The cosmopolitan and environmental challenges of the idea of Europe in the age of the Antropocene

Abstract

. In this paper we try to show how the contemporary challenges of the global environmental crisis in the age of the Anthropocene confront us with the urgent need of reevaluating the premises of classical contractualism and designing a new idea of Europe for the 21st century. We begin by expounding the principles of what we call an enviro-social contract which takes the environmental crisis as the main axis of our ontological condition in the contemporary world to subsequently identifying in the remaining sections the main theoretical issues on the possibility of a new environmental and cosmopolitan idea of cosmopolitan Europe according to our previous arguments. We finish by proposing cities as cosmopolitan political agents which can contribute to rethink the idea of Europe through the creation of a cosmopolitan political culture in face of the current European sociopolitical and institutional crossroads.