Toward a Cosmopolitan and Inclusive European Identity? Negotiating Immigrants’ Inclusion and Exclusion in the New Europe

Abstract

The evolving European identity has captured the imagination of researchers and the wider public alike. It denotes the prospect of a viable and stable social and political community beyond the nation-state. Yet, as the social preconditions for making such a transnational community become feasible, a European collective identity has become the subject of competing political projections and normative expectations. Klaus Eder (2001; 2004) has repeatedly shed light on how the concept of collective identity suffers from a lack of analytical rigor and from burgeoning normative claims. This also holds true for the link between an emerging European identity and the integration of migrants into the fabric of European societies: one of the key normative expectations concerning an emerging European identity and transnational citizenship regime is that they are cosmopolitan in nature and, at least to a large degree, exempt from the exclusionary underpinnings of traditional national identities (Eder and Giesen 2000). A European identity is widely expected to provide an environment in which traditional modes of social closure and discrimination against the allegedly inferior ‘other’ become less and less acceptable as a social and political practice. As compared to national identities the European one is inherently defined by its lack of cultural or ethnic foundation and thus structurally prepared to deal with Europe’s internal cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity (Dell’Olio 2005; Dietz 2004).