Whither Europe?

Abstract

The financial collapse of 2008, and its consequences of recession in the Eurozone and beyond, has exacerbated tensions at the heart of the postwar European project. The politics of austerity has provoked populist and far-right political responses, scapegoating migrants and minorities and increasingly calling the project of integration into question. In this essay I focus on responses by social theorists to the emerging crisis. In particular, I address the contrast between their reaffirmation of ‘European’ cosmopolitanism and their associated criticisms of multiculturalism, which, instead, is posed as a threat. In this way, while they challenge those who wish the dissolution of the European project, they do so at the expense of those seen to be internal ‘others’, whose scapegoating is one aspect of the populist threat to that integration. It is their failure to address the colonial histories of Europe, I argue, that enables them to dismiss so easily its postcolonial and multicultural present. As such, they reproduce features of the populist political debates they otherwise seek to criticize and transcend. A properly cosmopolitan Europe, I suggest, would be one which understood that its historical constitution in colonialism cannot be rendered to the past by denial of that past.

• Colonialism
• cosmopolitanism
• European Union
• historiography
• multiculturalism
• postcolonialism

Notes

1 Alongside selling residency rights and, ultimately, citizenship for selected high-net-worth individuals from approved countries, there are also high-priority and fast-track routes to obtain short-term visas. In contrast, the UK government had planned to charge a £3,000 ‘security-bond’ for what it regarded as ‘high-risk’ overseas visitors from six African and Asian countries, though this was subsequently scrapped (The Hindu, 3 November 2013).

2 http://waehlt-europa.de/ (accessed 3 March 2014).

3 All these personal contributions can be found at http://waehlt-europa.de/ (accessed 3 March 2014). I thank Daniel Orrells and Maurice Stierl for help with translations.

4 On the situation in Lampedusa, see Hasselbach (2013) and De Genova (2014).

5 http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/index_en.htm (accessed 3 March 2014).

6 Even in its own terms, Habermas's designation of the transcendence of religious divisions by the project of European union is parochial, since the negotiations for entry by Ireland and the UK from 1961 to entry in 1973 were marked by the reemergence of ‘postcolonial’ and religiously marked nationalisms and extremist violence in Northern Ireland and the British mainland.