Europe and Asia beyond East and West
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Europe and Asia beyond East and West

Gerard Delanty, Gerard Delanty

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Europe and Asia beyond East and West

Gerard Delanty, Gerard Delanty

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About This Book

This major new book tackles key questions on Europe in the context of shifting parameters of East and West. The contributors - sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians - show, from a variety of different perspectives, that the conventional equation of Europe with the West must be questioned. Featuring four thematically organized chapters, the book looks at:

  • apost-Western world
  • Asia in Europe: encounters in history
  • between Europe and Asia
  • otherness in Europe and Asia.

Exploring new expressions of European self-understanding in a way that challenges recent ideological notions of the 'clash of civilizations', this outstanding work draws on recent scholarship that shows how Europe and Asia were mutually linked in history and in contemporary perspective. It argues that as a result of current developments and the changing geopolitical context, both Europe and Asia have much in common and that it is possible to speak of cosmopolitan links rather than clashes.

This book will be of great value to students and researchers in the fields of sociology, European politics and history and cultural theory.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2006
ISBN
9781134181407
Part I
A post-Western world
1 Europe from a cosmopolitan perspective
Ulrich Beck and Gerard Delanty
Since its foundation in the post-Second World War period the European Union was a project that was shaped by the circumstances of its origins. It was primarily a product of the clashes within Western Europe and in particular between France and Germany. Given the wider context of the Cold War, it was never envisaged by its founders that it would ever be more than an alliance of the major Western European powers. Initially this was of course to be confined to economic cooperation, but increasingly it became a political and finally a social and cultural project, albeit within the limits of the narrowly defined Western Europe of the Cold War era. Gradually more and more countries were incorporated into the EU and since the Single European Act this project has moved far beyond its original justification.
Although the Single European Act may have been the decisive point at which the break with the earlier inter-governmental project had been made, today the European project has entered an entirely new phase that was never anticipated even after the end of the Cold War: the extension of the EU to include much of central and eastern Europe has now reached the point of possible inclusion of a country that has generally been regarded as Asian.
The debate about Turkey and Europe raises major questions about the identity of Europe and the rationale of European integration. This is not just a debate about the incorporation of yet another country into a transnational political organization. It is a debate about the raison-d’ĂȘtre of a polity and culture. Whether or not Turkey eventually becomes a member of the EU cannot be predicted at the present time, but – and the indications are now highly likely that it will – it is evident that the East–West divide has now ceased to be an inner European one but goes beyond the Cold War East and West divide. It has become a question of defining the relation of Europe to Asia, which must now be posed in terms of political community. In addition to this, there is also the growing importance of wider European–Asian relations that have arisen as a result of the economic rise of Asia. What is interesting in this development is a double logic to Europeanization, which operates on internal as well as on external dimensions. The argument advanced in this chapter is that the external dimension is coming increasingly to the fore today and the future of Europeanization will depend to a large degree on successful external cosmopolitanism. The perspective suggested by this is a view of Europeanization in terms of internal and external cosmopolitanism.
From transnationalism to cosmopolitanism
The earlier enlargements of the European Union – the incorporation of the British Isles, southern, Nordic and central and eastern countries from the 1970s – accompanied a gradual movement towards the transnationalization of the nation-state. While there is nothing to indicate that this transnationalization of the state will cease, the current situation is one that suggests something else is also going on and which cannot be fully understood without taking a different perspective. We may term the current situation one of cosmopolitanism as opposed to transnationalization since what is referred to here is not merely a matter of the transformation of statehood but a transformation in the political subjectivity of Europe. The kind of subjectivity emerging today can be termed cosmopolitan in view of its open-ended nature and the fact that it is not underpinned by a substantive identity such as ‘a people’ but a multiplicity of identities and projects.1 There are at least four major developments in Europeanization that are a feature of the present day and which are indicative of cosmopolitanism.
First, as mentioned, the nation-state is not being replaced by a supra-state. The modernist drive to create homogeneous structures such as territorial states with a unitary structure is not being replicated on the European level. While the debate on the nature of statehood will continue, it is evident that the EU is not a larger version of the traditional state. The nation-state itself is undergoing tremendous change and for this reason we do not see a dilemma of nation-state or supra-state. This dualism is simply the wrong way to view the current situation. In terms of statehood, the EU is a mixed polity. The creation of interdependencies in every field of politics is not just a form of cooperation which ultimately leaves the nation-states concerned untouched, as the inter-governmental perspective implies. Instead, Europeanization transforms state power and national sovereignty to their very core. The mixed nature of the EU is likely to grow as a result of relations with neighbouring countries. The result of this is not something that can be easily encapsulated in a constitutional design and underpinned by a straightforward appeal to a European people. The European polity has often been described as a reflexive form of integration (Eriksen 2005; Eriksen et al. 2005).
Second, the interpenetration of European societies is now a reality. European societies are becoming more and more mixed as a result of a common currency, migration, tourism, a transversal web of cheap airlines, and the common feeling of inhabiting the world risk society. Several decades of European integration have also enhanced the process, which it must be emphasized is not leading to a single European Society any more than it is leading to a supra-state that transcends national states but to different degrees of interpenetration. Resulting from this is a common European public culture. The term is used in the specific sense to refer not to a common European identity but to common concerns and common modes of communication. Although Europeans do not share a common language or read the same newspapers and watch the same TV programmes – despite the existence in almost every country of Who Wants to be a Millionaire – they do share certain debates and share certain critical moments. Culture, which is a system of communication, can also be analysed in terms of modes of communication, such as repertories of justification. Looking at European public culture in terms of arguments – including disputes over the nature of Europe – offers in a certain sense a level of analysis that captures the cosmopolitan dimension of cultural commonality. It is in this sense that Habermas’s notion of Europe as a post-national constellation of communicative spheres makes sense (Habermas 1998, 2001, 2003). This point will be returned to below when we discuss democratization. As far as identity is concerned, there is now considerable evidence to show that a European identity is not emerging to replace other kinds of identity but exists along side a wide range of other kinds of identity (Herrman et al. 2004).
Third, following from the previous point, Europeanization cannot be separated from globalization. There is a tendency to view Europeanization as a reaction to globalization. But this betrays the illusion that globalization can stop at the frontier of the EU. It is a mistake too to suppose that the EU is not vulnerable to the pressures of globalization. Inside and outside cannot be distinguished in a way that separates Europeanization and globalization. Europeanization should rather be viewed as an instance of globalization. The nature of security, for instance, is no longer one that can rely on an Outside from which the Inside must be protected. The implications of this will be discussed in more detail in the final section of this chapter.
Finally, mention can be made of the geopolitics of Europe, which does not have one centre but several and has changing relations of centres to peripheries. It is possible to see the field of Europe as made up of different ‘Europes’. In addition to Old Europe (the major Western nation-states) and New Europe (post-communist countries) there are the older geopolitical spatial configurations, such as Central Europe and East Central Europe. Other examples are mega-regional blocs, such as Nordic Europe, Iberia and TransAlpine region. In addition there is the complex web of post-imperial relations that connect Europe to the post-colonial world. More than half of the world’s dependencies – some 30 states – are under the direct rule of EU member states (Böröcz and Sarkar 2005: 164). In terms of geopolitics, the global, the national and the European dimensions interact to produce a complex field of borders and rebordering out of which emerge hard and soft borders, open and closed ones, with different degrees of spatial intensity by which regions, networks and flows operate. Another example of the changing relation of the centre to the periphery in Europe is the emergence of a new kind of governance whereby the EU expands its governance beyond the member states to neighbouring regions. Such regions, while being formally excluded from legal membership, are part of a networked political system in which ‘fuzzy borders’ come into play (Lavenex 2004: 681). Examples of this are accession association (for potential members), neighbourhood association (Mediterranean and near eastern countries), development co-operation (Africa and wider Asian countries) and various kinds of cooperation (see Lawson 2003; Piening 1997). In this context it makes little sense to speak of borders exclusively in terms of the legal boundaries of a given territory. Stein Rokkan referred to these relations on cores and peripheries as a European system of cleavages (Rokkan 1999, cited in Eder 2006).
The first conclusion, then, is that Europeanization entails a process of societal transformation, which can be termed cosmopolitanism to refer to the lack of closure in it due to its multi-levelled orders of governance and its multi-directional expansion. The cosmopolitanism suggested by this should not be equated simply with pluralism. While diversity is an important component of the mosaic of European societies, there is also a process of interaction going on. The interpenetration of societies, the interlinking of different orders of governance, the impact of globalization and transnational movements of all kinds results not just in more diversity, but in societal transformation. Cosmopolitanism is thus not a matter of coexistence, as in multiculturalism, or cultural dialogue, since the various levels and actors co-evolve and as they do emergent realities are produced. Furthermore, the resulting cosmopolitanism, which is variously internal and external, is not a matter of convergence into a uniform framework since the movement itself produces its own terms. There is not a prior plan – such as a master plan or institutional design – or an underlying identity that explains everything. The debates of the present day about the constitution and borders of the EU are an example of this reflexive logic to Europeanization.
Cosmopolitanism and democratization: European public culture
One aspect of democracy that people most commonly associate with the notion is parliament, which is the representative voice of a sovereign people. Viewed in such simple terms it could be argued that there is no European democracy because the European Parliament is not a sovereign institution. This is too simple a view of democracy, which also consists of public debates and civil society outside the formal arena of the state. As a cosmopolitan project, Europeanization entails more not less democracy. In European public culture new discourses about political community are being articulated. These discourses are not controlled by any one social actor and in them competing conceptions of political community are worked out. Actors constantly have to re-situate themselves as the discourses lack fixed reference points. The debate about the draft European Constitution is a pertinent example. This is a process of contestation, persuasion and power in which multiple actors were involved. What is clear from this is that there are no authoritative definitions of what constitutes the ‘we’ of the political community and also there is no clear definition of who the ‘Other’ is.
As previously suggested, Europe is now indefinable for precisely these reasons; both Self and Other are not easily defined in ways that can lead to a clear-cut identity that could be encapsulated in a constitution or in a territorially defined polity. Europeans are divided on whether Europe includes Turkey and they are divided on whether Europe can be defined by Christianity. They are divided on whether Europeanization is good or bad and what its limits should be. Much of this is an expression of democratic self-criticism, but much of it is fuelled by xenophobia and a failure to see the connection between the reality of cosmopolitanism and the expansion of democracy.
All of a sudden, a European discourse of origins is on everyone’s lips. Those who want to keep the Turks out discover that the roots of Europe lie in the Christian West. Only those who have always been a part of this ‘occidental community of shared destiny’ is ‘one of us’. This becomes clear when we ask ‘Where do you stand on Turkey?’, which has become the critical question of European politics. It divides opinion and ignites the conflict between the old national and a new cosmopolitan Europe. The term ‘cosmopolitan Europe’ can be understood as precisely the negation of this sort of territorial social ontology which seeks to block all paths to the future. The idea of a ‘cosmopolitan Europe’ has an empirical meaning in drawing attention to the diverse and ever-changing world in which we live, for example, that the Turks some people want to keep out have long since already been inside. Turkey arrived in European space a long time ago, as a member of NATO, as a trading partner, as one pole of transnational forms of life. Moreover, large parts of Turkey are Europeanized.
To allow a Christian-occidental principle of ethnic descent to be resurrected from the mass graves of Europe is to fail to understand Europe’s inner cosmopolitanism. It is to deny the reality of the roughly 17 million people living in the EU who cannot recognize this ethnic-cultural heritage of ‘Europeanness’ as their own, because they are Muslims or people of colour, for example, yet who understand and organize themselves culturally and politically as Europeans. The history of the eastern contribution to Europe and the contribution of migrants to the cultural dynamics and moral self-understanding of a cosmopolitan Europe has yet to be written. In the world of the twenty-first century there is no longer a closed space called ‘the Christian West’. With growing transnational interconnections and obligations, Europe is becoming an open network with fluid boundaries in which the outside is already inside.
There is no doubt that the current state of the European Union deserves criticism. But where can we find suitable standards of criticism? They cannot come from the national self-image or from laments over the loss of national sovereignty. The concept of a cosmopolitan Europe makes possible a critique of EU reality which is neither nostalgic nor national but radically European. The reality of Europeanization is the reality of democratization. It was not too long ago that many of the present EU member states were anything but democratic. Germany ceased to be a totalitarian state after 1945 while Greece, Portugal and Spain made the transition to democracy only in the 1980s. The process by which the central and Eastern European countries made the transition to democracy since 1990 was enhanced by the accession to the EU. In addition to establishing a framework for peace and democracy in post-war Europe, the EU has now the capacity to influence democratization in its neighbouring countries. This is evident in Bulgaria and in Romania. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Turkey, where the impact of democratic reforms has been extensive. It is also evident that the EU is able to use effectively further enlargement in the Balkans as an instrument of foreign policy. The prospect of eventual membership for Croatia, and likely membership in the near future for Serbia, has been a huge inducement for democratization. This is also becoming evident in the case of Ukraine, one of Europe’s least democratic countries. With this capacity to develop democracy in neighbouring countries the EU has the means to become an important power. The prospect of Europe becoming such a cosmopolitan player will be discussed below.
There is a further democratizing dimension to European public culture that must be highlighted: the culture of resistance that was created after the Second World War. While much of this heritage has been claimed by national identities, there is a dimension that has a strong cosmopolitan side to it. Cosmopolitan Europe was consciously initiated after 1945 as the political antithesis to a nationalistic Europe and its moral and physical devastation. This cosmopolitan Europe is a Europe which struggles morally, politically, economically and historically for reconciliation. The adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ stands for this openness limited by the critique of ethnonationalism which clamours for recognition of cultural difference and diversity.
The creation of an international court from its origins in the Nuremberg Trials was the first step in the direction of a cosmopolitan Europe (see Fine 2000). It is remarkable that it was a creation of legal categories...

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