Cosmopolitan Europe: Postcolonial Interventions and Global Transitions

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is as controversial and as contested a term as the notion of Europe. The project of Cosmopolitan Europe is therefore a project that assesses Europe's postcolonial transformations, in which the holdings of the imperial past continue to inform the crisis of the present, and to haunt it through its neocolonial, xenophobic and neoliberal practices. By applying and revisiting the postcolonial paradigm in relation to cosmopolitanism, a new idea of Cosmopolitan Europe emerges which accounts for alternative forms of integration, emancipation and management of diversity. Cosmopolitan Europe emerges not as a renewed Eurocentric notion but as a space of transition and renewal that can still fulfil its cosmopolitan promise despite its dark legacies and contested pasts. For Habermas the specificity of Cosmopolitan Europe rests on the possibility of unity in diversity, in a way that is capable of negotiating religious pluralism.