In order to secure the support of citizens, and to foster their self-consciousness as members of the EU polity based on “common values” (Habermas and Derrida 2003), PNC advocates an expansion of EU-level citizenship, beyond the socially thin and market facilitating citizenship currently on offer, to include the whole constellation of rights previously guaranteed by the nation-state during the “thirty glory years” of the post-war period (Habermas 2001b). From the perspective of PNC, EU citizenship therefore has the potential to combat two main obstacles to the realization of a progressive cosmopolitan order: namely, the destructive effects of twentieth-century European nationalism and the “hollowing out” of national citizenship rights as a result of neoliberal globalization. Despite the academic and political influence of PNC, and indeed the merits of many of its goals and visions, we hold that its conception of EU citizenship faces severe limitations.
To begin, we take issue with PNC’s conceptualization of the interrelations between globalization, the nation-state, and EU integration. While we agree with claims that globalization represents a diffusion of power across multiple scales of governance and that state functions have been adjusted, if not necessarily diminished, as a result, we find problematic the fact that there is no systematic attempt within PNC scholarship to explain why it has come into being, and who (in terms of concrete social and political actors) is pushing it forward in the first place. Instead globalization is treated as an independent variable, an exogenous, almost inevitable, and most crucially, agent-less process bearing down on the political capabilities of nation-states. In focusing on globalization as a process, this “logic of no alternative” (Hay and Rosamond 2002: 158; see Chapter Four) within PNC ignores the fact that globalization is just as much a project reflecting the interests and power of identifiable social and political actors (Overbeek 2004), with many of its key facets authored by nation-states habitually portrayed by PNC as globalization’s victims (Görg and Hirsch 1998; Panitch 1996; Murray 1971). Thus if globalization is, as PNC is willing to concede, primarily about the acceleration of global capitalism, then the role of “critical” theory, from which PNC finds its lineage, should accordingly be to scrutinize the role of capital as a class actor, explaining the role of its structural power in disciplining and ultimately subordinating the interests of other competing class forces (Morton 2006).
This critique of PNC’s conception of globalization and its relation to the nation-state has direct implications for the perspective’s approach to EU integration and citizenship. While PNC is primarily interested in endorsing the EU as a “buffer” against the apparent negative effects of globalization on the nation-state, it is not equipped with the conceptual and analytical tools to inquire into the historical and material dimensions of the EU project: explaining its origins and limitations, in addition to identifying the power relations that underpin it. Much like in its assessment of globalization, PNC is willing to concede that EU integration has, to this point, been primarily about market-making integration (Habermas 2001b), and subsequently argues in favor of market-correcting mechanisms to counter market integration along the lines of an EU project envisioned by former Commission President Jacques Delors. Yet at no point does it take into consideration the structural barriers in place that have historically constrained the realization of EU-level market-correcting mechanisms (Deppe 2004: 311), explaining for instance why Delors’ social democratic vision for the EU was eventually cast aside (see further Chapter 3). Processes linked to EU integration, therefore, much like the PNC account of globalization, are taken as given instead of serving as phenomena to be explained in their own right. Thus the PNC’s endorsement of the EU project serves as a “totalizing blueprint” that is “not grounded in realist analysis of the relevant context, concrete embodied actors, social relations and mechanisms, and transformative possibilities” (Patomäki 2003: 347).
Similar shortcomings also plague PNC’s views on citizenship, which involve declaring support for the EU project and its citizenship policy on the basis of their supposed promotion of progressive, cosmopolitan values without inquiring into the historical and material context through which EU citizenship has developed. To cosmopolitan reasoning, however, there is little room for such hesitance. For many within this school of thought, one of the chief intellectual tasks is rather to venerate the EU’s past achievements and outline hopeful visions for the EU’s future. “The historical success of the European Union,” writes Jürgen Habermas (2006: 48, italics in original), “has confirmed Europeans in the conviction that the domestication of the state’s use of violence also calls for a reciprocal restriction of the scope of sovereignty at the global level.” Given, moreover, that this enterprise is founded on a passionate conviction that the EU project eventually will yield a progressive cosmopolitan return—working, for instance, to the advantage of migrants’ rights and inclusion—it can neither afford any agnosticism as regards the EU project’s allegedly benign founding intentions, nor as regards its allegedly benign teleology (for examples of this passionate conviction, see Beck 2006: 168; Beck and Grande 2007: 2; Giddens 1998: 142–7). This, in much the same way, then, as yesterday’s nationalist intellectuals could not afford such questioning of the national project. To declare support for, and invest hope in, this form of cosmopolitan subject making while neglecting the power relations through which subjects “forge themselves” (Davies 2005: 135) is tantamount, as André Drainville (2004: 31) has argued in his critique of PNC, to treating citizens as “ghosts.”
A more nuanced power perspective, anchored in the critical-theoretical procedures of negative dialectics, which assess conceptual frameworks and analytic models “in terms of how they are not serving” humanity’s material needs and “self- and mutual recognition of human subjectivities and their aspirations” (Ryner 2005: 145), would place two burdens of proof on the PNC endorsement of EU citizenship. First, the extent to which EU citizenship actually entails a more effective and democratic guarantor of rights vis-à-vis national citizenship; and second, the reasons why EU citizenship serves as a more inclusive basis for identity and rights formation and not merely as a regional mode of exclusiveness based on a new European platform of anti-immigrant nationalism and ethno-cultural chauvinism (Hansen 2000, 2009; Kveinen 2002). Today’s cosmopolitans may assert that Islamophobia only can be tackled above the nation, since, as Beck (2006: 166–7) claims, it is “utterly un-European” to be anti-Muslim—a fact that Beck links directly to the condition that, in sharp contrast to the nation-state, “[r]adical openness is a defining feature of the European project and is the real secret of its success”. Yet, when searching for the empirical corroboration of this and other assertions holding forth the EU project’s inherently benign and anti-racist spirit, one looks in vain for any systematic account demonstrating how such “radical openness” actually manifests in more concrete terms and how it serves to mitigate the current plight of Muslims (see further Chapters 5–6). When a disjuncture exists between the exercise of power and legitimacy (whether defined in terms of social rights, inclusiveness or non-discrimination), as is the case in the contemporary EU project, the task of critical theory must therefore be to scrutinize the contextual environment in which this disjuncture has emerged, to grasps the limits that EU citizenship faces in its task of popular legitimation. PNC, in endorsing EU citizenship on the basis of an abstract model, clearly falls short of this task.
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