4 What does it mean to be a ‘European’?
The possibility of cosmopolitan loyalties
In asking the question ‘what does it mean to be European?’ we are not asking the thorny question ‘what is Europe?’ considered in Chapter 2. Europe as such does not exist, as Jean Monnet himself remarked; it has to be created. Europe does not exist as a subject in the sense of a subject that has sovereign power or a cultural essence. Europeans, then, are not like national subjects, who have to varying degrees political power based on the political subjectivity of the nation-state. As a political framework Europe has yet to be created. Although the current European Union has gone far in creating such a framework, a political subject that can be identified with ...
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