Cosmopolitan Europe Postcolonial Interventions and Global Transitions
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48 Cosmopolitan Europe Postcolonial interventions and global transitions Sandra Ponzanesi Is the notion of Cosmopolitan Europe an oxymoron? How can we think of a borderless world when, despite its supranational status, Europe still clings to its fortified external borders and is undergoing a revamping of internal national identities? Both terms included in the proposed oxymoron are highly contested. Europe – whether we want to define it as a geographical space, a cultural identity or a political entity – is still subject to many ambivalences, disagreements and disputes. “Where does Europe begin and where does it end?” asks Stuart Hall (2003 : 36); “Is Europe a dead political project?” questions Étienne Balibar provocatively ( 2010 ) or is Europe “an unfinished adventure”, as Bauman (2004 ) puts it more utopically? In his essay “‘In but not of Europe’: Europe and its Myths”, Stuart Hall quotes critic C.L.R. James’s position towards Europe, which was one of “he was in but not of it”. He concluded that he was formed by a relationship of “colonial dependency, subalternity and ‘otherness’ to Europe” ( Hall 2003: 36). Hall has dedicated a lot of attention to the diasporic roots of Europe, and had accounted for the result of this process as producing “cultures of hybridity”, since cultural iden- tities are emerging while in transition, drawing on different traditions but resisting wholesale assimilation ( Hall 1992 ). Whether we want to define Europe as an identity, a political project, a financial unit or a securitized bulwark, the oft-recited mantra of ‘Fortress Europe’ being predicated upon the motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ rests on a profound ambivalence: whose unity and whose diversity is being addressed? What are the paradigms of universalism and difference that are being invoked? Cosmopolitanism is as controversial and as contested a term as the notion of Europe. Being based on philosophical traditions which range from the Stoics to Kant and contemporary think- ers, it is distinctive for having continued to inflect political theory and cultural studies. It is a notion that, from the cultural spectrum to political institutions, allows the tension to be traced between the local and the global, the specific and the universal, individual freedom and collective responsibility, the normative and the pragmatic. Cosmopolitanism is also a very ambivalent idea within the postcolonial, with which it seems to be closely linked. For Benita Parry “the global flows” of transnational cultural traffic have Copyright © 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. © 2018. Routledge. Copyright produced an emergent postcolonial cosmopolitanism ( Parry 1991 : 41). This often refers to the association of cosmopolitanism with a sort of perennial immigration condition but also to a con- fusion between the terms cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. Therefore the criticism of the 564 Delanty, G. (Ed.). (2018). Routledge international handbook of cosmopolitanism studies : 2nd edition. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2019-03-28 08:57:38. Cosmopolitan Europe free-floating use of the term cosmopolitanism has been consistent and harsh. This is because an array of comparative cosmopolitanisms must cobble together quite disparate histories. To combine cosmopolitanism and Europe doubles many of the dissonances that connote each term, and yet ‘Cosmopolitan Europe’ is not just a utopian notion but an aspirational term that proposes a diversification of both the dominant understanding of Europe and of cosmopolitan- ism to make space for difference and particularities which are usually seen as marginal both to the project of Europe and of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan Europe is therefore not just an oxymoron but as Spivak famously said, that which “we cannot not want” ( Spivak 1999 : 110). This implies that Europe has to address its own colonial history in order to be able to address its postcolonial and cosmopolitan present. And this implies that a new understanding of the postcolonial is needed beyond the understanding of ‘postcolonial’ as referring only to the ‘other’ places outside of the West, or to the immigrants that come to Europe as beneficiaries of a decolonial settlement. This new understanding of postcolo- nialism must account for Europe as a postcolonial place and for migrants as part of the European project of modernity (Gilroy 2004) coming to claim their long-standing history and connection to the project of Europe. Without the recuperation of those omitted, silenced or removed his- tories, no Cosmopolitan Europe can emerge which is predicated on a post-Enlightenment view of ‘Unity in Diversity’. Postcolonial Europe As Peo Hansen has argued, European Studies (including the study of European integration) has focused mainly on the historical internal rivalries within Europe and on the polarization brought by the Cold War, obfuscating or dismissing the dismantling of another world order in the form of colonialism and imperialism, which was at the basis not only of the establishment of European nation states but also of European formation. European integration became the model to escape the responsibilities of colonialism and to “adjust to the changing political and economic circum- stances brought about by decolonisation” ( Hansen 2002 : 493). Therefore insufficient attention has been paid to the link between the process of decoloniza- tion and that of European formation, and to the idea that Africa just came as a dowry to Europe ( Hansen and Jonsson 2014 ). On the contrary, since its inception Europe, or at least the Europe we tend to associate with the European Union, has been predicated on the idea of peace and freedom (Hansen, 2000). Built on the ravages of World War II and the memory of the Holocaust, the European project of integration and unification was meant as a ‘never again’. It was a response to atrocities and crimes against humanities that until then had been thought possible only when far removed from its own territory, placed outside of Europe, displaced in the far-off territory of the empire, where the colonies functioned as laboratories for European social, political and cultural experimentation. It is no surprise that the eugenics of empire was developed in order to create a stark opposi- tion, or a motivation for differentiation between the West and the Rest, to support the civilizing mission as the white men’s burden which was predicated on racial taxonomy and exclusion. The first genocide of the twentieth century was that of the Herero in Namibia in the early 1900s (which led to more than 100,000 deaths). Memories of this have been repressed, removed and for a long time disassociated with the development of concentration camps in Nazi Germany ( Gewald 1999 ; Conrad 2012 ), the continuum of empire coming back home to affect and disturb Copyright © 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. © 2018. Routledge. Copyright what had been considered a regulated European order, initially established with the Westphalian treaty in 1648 which was supposed to end the wars of religion in Europe in order to overcome one of the most destructive periods in Europe. 565 Delanty, G. (Ed.). (2018). Routledge international handbook of cosmopolitanism studies : 2nd edition. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2019-03-28 08:57:38. Sandra Ponzanesi The history of Europe has always excluded the colonies, even when they were officially still part of Europe after 1945: Algeria belonging to France until 1962, the protectorate of Somaliland under Italian administration AFIS (Amministrazione Italiana Fiduciaria della Somalia) until 1960, Angola and Mozambique belonging to Portugal until 1975, Suriname and the Caribbean islands as part of the Netherlands, Western Sahara under Spain until 1975, and Melilla and Ceuta still under Spanish rule. However, the conflicts related to the wars of independence in those regions (e.g. the Algerian War until 1962) were seen as not part of Europe but displaced elsewhere, and therefore not denting the European project of peace and freedom. Therefore it was surprising when the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union (EU), which: for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democ- racy and human rights in Europe. The work of the EU represents ‘fraternity between nations’, and amounts to a form of the ‘peace congresses’ to which Alfred Nobel refers as criteria for the Peace Prize in his 1895 will. (Nobel Prize committee, Nobleprize.org) This challenges not only the way in which one envisions a postcolonial Europe but also the very notion of European cosmopolitanism as predicated on the idea of freedom and peace. How can the idea of Europe be referred to as an ideal of Western modernity and democracy when histories of exclusion have continued to be reproduced not only in the far-off territories of empire but within Europe itself? As I have written elsewhere, Europe works as both an “exclusionary and discriminatory for- tress and a supra-national organization based on ideas of peace, justice and emancipation” ( Pon- zanesi 2011 : 1). The European Union began as a coordinating organ, an economic marketplace and an alliance between sovereign states. As an organization based on the free movement of goods, ideas, persons and services, it promotes and facilitates global flows on the European continent. This European economic integration – comprising norms of good governance and democracy, social justice, environmental protection and human rights – is shaping global governance by contribut- ing ‘European standards to the world’ (Magone 2009: 277). It is this idea of exceptionality and of Europe as a civilization based on a broad consensus about the idea of democracy, law and science that allows European culture to be exported to the rest of the world ( Bhambra 2009 : 76). We could say that the granting of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of this expand- ing European ideology is debatable. From a postcolonial context, we could refer to the imperial or neocolonial character of this enterprise, in which the emphasis on the spread of democracy can be questioned.