10 - Kant's Conception of the Nation-State and the Idea of Europe

Summary

Conceptual and moral difficulties surrounding the question of Europe are often both signaled by appeals to Immanuel Kant. From the ambiguously Kantian “ode to joy” that the European Union has made its anthem, to Derrida's and Habermas's joint reference to what they call “the Kantian hope in a global domestic politics,” to the invocation by Joseph Weiler, Gerald Delanty, and others of the Kantian principle of “autonomy” as a grounding norm of European commonality—one is constantly encountering what one good European famously called the “the great Chinaman of Königsberg.” Indeed, political analyst Robert Kagan has gone so far as to call the aspiration of many Europeans today a “Kantian paradise”—in contrast with what he regards as the sounder “Hobbesianism” of the United States.

In what follows I will attempt to show that some, though not all, such identifications of Kant with current visions of Europe are misplaced, or at least based on a misunderstanding of Kant's own, and arguably superior, solution to the problems of the nation-state with which current theorists are grappling. In particular, I will argue that some of the tensions, or polarities, between affective identity and rationalization (or eros and civilization, as Joseph Weiler has wittily put it) were more satisfactorily addressed by Kant prior to the emergence of romantic nationalism.