Fake Europeanization of Elites and Failed Europeanization of the Massesss

• • 
  • Presentation speakers
    • Emanuel Crudu, Euroacademia (Paris, Lucca & Brussels)

  Abstract:

  As Jose Manuel Barroso put it, EU is the first non-imperial empire ‘built on voluntary pooling of power and not on military conquest’. It is the argument in this paper that the EU identitarian narratives maintain a delineative East – West slope and reproduce narrative practices that resemble rather a neo-medieval empire shape than an emerging European cosmopolitan order or a Westphalian superstate. While the processes of identity making intrinsic to the creation of nation states produced a homogenizing move that propelled the created other outside its borders, the EU identity making frames internal hierarchies accommodating an internal other trough a persisting wide and growing set of dichotomies: core Europe/non-Core Europe, new Europe/old Europe, pioneers/followers, centre/periphery, cosmos/chaos. The proliferation of such dichotomies expresses the widespread though most often gratuitous European scepticism in the complementarity between wider and deeper integration and fuels scenarios for differentiated and club based integration. While in identity making practices that became inherent to the process of Europeanization we face what G. Majone called a ‘failed Europeanization of the masses’, this paper addresses also the fake Europeanization of the elites through proliferation of often rather mimetic than substantive European political behaviors and values promotion.

 

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