13 - Imperial Modernism and European World-Making

Summary

A European Variety of World-Making?

At the time of writing, it seems that the sceptics have been right. After the referenda on the constitutional treaty of the European Union in France and the Netherlands, the European political project is in disarray. Some of those sceptics will even insist that there never was such a political project anyway. The European Union, in their view, is nothing but an association of states to further their own interests, and the apparent acceleration of political integration over the past fifteen years did not really change its nature. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, so they will underline, explicitly does not strive to go beyond the existing rights at national level, but only aims to bring them together in a single document. And the constitutional treaty, if it were ever to come into force, is nothing but an exercise in institutional architecture, at best eliminating some incoherence in the historical layers of European treaties and at worst petrifying some dysfunctional co-operative mechanisms due to power-bargaining between the nation states.

Such a purely sceptical look fails to perceive the most significant novelty of the process, namely, the founding of a polity through the deliberate interaction of the members of that new polity. European political integration can fruitfully be seen as an attempt at world-making. Rather than start the analysis of such an attempt with an a priori emphasis on its limitations, which any such process will always have, it seems more promising to understand its nature by analysing the problems it tries to address, and this in a twofold way.