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Preface

Europe as a model must be rethought. It worked for fifty years but now it has outlived its usefulness. A new era of border-transcending and border-effacing cooperation began, if not at first, then emphatically with the eastern enlargement of the European Union. Yet what exactly has occurred? Where is Europeanization leading us and what has been its driving force to date? The euphoria (and the scepticism) over the new, enlarged Europe cannot disguise the fact that Europe still remains to be understood and conceptualized. This historically unique and distinctive form of intergovernmental and inter-societal community escapes all traditional categories and concepts. Europe exemplifies particularly clearly how historically unreal and blunt our political concepts and the theoretical concepts of the social sciences have become – for both remain trapped in the conceptual straightjacket of methodological nationalism.

What holds the enlarged Europe together? A new perspective on Europe – the cosmopolitan outlook! This book is a response to the new founding moment of the European Union and it presents and develops a concept for it, namely, ‘cosmopolitan Europe’. It is an attempt to understand and to provide a new theoretical and practical specification of Europeanization in light of the theory of reflexive modernization.

This reconfiguration of thought and research cannot succeed in a single step. This book is part of a larger project of Ulrich Beck, a trilogy on ‘cosmopolitan realism’, which it also brings to a close. In the first volume of this trilogy, Power in the Global Age, Ulrich Beck explores the legitimacy of political authority under conditions of global interdependence. The second book, The Cosmopolitan Vision, deals with foundational questions and develops the principles of a cosmopolitan enlightenment. This third and final volume, Cosmopolitan Europe, which is co-authored with Edgar Grande, throws light on the unknown Europe in which we are living.

That this trilogy could even be begun and be completed with the present volume is a piece of luck that is due to the extraordinary support of many people. In the first place, we must mention the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft which provides financial support for a collaborative research centre in Munich on the topic of ‘reflexive modernization’, whose director is Ulrich Beck and to which Edgar Grande has belonged from the beginning. This book demonstrates in an exemplary way how such a special research centre can stimulate scientific cooperation across disciplinary boundaries even when it is not formally organized as a research project. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft has, in addition, funded two empirical research projects of Edgar Grande within the framework of its special concentration programme ‘Governance in Europe’, from which ideas and findings have flowed into this book. Ulrich Beck owes an additional debt of gratitude to the Volkswagen-Stiftung for a grant that enabled him to work on these book projects over a long period.

Finally, we would like to thank our students in Munich, London and Toronto with whom, in recent years in numerous seminars and lectures, we discussed our ideas on cosmopolitan Europe in a globalizing world, and who repeatedly forced us to sharpen our view of Europe. Almut Kleine has survived many new revisions of the complete text virtually without losing her patience, which goes far beyond what one can reasonably expect even from the most obliging person. Oliver Buntrock undertook the laborious task of assembling the bibliography. Our warmest thanks to them both.

Ulrich Beck

Edgar Grande