European integration and the problem of the state: universality, particularity, and exemplarity in the crafting of the European Union

Between regional community and global society: Europe in the shadow of Schmitt and Kojève

“…2 While the article thereby aligns with other theoretical inquiries into Europe’s fate between particularism and universalism (e.g. Borg, 2014; Walker, 2000), it re-locates this tension in the works and dialogue of two classical thinkers who struggled with a post-national constellation of regional integration already before the EU was conceived—and whose theoretical perspectives still illuminate dilemmas and opportunities inherent in the basic architecture of the European project. Finally, although democracy is conspicuously absent from Schmitt’s and Kojève’s perspectives discussed here, this does not mean that the insights they provide would not in turn inform, pace Schmitt and Kojève, democratic debates, participation, and deliberate choices precisely when brought to the fore.…”

“…Yet on the other hand, and quite in contrast to the particularistic Großraum concept, EU enlargement and external policies, as, for instance, expressed not only in the “Copenhagen Criteria” but also in the failed Constitutional Treaty, are informed by norms held to be universally valid and to be globally promoted, from human rights to free trade, filling a particular identity with supposedly universal values through European “exemplarity” (Borg, 2014). Such an understanding of the promotion of social, economic, legal, and moral standards as part and parcel of a genuine universal and thus ultimately nonpolitical expansion of modernity has in turn been articulated paradigmatically by Kojève.…”

“…In addition, the universalist thrust implied in the assumption of a progressive expansion of Western law and markets shows a certain “political messianism” (Weiler, 2012; see also Borg, 2014) vis-a-vis others that could be rejected as justifying European hegemonic ambitions. In fact, it is arguably this Eurocentric or Western view that non-Western communitarians have opposed as political intrusion, thereby attempting to reinforce (or to imagine) cultural and territorial boundaries.…”