Cosmopolitan Europe (ePub)

Europe is Europe's last remaining realistic political utopia.
But Europe remains to be understood and conceptualized. This
historically unique form of international community cannot be
explained in terms of the traditional concepts of politics and the
state, which remain trapped in the straightjacket of methodological
nationalism. Thus, if we are to understand cosmopolitan Europe, we
must radically rethink the conventional categories of social and
political analysis.

Just as the Peace of Westphalia brought the religious civil wars
of the seventeenth century to an end through the separation of
church and state, so too the separation of state and nation
represents the appropriate response to the horrors of the twentieth
century. And just as the secular state makes the exercise of
different religions possible, so too cosmopolitan Europe must
guarantee the coexistence of different ethnic, religious and
political forms of life across national borders based on the
principle of cosmopolitan tolerance.

The task the authors have set themselves in this book is nothing
less than to rethink Europe as an idea and a reality. It represents
an attempt to understand the process of Europeanization in light of
the theory of reflexive modernization and thereby to redefine it at
both the theoretical and the political level.

This book completes Ulrich Beck's trilogy on
'cosmopolitan realism', the volumes of which complement
each other and can be read independently. It is essential reading
for anyone interested in the key social and political developments
of our time.