Querying Cosmopolis at the Borders of Europe

Olivier Thomas Kramsch
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Olivier Thomas Kramsch: Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Department of Human Geography, Radboud Universiteit, Postbus 9108, 6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Environment and Planning A, 2007, vol. 39, issue 7, 1582-1600

Abstract: Notions of immanence provide the implicit theoretical grammar for much work exploring the political terrain of an active transnational or radically cosmopolitan society in our day. In this paper I attempt to problematize such a gesture in the recent ‘turn to cosmopolis’, arguing that its conceptual frame fails to specify adequately the geohistorical preconditions for a politics capable of mediating between nationalizing and cosmopolitanizing tendencies at work in a globalizing world. For the case of Europe, I argue such a legacy may be more productively located in the ‘border work’ of mid-20th-century anti-imperialism and decolonization, whose struggles to redefine the postcolonial couplet of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ haunt current attempts by the European Union to craft a more inclusive and cosmopolitan transboundary future. I explore how such governmentalizing phantasms specifically inform attempts to create viable cross-border regions ( euregios ) within the EU, and continue to gnaw at attempts to negotiate boundary disputes at the outer limits of the continent. In conclusion, a cautious rite of exorcism is ventured by engaging with the elusive anti-imperial cosmopolitanism of Frantz Fanon.

Date: 2007
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:39:y:2007:i:7:p:1582-1600

DOI: 10.1068/a38212

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