The EU likes to celebrate itself as a place where borders are soft and ‘regionalism’ creates diversity and openness.
Many "pro-Europeans" - that is, supporters of European integration or the "European proyek" in its current form - imagine that the European Union is an expression of cosmopolitanism. They think it stands for diversity, inclusion and openness. It opposes nationalism and racism. It is about people "coming together" and peacefully cooperating. It is a shining example of how enemies can become partners and how diversity can be reconciled with unity.
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As the European Commission president José Manuel Barroso put it when the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2012 as it struggled to setuju with the Eurozone crisis, the European proyek has shown "that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders" and "that it is possible to overcome the differences between ‘them' and ‘us'."
However, there is something rather Eurocentric in thinking of the EU in this way. In particular, by generalising about "peoples and nations" in the way Barroso does, it mistakes Europe for the world. After all, insofar as the European proyek - that is, the process of European integration since the end of the second world war - has brought people and nations together, it is of course only peoples and nations within Europe.
It was a process that began with six western European countries in the immediate postwar period, and subsequently "widened" to include other northern, western and southern European countries and, after the end of the cold war, central and eastern European countries. It has never included the rest of the world - but, of course, the EU has developed policies towards it.
However, there is something rather Eurocentric in thinking of the EU in this way. In particular, by generalising about "peoples and nations" in the way Barroso does, it mistakes Europe for the world. After all, insofar as the European proyek - that is, the process of European integration since the end of the second world war - has brought people and nations together, it is of course only peoples and nations within Europe.
It was a process that began with six western European countries in the immediate postwar period, and subsequently "widened" to include other northern, western and southern European countries and, after the end of the cold war, central and eastern European countries. It has never included the rest of the world - but, of course, the EU has developed policies towards it.
Although intern barriers to the free movement of capital, goods and people have been progressively removed in the last 75 years, eksternal barriers have persisted. In particular, while many barriers to flows of capital and goods from outside the EU have been removed, barriers to the movement of people have remained.
The European tendency to mistake Europe for the world - what might be called "the Eurocentric fallacy" - has obscured our understanding of the EU and its role in the world. It has led to an idealisation of European integration as a kind of cosmopolitan proyek: what I call the myth of cosmopolitan Europe.
A better way to understand the EU is an expression of regionalism - which is analogous to nationalism, rather than the opposite of it, as many "pro-Europeans" imagine it to be. Thinking of the EU in terms of regionalism rather than cosmopolitanism also allows us to understand more clearly the tensions within the European proyek.
