Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

The collective identity of Europe 25
and technology, and to stimulate trade and crafts and the production of goods. Law
and education became the core arenas of citizenship in enlightened absolutism.
The people were transformed from a bunch of locally varying peasants and craftsmen
into uniform and equal citizens of a state (Scott 1998). Enlightened absolutism
discarded not only local and regional differences, but also disregarded the religious
and ethnic diversity of the citizens – these differences were banned from the
public sphere of the state and enclosed in the privacy of the citizens. Thus the
distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ became the core institutional device for
coping with cultural diversity.
Again, there are strong institutional similarities between the political order of
enlightened absolutism and the current state of the European Union: the strong
bureaucratic centre that claims to represent reason and rationality; the missionary
rhetoric of progress and modernisation; the attempt to stimulate economic growth
as the prime motive of political integration; the institutional protection of a large
internal market against imports; the bureaucratic standardisation of products and
services; the thrust to overcome the diversity of national and local identities and to
turn the people of different nations into European citizens; and finally the sense
of competition with respect to ‘outside organisations’ like the US or Japan.
But although the model of enlightened absolutism seems to come closest to the
constitutional practice of the European Union, it is still incompatible with the central
trope of modern political discourse – the idea of a sovereign demos. Even if EU
politics actually operated according to the model of enlightened absolutism it would
have to face the challenge of the deficit of democracy.
This idea of the sovereign demos is at the core of the modern nation-state.
Although the idea of the nation is not a modern invention, the nation as the ultimate
sovereign actor of politics is, indeed, a decisively modern, Western and European
idea. It emerged in the seventeenth century and ascended to the position of an
undisputed master-narrative of history and state formation in the first half of
the nineteenth century (Giesen 1998). In the ‘spring of nations’ these were seen as
naturally given collectivities, that – like sleeping giants – could awake, rise, break
the chains of foreign domination and determine their fate by themselves. Thus the
revolutionary uprising against the monarch or against foreign rule became the most
important foundation myth of the modern democratic nation. Revolutions are, by
their very definition, ruptures in the continuity of constitution and legal rule, a
relapse into the state of nature, that can be conceived of as Hobbesian violence
or as Rousseauian paradise (Koselleck, Meier, Fisch and Bulst 1984). Only if we
presuppose that the demos, the people, the nation ‘exists’ in this state of nature, i.e.
independently from and prior to any constitution, legal system and public sphere,
only then can we account for the idea of democratic sovereignty as distinct from the
idea of justice that was already at the core of the constitutional paradigms outlined
above.
We have to assume this collective identity of the nation and to represent it in the
discourse of political culture in order to decide about the question of who is to vote
about the constitution, about citizenship rights, etc. and who is not. The phrase
‘we, the people’ in its most elementary sense implies boundaries against outsiders,