A COSMOPOLITAN APPROACH TO THE EUROPEAN CRISIS

Abstract

The paper analyses the political implications of the European crisis from a cosmopolitan perspective. A qualitative approach grounded on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan democracy seeks the ways with which the EU could overcome the crisis enhancing its limited a) internal and b) external cosmopolitanism. In the first case the analysis focuses on how the EU could shift away from intergovernmentalism towards cosmopolitanism with new institutional instruments of solidarity, unity and cooperation. In the second case, the argument is that a successful enlargement strategy, especially towards Turkey, can contribute to the cosmopolitanisation of Europe. Overall, the conclusions drawn from the attempt to apply cosmopolitanism to the EU suggest that, indeed, cosmopolitanism, which transforms political and cultural subjectivities in the encounter of the local/national with the global, can potentially be practically feasible, showing that globalisation and European integration can be conceived as processes that may strengthen each other.

Keywords

• cosmopolitanism, EU crisis, enlargement

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