals... frequently insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the other, and its affinities with racism," according to Benedict Anderson. "Pro-Europeans" have a propensity to perceive nationalism in this manner, especially in the United States. They consider it to be, at best, an anachronism. They perceive it as potentially hazardous. Nationalism is war, as French President François Mitterrand stated in his final speech to the European Parliament in 1995.
However, approaching nationalism in this manner has yet another Eurocentric element. It is challenging to reconcile Partha Chatterjee's description of nationalism as a "dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature, threatening the orderly calm of civilised life" with the anti-colonial nationalism that existed in India during the country's independence struggle. When nationalism is only viewed negatively, Chatterjee claims that its "emancipatory aspects" are obscured. Europeans, especially Germans, who frequently view the history of the nation state through the lens of their own experience with it, have a tendency to exaggerate the differences between nationalism and regionalism, which has also led to a blind spot regarding the possibility that European regionalism could resemble European nationalisms.
The manner in which the EU responded to the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 is a good illustration of this blind hole. Personal protective equipment (PPE) export regulations were put in place by France and Germany at the beginning of March as the virus spread across Europe, particularly hard-hit Italy. "Pro-Europeans" often viewed this as risky nationalism. When these limitations were removed a week later and the EU itself placed limitations on the sale of PPE outside of Europe, it was viewed as a victory for European cohesion. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, remarked, "We need to help each other." However, it appeared that few "pro-Europeans" were aware that the EU had accomplished exactly what they had criticized member states for, but at a regional level and with potentially more worse global repercussions.
Similar to this, Germany adopted the tagline "Making Europe Strong Again Together" when it assumed the six-month EU chairmanship in 2020. Therefore, the German government adopted the "Make America Great Again" motto of the Trump administration, but because it now applied to a region rather than a nation, it thought that this would change its meaning to the reverse of what Trump was trying to convey. Wolfgang Ischinger, a fervent "pro-European" and former German diplomat, did not find anything wrong with the slogan. He remarked that Germany's support for a strong EU is the exact opposite of endorsing or glorifying nationalism. In other words, when accepted by Europe as a continent rather than by country states, far-right tropes either didn't exist or mysteriously stopped being far-right tropes.
In order to think about precisely what kind of imagined community Europe is, it is necessary to look more closely at the processes of identity creation in each case in order to grasp the parallels and contrasts between European nationalisms and European regionalism. But it's crucial to distinguish between less critical views of identity creation and myths about national and regional identities, or comforting and sanitizing tales that are the direct result of nationalism or regionalism. Because "pro-Europeans" themselves think it's crucial to fortify European identity, their attempts to construct a "narrative" for the EU frequently mythologize it in order to construct a "usable past" rather than elucidate it further.
Particularly, there is a propensity to conceptualize the emergence of the European identity in terms of an idealized and oversimplified understanding of its past. Europe is frequently seen as a closed system, or as an area with its own distinct history from that of other regions.
Contrarily, the formation of the European identity was in opposition to a number of non-European others, the relative weight of which shifted through time. Jews were Europe's main internal enemy during the Middle Ages, when Islam was its main exterior foe and Europe was mostly synonymous with Christianity. Non-white people were Europe's "constitutive outsiders" after the Enlightenment and particularly during the colonial era. Europe was increasingly contrasted with and viewed as competing with Russia and the US during the 20th century. As much as many "pro-Europeans" would like to believe it, the postwar notion of a Europe centered on the EU did not completely break with this history of othering.
Although pro-Europeans believe that Europe is not a nation, or even the reverse of a nation, they frequently use language that is strikingly similar to that of nationalists when discussing their own country. The notion of Europe as a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, or "community of fate," is a suitable illustration. When applied to a national setting, the idea is typically viewed as problematic, particularly in Germany. In particular, it is perceived as implying a primitive or pre-political conception of the country. Pro-Europeans, however, frequently use the phrase to refer to the EU and seem to believe that when used at the regional level as opposed to the national level, it is completely unproblematic. For instance, the French philosopher Edgar Morin stated in 1990 that Europeans had "arrived at the moment of the community of fate" after becoming aware of their shared fate since 1945.
The perception of the EU as a "community of fate" has become stronger as Europeans have felt more endangered, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine. Contrary to what many "pro-Europeans" would have you believe, the cultural component of European regionalism did not just vanish after 1945. As a result, it informed the postwar European project, which did not give rise to a brand-new, exclusively civic regionalism, and continued in a more subdued manner. We might refer to this cultural component of European regionalism as "Eurowhiteness" rather than European regionalism in general, especially the post-second world war version that is focused on the EU.