A characteristic of political movements today is the appeal to selfdetermination. It has entered the political discourse of populist politics and has given a new impetus to nationalism. Populist politics, broadly defined as anti-establishment and nativistic, has become a new force in the world today and has changed the political context of Europeanisation. Populists are no longer outsiders; they are now part of the mainstream, though when they join the mainstream, they are no longer outsiders. While by no means entirely right-wing, in Europe populism has been predominantly associated with right-wing politics and has been successfully embraced by the extreme right for which it has become a convenient way of escaping the damaging label of fascism. The appeal to self-determination has always exerted a powerful hold over the popular imagination. It has a resonance that is not easily matched by the established politics of the centre and many despair at what appears to be a crisis of liberal democracy. Populist movements have advanced their cause and increased their popularity through appealing to self-determination. Minority groups of all kinds have also advanced their cause by appeal to self-determination (Hilpold, 2017). But what does it mean and what is it really capable of achieving? Is liberal democracy and European integration really in peril?

The idea of self-determination in nationalist movements generally rests on the idea of an external source of domination that had to be removed, often by violence and at any cost. In this chapter, which is concerned with secessionist expressions of self-determination, I argue that the idea of selfdetermination today has lost the meaning it once had, namely the voice of a dominated people. It has been forced to become democratised in a way that it was not before. In many of its expressions, it has undergone a shift in the direction of illiberal democracy, but it can also take a more pronounced call for more meaningful forms of democracy. Today in Europe the appeal to self-determination has many different meanings, depending on whether the examples are Catalonia, Scotland, Ireland, Corsica, Flanders or Brexit.

Introduction

The startling result of the referendum of June 23, 2016, at first defies explanation. How could a relatively prosperous country with a fairly stable state system act against its economic and political interests? Do people willfully act against their interests? Do they even know what their interests are? The Brexit phenomenon has been widely viewed as the biggest crisis for the UK since 1945. In bringing the country to the brink of a crisis of governability and marking a new milestone in the history of the post– World War II project of European integration, it has also brought about a new political context, in which the populist anti- immigration Right has made large gains, and a climate of considerable political uncertainty as well as economic decline. The circumstances by which the referendum was set up are of course the primary causal factors in accounting for Brexit, as are the failure in political leadership in allowing a referendum to take place on a complex issue that referenda are ill- equipped to deal with. Brexit is also an interesting sociological case study of major societal change and institutional transition.

The aim of the present chapter is to explore the sociological ramifications of the referendum, which I argue is hugely significant. The fact that the outcome with a narrow majority of approximately 1.2 million could easily have gone the other way— that is, if just over 640,000 had voted remain— does not detract from that the fact that 17.4 million voted leave (51.9 percent). In fact, the narrow split— 51.9 percent against 48.1 percent— has served to enhance the magnitude of Brexit, which if implemented will entail major change and impose the will of one- half of the population on the other. Referenda, unlike elections, are not just cases of simple majorities determining outcomes. There are many reasons why this is the case, and it is not the aim of this chapter to examine the constitutional questions that Brexit raises (see the chapters by Chris Thornhill and Antje Wiener in this volume), but one point must be noted: election outcomes are reversible at the next election. Referenda generally are not reversible, however, and in the case of Brexit a more or less irreversible systemic course of action will ensue that will almost certainly set the historical clock back by several decades.

Abstract: This article explores the concept of borderlands with respect to conceptions of Europe and current developments in European societies, especially in the context of the recent enlargement of the EU. It examines the changing nature of borders with a view towards offering an assessment of the notion of a post-Western Europe. The thesis advanced in the paper is that Europe is taking not just a post-national form, but is also taking a post-Western shape and this latter dimension may be more significant. An important aspect of this is changing relations of peripheries to the core. The aim of the paper is to offer a new assessment of the periphery which can be seen as a zone of re-bordering. In the periphery the relation between the inside and the outside is complex and ambivalent; while often taking exclusionary forms, this is a relation that can also be viewed as the site of cosmopolitan forms of negotiation.

Introduction

The enlargement of the European Union has brought about a significant change in the shape of Europe as a geopolitical entity. The significance of the eastern enlargement process goes beyond the institutional question of the membership and constitution of the EU and suggests a major reorientation in the identity of Europe. Unlike earlier enlargements of the EU, the recent enlargement processes have wider cultural implications.

The emergence of new kinds of racism in European societies – referred to variously as ‘Euro-racism’, ‘symbolic racism’, ‘cultural racism’ or, in France, as racisme différentiel – has been widely discussed (see for example Holmes 2000; Macmaster 2001). While these accounts differ, there is widespread agreement that racism in Europe is on the increase and that one of its characteristic features is hostility to migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers who are positioned in exclusionary discourse as the new ‘Others’. In this respect European racism is characterized by a hostility that is not exclusively defined by the traditional terms of ‘colour’ and ‘race’, as was typical of ‘biological’ racism in the industrial and colonial period (Fekete 2001).

Accordingly, in many European countries the extreme right has refined its electoral programmes under the rubric of nationalist-populist slogans and has adopted more subtle (or coded) forms of racism. The move away from overt neo-fascist discourse has in fact allowed these parties to expand their electoral support as populist-nationalist parties concerned with a defence of ethnonationalist ‘culture’ (Rydgren 2003, 2005; Delanty and O'Mahony 2002; Wodak and Pelinka 2002; Pelinka and Wodak 2002). But this has led to an increase in racist and anti-Semitic discourse, not its decline, since contemporary racism often takes more pervasive, diffuse forms, frequently – and paradoxically – to the point of being expressed in the denial of racism (Van Dijk 1985).

The question of the place and role of religion in modern secular societies has been a subject of much discussion in scholarly debates. Sociologists of religion have noted the increasing secularization of modern societies in terms of the separation of church and state and have noted the overall declining importance of religious belief and practice. Although the so-called secularization thesis has been much debated, since much of the decline of religion in fact amounted to the privatization of religious belief, there does appear to be widespread agreement that modernity entails the overall decline of religion (Bruce 1996; Norris and Inglehart 2004). This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of the secularization thesis, but it can be noted that the secularization of religion does not amount to the disappearance of religion. To take an obvious example, the USA is a highly secular society in terms of the role of religion in the state and the Constitution of the Unites States of America is one of the most secular constitutional documents in existence. However, American society is highly religious and there is in addition a certain cultural stream commonly referred to as civil religion, a sense of nationhood that has many features of religious worship (Casanova 1994, 2001; Madsen et al. 2002). In much of Asia and in most parts Africa, religion has become highly important to rapidly modernizing post-industrial countries that did not undergo a European-style reformation where major doctrinal change occurred before industrialization.

Introduction

As noted in Chapters 3 and 4 there are cosmopolitan dimensions to the contemporary political community as reflected in a growing concern with global ethics, post-national expressions of citizenship and solidarity. The European transnationalization of the nation-state is one of the most important contexts for the crystallization of cosmopolitanism as a political reality. This is not to say that the European Union represents a cosmopolitan order, but that European integration in establishing the foundations of a new kind of polity, which can be roughly described as a post-sovereign state, is without doubt one of the most significant examples of what Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande (2007) have called a ‘cosmopolitanization’ of social reality in Europe. The theoretical approach to cosmopolitanism in this book, as outlined in Chapter 2, stressed the processual nature of cosmopolitanism, which is not an end state or complete condition but a developmental logic. On this basis, the argument is not that the EU is a cosmopolitan polity, but that certain elements in the Europeanization of the nation-state have established preconditions for cosmopolitanism to be a significant dimension to contemporary European society.

In the terms of the four-fold conceptualization of cosmopolitanism discussed in Chapter 2, elements of all four are present to varying degrees: the relativization of national identity, the beginnings of a politics of recognition, critical and deliberative forms of culture, and signs of the emergence of a normative public culture.

In this chapter I argue that one major dimension of cosmopolitanism is a concern with global ethics. Global ethics has a critical and dialogic character rather than being primarily grounded in ‘thin’ universalistic principles that transcend specific contexts. For this reason the question of global ethics is particularly interesting for critical social theory, which has been traditionally concerned with the critique of the present from the perspective of a critical-normative idea of the just society. As argued in the previous chapter, cosmopolitanism emerges out of shifts in the moral and political self-understanding of society and as such is a form of immanent transcendence whereby societies undergo change as a result of internal transformation as they respond to external and especially global challenges. It contains a strong ethical character and one that has a global frame of reference. Global ethics is above all an expression of cosmopolitan political community and can be seen as a multi-layered form of socio-cultural transformation. In the terms of the analysis in the preceding chapter, global ethics concerns the capacity to create a shared normative culture. It is not merely a product of a belief in global humanity and thus ‘thin’ (Dobson 2006). Societies can learn through ethics in the sense of shifts in their moral consciousness as a result of confronting common problems: collective learning takes the form of cognitive shifts which are primarily worked out in the communicative processes of the public sphere and shape collective identities.

My intention in this book is to set out an argument for the contemporary relevance of cosmopolitanism for social science. More specifically my aim is to demonstrate the empirical and normative significance of cosmopolitanism for critical social theory. I have termed my approach critical cosmopolitanism to emphasize a dimension of cosmopolitanism that is not normally discussed in the now extensive literature on cosmopolitanism, namely the capacity for self-problematization and new ways of seeing the world that result when diverse peoples experience common problems. Against culturally oriented approaches, I see such problems as not cultural but social and economic and have significant political implications, which require a new kind of imagination – a cosmopolitan as opposed to national or market based ones – to address. The argument of this book is that such an imagination is present in the ways in which societies today, as in the past, have responded to the experience of globality.

In many ways this book is an expanded and re-worked version of an article on the idea of critical cosmopolitanism I published in 2006 in a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology on cosmopolitan sociology, edited by Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, British Journal of Sociology 57 (1): 25–47. Chapter 2 is a much extended and re-worked version of that article.

Introduction

Chapter 8 looked at the internal transformation of the European political community with a view to establishing the limits and possibilities for cosmopolitanism. My concern in this chapter is to look beyond the internal dynamics of change to consider the implications of the enlargement of the EU, especially since the fifth enlargement in 2004, for cosmopolitanism. The chapter is chiefly concerned with the changing relation of centres and peripheries and the wider geopolitical shape of Europe. This will be explored largely around the question of the kinds of borders that are being created in the periphery as a result of Europeanization. My argument is that there is now a changed relation between the periphery and the core, with the periphery emerging from marginalization to become a site of cosmopolitan re-bordering. However, the true significance of the relation of core to periphery is more inter-civilizational than a matter of the transnationalization of the nation-state. Europe is not simply a product of Western civilization, but is an inter-civilizational constellation in which many civilizational heritages interact. This suggests a post-Western conception of Europe as a field of interacting cultures, rather than a unity or an integrated geopolitical entity that can be understood along the lines of nation-state formation or by reference to a primary origin.

In the terms of critical cosmopolitanism developed in this book, the most important aspect here is the interactive dimension as opposed to the logic of integration.