than as facilitators of, effective political cooperation and democratic participation.2
As a result, PNC prescribes the establishment of new democratic institutions at the local, regional and global levels, to accommodate and politically harness the diffusion of power across the different levels at which it is exercised. Crucially, the formation of a multilayered democratic world order would require the establishment of a universal form of political membership based upon “global citizenship” (Falk 2000; Carter 2001), with the rights and obligations of global civil society and global institutions being based on civil, political, economic, social, and reproductive rights (Held 1991; see also Held 2006). PNC scholarship has been engaged in efforts to assess existing regional and global institutions to serve as prospective “models” for the establishment of an alternative world order.
According to the criteria set by PNC, the EU represents “the last politically effective utopia” (Beck and Grande 2007: 2), and the “the only normatively satisfactory alternative . . . an alternative that points to a cosmopolitan order sensitive to both difference and social inequality” (Habermas 2001a: xix, cited in Manners 2007: 81). In this way the institutional setup of the EU serves as a nascent cosmopolitan polity, and a blueprint for further development:
The first international organization which begins to resemble the cosmopolitan model is the European Union. Its members are in fact sovereign states which have voluntarily transferred increasingly broad tasks (from coal and steel policy to human rights) to the Union. . . . The centripetal force of the European Union is even greater than that of the United States, which has extended geographically without absorbing culturally heterogeneous communities. From the constitutional point of view, it is extremely significant that intergovernmental institutions such as the Council of Ministers are now backed by technical institutions such as the Commission, and even by a body directly elected by citizens, such as the European Parliament. The principle of subsidiarity has allowed European institutions to intervene in selected policy areas of member countries. Seen from a global perspective, the European Union is an experiment of great importance. We can only hope that it will be imitated by other regional organizations, be it the Union of African Unity or the Organization of American States. At the same time, the European Union offers interesting cues for a possible reform of the United Nations and the setting up of new institutions (Archibugi 1998: 219–220).
EU citizenship, which serves as the legal embodiment of a European identity based on “the secularization of the egalitarian and individualist universalism that informs our normative self-understanding” (Habermas 2001b: 20; see also Delanty 2005), serves an essential function within PNC’s conception of the EU. The potential of EU citizenship to act as an avenue toward the establishment of a cosmopolitan democracy of global citizens lies in the fact that it represents the only concrete example of a legally established citizenship model not based upon the boundaries of the nation-state. In their penchant for normative prescription, PNC theorists argue that EU citizenship should continue to evolve along the lines of “constitutional patriotism” (as coined by Habermas), under which loyalties and allegiances are derived not from national or ethnic origin but instead from an identification with a truly inclusive “post-national” and multicultural EU polity, where rights and obligations are accessible to all, including migrant third-country nationals (TCNs) residing within EU member states (Soysal 1994; for an overview, see Prentoulis 2001).
In order to secure the support of citizens, and to foster their self-consciousness as members of the EU polity based on “common values” (Habermas and Derrida 2003), PNC advocates an expansion of EU-level citizenship, beyond the socially thin and market facilitating citizenship currently on offer, to include the whole constellation of rights previously guaranteed by the nation-state during the “thirty glory years” of the post-war period (Habermas 2001b). From the perspective of PNC, EU citizenship therefore has the potential to combat two main obstacles to the realization of a progressive cosmopolitan order: namely, the destructive effects of twentieth-century European nationalism and the “hollowing out” of national citizenship rights as a result of neoliberal globalization. Despite the academic and political influence of PNC, and indeed the merits of many of its goals and visions, we hold that its conception of EU citizenship faces severe limitations.
To begin, we take issue with PNC’s conceptualization of the interrelations between globalization, the nation-state, and EU integration. While we agree with claims that globalization represents a diffusion of power across multiple scales of governance and that state functions have been adjusted, if not necessarily diminished, as a result, we find problematic the fact that there is no systematic attempt within PNC scholarship to explain why it has come into being, and who (in terms of concrete social and political actors) is pushing it forward in the first place. Instead globalization is treated as an independent variable, an exogenous, almost inevitable, and most crucially, agent-less process bearing down on the political capabilities of nation-states. In focusing on globalization as a process, this “logic of no alternative” (Hay and Rosamond 2002: 158; see Chapter Four) within PNC ignores the fact that globalization is just as much a project reflecting the interests and power of identifiable social and political actors (Overbeek 2004), with many of its key facets authored by nation-states habitually portrayed by PNC as globalization’s victims (Görg and Hirsch 1998; Panitch 1996; Murray 1971). Thus if globalization is, as PNC is willing to concede, primarily about the acceleration of global capitalism, then the role of “critical” theory, from which PNC finds its lineage, should accordingly be to scrutinize the role of capital as a class actor, explaining the role of its structural power in disciplining and ultimately subordinating the interests of other competing class forces (Morton 2006).
This critique of PNC’s conception of globalization and its relation to the nation-state has direct implications for the perspective’s approach to EU integration and citizenship. While PNC is primarily interested in endorsing the EU as a “buffer” against the apparent negative effects of globalization on the nation-state, it is not equipped with the conceptual and analytical tools to inquire into the historical and material dimensions of the EU project: explaining its origins and limitations, in addition to identifying the power relations that underpin it. Much like in its assessment of globalization, PNC is willing to concede that EU integration has, to this point, been primarily about market-making integration (Habermas 2001b), and subsequently argues in favor of market-correcting mechanisms to counter market integration along the lines of an EU project envisioned by former Commission President Jacques Delors. Yet at no point does it take into consideration the structural barriers in place that have historically constrained the realization of EU-level market-correcting mechanisms (Deppe 2004: 311), explaining for instance why Delors’ social democratic vision for the EU was eventually cast aside (see further Chapter 3). Processes linked to EU integration, therefore, much like the PNC account of globalization, are taken as given instead of serving as phenomena to be explained in their own right. Thus the PNC’s endorsement of the EU project serves as a “totalizing blueprint” that is “not grounded in realist analysis of the relevant context, concrete embodied actors, social relations and mechanisms, and transformative possibilities” (Patomäki 2003: 347).
Similar shortcomings also plague PNC’s views on citizenship, which involve declaring support for the EU project and its citizenship policy on the basis of their supposed promotion of progressive, cosmopolitan values without inquiring into the historical and material context through which EU citizenship has developed. To cosmopolitan reasoning, however, there is little room for such hesitance. For many within this school of thought, one of the chief intellectual tasks is rather to venerate the EU’s past achievements and outline hopeful visions for the EU’s future. “The historical success of the European Union,” writes Jürgen Habermas (2006: 48, italics in original), “has confirmed Europeans in the conviction that the domestication of the state’s use of violence also calls for a reciprocal restriction of the scope of sovereignty at the global level.” Given, moreover, that this enterprise is founded on a passionate conviction that the EU project eventually will yield a progressive cosmopolitan return—working, for instance, to the advantage of migrants’ rights
