Cosmopolitan Europe

Europe is Europe's last remaining realistic political utopia.

But Europe remains to be understood and conceptualised.

This historically unique form of inter-state community resists the traditional categories and concepts of the nation-state.

Hence cosmopolitan Europe can only be disclosed through a radical self-criticism of conventional concepts of politics and the state which remain trapped in the straightjacket of methodological nationalism.Just as the Peace of Westphalia brought the religious civil wars of the 17th century to an end through the separation of Church and State, so too the separation of State and Nation can be the response to the horror of the 20th century. And just as the secular state make possible the exercise of different religions, cosmopolitan Europe must ensure the coexistence of different ethnic, religious and political forms of life across national borders on the basis of the principle of constitutional toleration.

Nothing less than rethinking Europe is the task the authors have set themselves in this book.It represents an attempt to grasp Europeanization in light of the theory of reflexive modernisation and thereby to redefine it theoretically and politically.

This book completes Ulrich Beck's trilogy on 'cosmopolitan realism', whose volumes complement each other and can be read independently.

The Cosmopolitan Vision develops the theoretical perspective which in Power in the Global Age is applied to key issues concerning the postnational legitimation of political power and, finally, in Cosmopolitan Europe, is tested against a special case, the unknown Europe in which we live.