Peace and cosmopolitan Europe: “varietas delectat”

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the character of european cosmopolitanism under the aegis of varietas delectat. The analysis bears particularly on the relational and interactive character of cosmopolitanism and its procedural, post-metaphysical and non-essentialist nature, which transforms a positivism of sanctions into a positivism of consensus and recognition. When cosmopolitanism is inscribed in the “regulative idea” of history in the kantian sense, and it is applied to the building of Europe, then it is no longer possible to assess this process by deterministic mechanisms and functions; rather, the European Union is made more inteligible when one considers its post-national nature, in which becoming european emerges as a distinct category, overflowing the logic of nationalistic judgement: member states, do not deny themselves, but are preserved in a new political and legal plane, nobler than that of the merely national sphere; this new level can only be aprehended in the context of a “complex sovereignty”, so designated because new challenges are better met through a sovereignty which is shared, than through the single isolated action of any particular absolute sovereignty. Having disclosed the “virtuous circle” between cosmopolitanism and europeanism, the analysis then develops some aspects of the projection of european cosmopolitanism within the wider framework of current globalization.

Key words: Europe, European Union, state, cosmopolitanism, peace, sovereignty, citizenship.