Market cosmopolitics in Europe

A market cosmopolitics might be regarded as the founding governmental rationality of the contemporary European project. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) sought to deploy economic means to political ends, creating interdependent markets in a set of industries of central import for European states’ war regimes and thereby taming the anarchical relationship that had precipitated inter-state conflict. The Rome treaty extended this market rationality to many more domains of economic activity and this became increasingly solidified or constitutionalized via, inter alia, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the lobbying of European business interests (Mattli and Slaughter Reference Mattli and Slaughter.1998; Apeldoorn Reference Apeldoorn2002). Such insights are consistent with a range of contemporary European Studies scholarship – both normatively critical and complimentary – which implicitly or explicitly regards the market as performing a ‘role of veridiction’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008) – acting as the guiding principle – for contemporary post-national government in Europe. From a mainstream liberal perspective, Moravcsik implicitly celebrates the realization of market rationalities in the post-national institutional context in general and in the EU in particular and Majone is explicit in his celebration of the EU as a (re)-regulatory depoliticized entity that essentially coheres with a liberal notion of government concerned with ‘the tyranny of majority’ (Majone Reference Majone1996, Reference Majone1998; Moravcsik Reference Moravcsik1997, Reference Moravcsik1998). From a Marxist perspective, the emergence of a supranational economic constitution and monetary policy is variously understood as supporting the agenda of the (neo)-liberal state or bemoaned as establishing a ‘new constitutionalism’ that delimits popular sovereignty (Gill Reference Gill1998, Reference Gill2003). The point, in short, is that what I term a ‘market’ cosmopolitics is widely conceived as prevalent in the EU and variously celebrated and reviled.

A market cosmopolitics informed by a liberal political economy is, I would concur, the central rationality of contemporary post-national government in Europe. Foucault's (Reference Foucault2008) lectures on liberal government, provide a history of ideas from which we can develop an account of the conditions of possibility and aims of contemporary post-national or cosmopolitical government in/for Europe. Emerging in 18th century Europe, a liberal mode of rule is conceived in extremely broad terms by Foucault and contrasted with the preceding mode of raison d’état. A liberal government imposes limits; it objects to excessive government rather than focusing on the abuse of sovereign power, which formed the oppositional framework for constraining the reality of police state. In Foucault's account, the emphasis on a liberal government in the 18th century is closely associated with the emergence of political economy at this time. A central indicator of nature or truth, which was identified by political economy and to which government is enjoined to respond, is the organizing terrain of market. The market as a field of activity for the population becomes useful in unveiling a set of natural laws or principles, which inform the art of government from the 18th century onwards. While it was a site of extensive jurisdiction in the Middle Ages and 16th and 17th centuries, it increasingly becomes rendered as a natural domain in which government should only intervene in order to preserve those spontaneous competitive natural tendencies. In particular, the tendency of the market to produce a natural price that regulates the relationship between the cost of production and demand is regarded as important and something to be respected by government. Thus, political economy, ‘pointed out to government where it had to go to find the principle of truth of its own governmental practice… [I]t is [the market's] role of veridiction that will command, dictate, and prescribe the jurisdictional mechanisms, or absence of such mechanisms’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 32). This turn to the market, Foucault is clear, does not in fact mean less government, but rather government for the market.

As it moves into the 20th century Foucault's account focuses on the work of Germany's ‘ordo’ or ‘neo’ liberals, whose ideas became prominent with their adoption by powerful political allies in the aftermath of the Second World War. These scholars built upon the foundations of classical liberal scholarship, perceiving the state's very legitimacy to follow from an assessment of its performance of the market making function. The ordo-liberals were concerned, then, with the question of how to use the concept of economic freedom and competitive free markets as the very foundation for a post-war German state lacking in legitimacy. Foucault argues that in post-war Germany there was a political expediency to the deployment of an economic rationality. The German state required a uniting idea, both in addressing its own people and its political partners, which was not rooted in any traditionalist–statist conception that had proved so damaging in the guise of National Socialism. Neo-liberalism would appease American interests while also offering the people a sense of freedom over their own economic affairs. Thus, a juridical framework is presented as creating a space of freedom in the economic domain, since prevailing contingencies did not permit a juridical power of coercion. As future Chancellor Erhard, one of ordo-liberalism's key political proponents, said in 1948, ‘only a state that establishes both the freedom and responsibility of the citizens can legitimately speak in the name of the people’ (cited in Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 81). For ordo-liberalism economic freedom is thus both the state's foundation and its limitation; its guarantee and its security (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 102). As Foucault (Reference Foucault2008, 116) tells us, the ordo-liberals argue that we should adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words, we witness a ‘political reversal’: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervized by the state (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 117). However, this does not mean the absence of government or even a limited government. Indeed, ‘[g]overnment must accompany the market economy from start to finish. The market economy does not take something away from government. Rather, it indicates, it constitutes the general index in which one must place the rule for defining all government action. One must govern for the market rather than because of the market’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 121). Thus, we see the emergence in this German context of an economic constitution that would, in large measure, find its way into European level government.

Indeed, the treaty of Rome was in large part inspired by ordo-liberal ideas and certain key proponents – such as Walter Hallstein, the first President of the Commission – were key in its formulation (Gerber Reference Gerber1994). That said, it was arguably the interpretation of the Rome treaty in ordo-liberal or market cosmopolitical terms that was decisive in placing states in a deferential position vis-à-vis markets. While the Rome treaty envisaged the ECJ as the institution before which member state and Commission claims of non-compliance would be heard, as Mattli (Reference Mattli1999, 73) highlights, ‘the treaty evolved from a set of legal arrangements binding upon sovereign states, into a vertically integrated legal regime conferring judicially enforceable rights and obligations on all legal persons and entities, public and private, within the European Union’. The central point for current purposes is that it is the delegitimization of the state and privileging of the market – to some extent politically achieved by the ordo-liberals – which paves the way for a governmentality that is not territorially bounded in the same way as were the ideas of the 18th century liberals. The notion of a transnational or global free market place becomes more easily realizable when the state is downgraded in importance or, rather, when its raison d’être becomes the service of the market.

But what would it mean governmentally for a state to be under the supervision of the market? It would mean, as mentioned, the constitution of the state on the basis of the economy, or, in other words, the formulation of an economic constitution. The state is to be constituted not in terms of its granting of political rights to its citizenry, but instead in terms of its commitment to enable the competitive market within and possibly also beyond its territory. While the ordo-liberals celebrate the market form and, in particular, the governing role of prices in a truly or perfectly competitive market place, they do not consider pure competition to be a ‘primitive given’ and hence part of government's non-agenda as conceived by classical liberalism. Rather, as history reveals for the ordo-liberals, pure competition is fragile, ‘it can only be the result of lengthy efforts and, in truth, pure competition is never attained’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 120). Competition is no longer then a naturalistic reality, but a normative concept, never to be entirely obtained, but nevertheless the regulative ideal according to which the success of government should be gauged. The economic constitution is thus associated with the need for ‘permanent vigilance, activity and intervention’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 132).

This is reflected in the ordo-liberal conception of social policy, which does not seek to impact directly on the market, as a brake or counterweight to it, or as a tool geared towards the easing of economic disparities, in the way in which Keynesian economists, the New Deal and the Beveridge plan envisaged for ‘welfare economies’. Indeed, the very regulatory social forces that are privileged by the ordo-liberals – market competition and the price mechanism – require differences, not equality, if they are to function properly (Donzelot Reference Donzelot2008). The subjects that animate these forces paradoxically require for their security a space of freedom as insecurity or uncertainty. Thus, ‘for the ordoliberals the economic game, along with the unequal effects it entails, is a kind of general regulator of society that clearly everyone has to accept and abide by’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 143). Hence, instead of ‘collectivization by and in social policy’, the ordoliberals promote ‘individualization of social policy and individualization through social policy’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 144). This means providing everyone with a space within which they can take on and confront risks, or, more concretely, the privatization of risk and uncertainty via technologies such as individual and mutual insurance and private property. Within this picture, economic growth becomes the pre-eminent goal of social policy and it becomes possible to talk about something called the ‘social market economy’, which has found its way into contemporary EU discourses and may even be gaining constitutional significance (Joerges and Rödl Reference Joerges and Rödl2004). In its original rendering, the social market economy permitted socially oriented goals, but not at the expense of the functioning of the competitive market and we perhaps see something similar in contemporary Europe.

Foucault's genealogy highlights that as it developed via a US or Chicago school, a neo-liberal government increasingly promotes the market as a generalizable framework and competitiveness or enterprise as a generalizable telos. This is the case for states and for supranational institutions, as evidenced in the EU's Lisbon and ‘Europe 2020’ competitiveness agendas of 2000 and 2010, respectively (European Council 2000; Apeldoorn Reference Apeldoorn2009; European Commission 2010b). Such a framework is also extended within populations or societies; indeed, it becomes a tool for governing all social relations, not only economic relations. Governing technologies have, in accordance with this conception of neo-liberal government, conducted what Foucault calls ‘an economic analysis of the non-economic’. They have sought to construct markets in non-economic domains, for example in the domain of society and work. As Foucault (Reference Foucault2008, 220) notes, ‘classical political economy has never analyzed labour itself, or rather it has constantly striven to neutralize it, and to do this by reducing it exclusively to the factor of time’. Concerned with analysing relational mechanisms of capital, investment and production, classical liberals did not, from a neo-liberal perspective, sufficiently focus on human behaviour, internal rationality, or the strategic programming of individuals’ activity. The neo-liberals re-render the worker; he is no longer merely an object in economic analysis, ‘but an active economic subject’ and the wage is reconceived as a return on capital (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 223). The notion of ‘human capital’ invented by Chicago school economists thereby links the abilities or skills of the worker (capital) with a possible earnings stream and in such an understanding ‘the worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 225). Following from this, whereas the classical liberals conceive of homo oeconomicus – the ‘subject of interest’ – primarily as ‘a partner of exchange’, for the neo-liberals ‘homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2008, 226). The entrepreneur thus becomes a generalizable figure in a way that classical liberals never imagined possible. Once human capital appears in an important field of knowledge/power, it makes sense that it is something that both governments and individuals should concern themselves with.

Considering the strategic orientation of contemporary Europe, this subject of entrepreneur is indeed of central importance. An economic constitution constrains ‘social’ policy in the EU such that it is enjoined to march to the tune of a neo-liberal monetarist agenda (Schafer Reference Schafer2004, 8). There is here a mirroring of a more general trend where, increasingly, ‘new welfare’ regimes privilege a ‘third way’ politics. As Jayasuriya (Reference Jayasuriya2005, 2) says, ‘to see this new welfare governance as a part of a movement back from economic to social policy is to miss the fact that this new policy strategy seeks to entrench a form of “market citizenship” that differs from that reflected in the political grammar of post war social democracy’. In the EU context specific policies include, the recent promotion of ‘flexicurity’, where security is redefined in terms of ‘coping with uncertainty’ and the accent is firmly placed on flexibility in labour markets (European Commission 2007; Keune and Jepsen Reference Keune and Jepsen2007); ‘lifelong learning’ aimed at fostering human capital (European Commission 2001); and the closely related attempt to celebrate and promote ‘entrepreneurial mindsets’ through education and learning (European Commission 2006). Such policies are championed as ‘modernisation’ and they are increasingly tasked with enhancing the welfare or security of individuals, to the detriment of a concern with the sort of ‘security’ offered by both a redistributive social justice and substantive worker protection. Such ‘modernisation’ permits the retrenchment of worker protection and redistribution, as the burden of risk is placed increasingly on the individual as entrepreneur who is, by definition, prepared to handle such risks. This devolved ‘risk management’ conceptualizes ‘human capital’ – like capital in general – as ‘mobile’. As Foucault (Reference Foucault2008, 230) says of this position,

In summary, from this market cosmopolitical perspective, the knowledge/power of a (neo)-liberal political economy is central in the ongoing constitution of a post-national regime of government and such a regime at once facilitates the deepening of a liberal rationality in the face of potential challenge from national democratic opposition. From a mainstream liberal EU studies perspective, such a regime ensures the functioning of the market in the manner of an ordo-liberalism and from a critical (often Marx or Gramsci inspired) perspective, it ensures the closure to popular scrutiny of the EU's economic regime and the inequalities that it precipitates. For the former, the economic constitution facilitates freedom in the face of inexpert masses and/or a potentially tyrannical factionalism (Majone Reference Majone1998; Moravcsik Reference Moravcsik2002), whereas for the latter it hampers freedom by excluding economic decision making – which via a neo-liberal power/knowledge extends its reach into the non-economic – from popular scrutiny (Gill Reference Gill2002, Reference Gill2003, see also a number of chapters in Nousios et al. Reference Nousios, Overbeek and Tsolakis2012). In the context of the ongoing politico-economic ‘crisis’ we are arguably witnessing an extension of this logic with the reinforcement of an economic constitution – particularly the tougher supranational policing of national budgets and (social) policies in the Eurozone – and the installation of unelected bureaucrats as leaders in struggling Eurozone member states in an attempt to appease ‘the markets’.

The crisis has precipitated an understandable and widespread opposition to a market cosmopolitics of a kind that mirrors to some extent the long-standing critiques of the aforementioned critical scholars. However, a market cosmopolitics clearly entails both ethical possibilities and limitations. The extension and deepening of market has had an irenic effect in contemporary Europe. While, as noted above, a neo-liberal market cosmopolitics relies on economic difference as the driver of competitiveness and entrepreneurship, it is formally blind to other kinds of difference. It seeks to guarantee a level playing field, for business through competition policy, but also for individuals through the assertion of anti-discrimination policies and laws. Equality of opportunity is not equality, but it is, nevertheless, of significance in the context of a Europe that has been historically divided and enacted divisions on nationalist, racial, gender, and ethnic lines. However, a logic of competitiveness obviously creates its own winners and losers; it creates socio-economic disparities and a logic of competitiveness can thereafter easily spill-over from a delimited economic domain. Indeed, a dogmatic Chicago school neo-liberalism promotes an economic domain in areas that were once considered ‘social’ or ‘public’. The ‘virtue’ or ‘sympathy’ of a classical liberalism associated with the likes of Adam Smith is eroded through the extension of competition ‘all the way down’. Unlike a dogmatic neo-liberalism, the ordo-liberals clearly recognized the limits on competitiveness. As Wilhelm Röpke noted of their programme, it ‘consists of measures and institutions which impart to competition the framework, rules, and machinery of impartial supervision which a competitive system needs as much as any game or match if it is not to degenerate into a vulgar brawl’ (cited in Allen Reference Allen2005, 205).

In the European context these limits are also recognized. While it is prevalent, a neo-liberal logic of competitiveness is clearly not the only or an all-pervasive rationality of government in/for Europe. In accord with Foucault's (Reference Foucault1982) conception of power as implying a space of freedom, we might, in short, consider both the possibilities and realities of resistance to a market cosmopolitics in/for Europe. In particular, we might consider an alternative genealogy of European cosmopolitics: a legal cosmopolitics.

Legal cosmopolitics in Europe

Remaining consistent with Foucault's insight that a liberal mode of government rooted in knowledges associated with political economy has never entirely displaced a sovereign juridical rationality, this section seeks to tell another story about contemporary cosmopolitics in Europe. This is a legal rationality that is much more than a pared down economic constitution. It is a rationality rooted in the imaginary of social contract and associated with the sovereign nation-state, but extended beyond the nation-state. It is a rationality that exists within both institutional realities and scholarly visions of integration; indeed, in both practice and scholarship, we have seen the extension of such features of the juridical nation-state as citizenship and an (albeit thin) political constitution to the post-national realm. Thus, cosmopolitan scholars such as Habermas (Reference Habermas2001a, Reference Habermas2001b) emphasize the importance of a political constitution for Europe that might offset a neo-liberal economic constitution and, in practice, some redistributive schemes have emerged: for instance, in the form of structural funds and the common agricultural policy. Habermas himself provides a compelling critique of a ‘market’ Europe from the perspective of an advocate of a legal cosmopolitics and post-national citizenship. He pitches the citizen in opposition to a neo-liberal ‘rational decider’ (herein, ‘subject of interest’ or ‘entrepreneur’). As he says (2001a, 94),

Habermas is concerned that in the European context, the market cosmopolitical economic constitution may undermine social contractarian rights to the extent that it impinges on the capacity of national governments to provide them, and, in neo-republican fashion, on the ability of the people to ensure that national governments provide them. In short, a market cosmopolitics has a pernicious impact on both solidarity and democracy. He notes increased capital mobility, increased flexibility in mass production, and the emergence of multi-national corporations as three factors that have eroded the balance between economic liberalization and national economic autonomy that was established in the Bretton Woods period, or the period of ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie Reference Ruggie1982). It is in this context that he notes the possibilities inherent in the European space for the re-assertion of a social contractarian rationality; a legal cosmopolitics. The subject of this governmentality is not the entrepreneur but a post-national solidarist citizen who both sanctions and benefits from redistributive policies – social and economic rights as well as liberal fundamental freedoms – in the face of (neo)-liberalism's emphasis on welfare retrenchment and the promotion of competitiveness. Thus, in his more explicitly political interventions, Habermas (Reference Habermas2001a) argues for and seeks to promote a ‘constitutional patriotism’ in the European space; concretely, this means a common bond or identity rooted not in national or ethnic identity, but in a set of shared principles (Habermas and Derrida Reference Habermas and Derrida.2003).

A legal cosmopolitics of this sort is not and has not been entirely absent from the European project. In practice, the ordo-liberal ‘reversal’ in the priority of state and market serves as only a partial explanation for the willingness of states to surrender or pool sovereignty and thereafter develop a European level of government. It may, in short, have been one condition of possibility, but perhaps not the only condition. In practice, a legal cosmopolitan rationality lay at the heart of many post-war visions of a federal Europe and was central to the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949. While some saw the Council of Europe as the harbinger of Churchill's United States of Europe, in practice it developed a narrow remit that focused on the Europeanization of a human rights and democratization discourse via a number of treaties, notably the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which led to the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While the ECSC and European Economic Community (EEC) were largely grounded in the aforementioned ‘market’ cosmopolitical rationality, the long-term inspiration for this community certainly lay in the popular political desire of the time to establish a pacific federal Europe. Both Schuman and Monnet were clear that the ECSC should represent but one small step in that direction. In this sense, Monnet's proposals can be read as both pragmatic and idealistic. Pragmatic in the sense that they sought to nurture a market in the specific industrial areas of coal and steel, but radical in the sense that – in accord with a functionalist logic – the ceding of sovereignty would ultimately lead to a more substantive federal European entity. The point is that the imaginaries of social contract and citizen associated with juridical nation-state were present at the outset and have never been entirely expunged from the reality of Europe. In short, a legal cosmopolitics is also significant and its citizen as ‘subject of right’ is irreducible to the entrepreneur as ‘subject of interest’.

From a Foucauldian perspective, the power of a supranational logic of convergence around neo-liberal knowledges necessarily implies a resistance to such logics from alternative power/knowledge nexuses, given that liberal government requires a space of choice, of responsibility, essentially a space of freedom. As Burchell (Reference Burchell1996, 26) says,

There is, then, a considerable space even within liberal government for the assertion of a legal rationality – and an associated solidarist citizen – that is concerned with the socio-political cost of economic government. This is a space within which scholarly accounts such as Habermas's and practical legal cosmopolitical realities have (re)-asserted themselves in the cosmopolitical European domain. Thus, even as a market cosmopolitics can be regarded as prevalent, both globally and within the EU, a legal rationality has always exerted itself in post-national and European politics at a number of different levels and in a variety of ways. In this regard, we might cite, in particular, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which formalizes a de facto recognition of transnational fundamental rights by the ECJ and includes, for instance, provisions relating to social and economic rights that reinforce and overlap with the ECHR (Sabel and Gerstenberg Reference Sabel and Gerstenberg.2010). More generally, discourses of borders, security, justice, home affairs (formerly pillars two and three), and even a redistributive social policy have always been present in the practice of European level government, even as these discourses are often refigured in accordance with a market cosmopolitics.

Particularly significant in this story is the much discussed category of a post-national EU citizenship (among many others, see Wiener Reference Wiener1998; Maas Reference Maas2007; Hansen and Hager Reference Hansen and Hager.2010), which was formally born with the Maastricht treaty in 1992. Prior to the introduction of this status, the right of an individual to claim rights commensurate with citizenship in another EU member state was tied to their economic subjectivity – their designation as mobile ‘worker’ (we might say ‘human capital’ or ‘entrepreneur’ in the language adopted in the preceding section) – but the emergence of ‘EU citizenship’, a unique post-national citizenship, has at least blurred this picture. Post-Maastricht ECJ case law has in many respects maintained what we might crudely term a cross-border-plus-human-capital test – reserving access to European jurisdiction for those passing both elements of the test – and thereby delimited access to European justice for many who enjoy the formal status of EU citizenship. However, in the past few years – 20 years after Maastricht – there has arguably been an important shift that has allowed post-national citizenship to come closer to citizenship as we know it at the national level. As a consequence of such anomalies, as ‘reverse discrimination’ – whereby nationals who have never exercized a right to move within the EU do not have recourse to European jurisdiction and therefore potentially have access to fewer rights than their co-nationals who have exercized such a right – the ECJ has in some cases allowed those who have not moved to another member state to also access its jurisdiction (for a comprehensive review of relevant case law, see Kochenov Reference Kochenov2011). Such moves are potentially significant for the lives of those with the formal status of EU citizenship, because they can be read as heralding a situation whereby ‘the scope of EU law has the potential to constrain the Member States’ ability to regulate virtually any issue independently’ (Kochenov Reference Kochenov2011, 86). Indeed, this direction of travel confirms the notion that ‘civis europaeus sum’…hangs over the Court as a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Kochenov Reference Kochenov2011, 92). Leading on from this and of more direct significance for the present argument, the development of a substantive or ‘real’ conception of post-national citizenship is permitting the Court to move away from its ‘strong bias towards market-based conceptual underpinnings, which [have] become logically inconsistent with the post-Maastricht situation’ (Kochenov Reference Kochenov2011, 72, see also Kostakopoulou Reference Kostakopoulou2005). In short, this is to argue that with the emergence of the legal category of post-national citizenship the economic constitution is increasingly challenged at European level by a far more political or legal constitution, which allows for universal individual recourse to a substantive supranational legal framework.

The potential emergence of a ‘real’ post-national citizenship is not to declare the victory of a legal cosmopolitics vis-à-vis a market cosmopolitics. In practice, we are witnessing in the EU territorial space jurisdictional co-operation and competition that involves, inter alia, member states, ECJ, and ECtHR (for a nuanced if perhaps over optimistic account, see Sabel and Gerstenberg Reference Sabel and Gerstenberg.2010) and these two cosmopolitical rationalities increasingly cut across these various jurisdictions – interacting within each of them – rather than mapping on to them. Thus, even if a full extension of EU citizenship and the emergence of a substantive federal situation were to occur, both cosmopolitical rationalities would be present, as they are within the contemporary (neo)-liberal nation-state. That said, the emergence of a substantive EU citizenship nevertheless serves to highlight that even in the context of the current crisis and the apparent reinforcement of economic constitution, there is an important contemporary story to be told about a social contractarian legal cosmopolitics in Europe.

More generally, the point is to highlight that in both the theory and practice of post-national government in/of Europe a legal rationality rooted in the imaginary of nation-state has not been entirely displaced by the liberal market rationality described in the foregoing section. Indeed, it has often operated as a critique of a market cosmopolitics via its invocation of the social, solidarist, democratic, inclusive, and redistributive aspects of the European welfare state, which the promotion of the market at European level is said to be undermining by stealth. Much normative scholarly work has thus sought to generalize and embed an immanent legal cosmopolitics; it has promoted a European social model, European citizenship, and a European (political) constitution. Such efforts are evident, for instance, in Habermas's aforementioned work on Europe [and the work of those inspired by him, such as the ARENA group (Eriksen Reference Eriksen2009)] and have found their way into the policy prescriptions of a range of actors at the EU level. These legal cosmopolitans do not explicitly promote a European federal state, but their prescriptions certainly render the EU as an entity that more closely resembles a nation-state. From this perspective, it is possible to understand how many on the left supported the monetary union that in the context of today's ‘crises’ has become the scourge of the left. It is possible in theory to extend this union beyond a delimited interest in market ‘credibility’ – and the current obsession with austerity in national fiscal policies – and open the way to a genuinely redistributive politics. In general, the EU might from such a perspective, represent a social model in more than rhetoric and even support the refiguring of neo-liberal globalization on a more social basis; a refiguring of the relationship between market and government (see, for instance, Jospin Reference Jospin2002).

Such a vision of Europe is, of course, itself subject to significant critique. A range of perspectives and institutional positions concerned with the EU's supposed democratic deficit would be concerned that this vision of Europe would require the imposition of a political constitutional settlement in the absence of widespread popular support for anything that resembles a federal Europe or European superstate (Grimm Reference Grimm2005). This might also go some way to explaining the aforementioned hesitant progress in ECJ case law in response to the emergence of ‘EU citizenship’ in the treaties. Such a critique speaks to widespread contemporary concerns about the legitimacy of the EU, often conceived as an entity without ‘demos’ (Weiler Reference Weiler1999) or an elite project. Indeed, aspirations to uniformity have in practice often led to resistance of the sort manifest in public opposition to, for example, Maastricht or the Constitutional/Lisbon treaty. Moreover, the notion of a substantive European constitution and associated identity or citizenship might lead to the replaying of the exclusionary tendencies of the nation-state as reflected in a range of critiques of Habermas's work on Europe (Parker Reference Parker2009). The invention of a European constitution – and citizenship – relies on a methodological nationalism that fails to respect an extant plurality in the contemporary EU (Beck and Grande Reference Beck and Grande.2007) and potentially reproduces the violence of exclusive nation-state, now as ‘fortress EU’.

In his Society Must Be Defended, Foucault offers, inter alia, a critique of a juridical political discourse that he associates with Hobbes. He offers a critique of the notion of social contract, which can be interpreted as an attempt to expunge extant difference via the claim that such a contract encapsulates a consent for Leviathan's rule (2003, 98). A similar critique can be levelled at Habermas's and similar attempts to foster a substantive European citizenship in post-national politics. Indeed, Habermas's thought – particularly his discourse ethic – relies on an ontology of consensus; the notion that consensus is inherent in language and reason giving can arrive at a genuine consensus. For Foucault, such an assertion expunges the political, the conflict and struggle that gives rise to any constitution. The effacement, a la Hobbes, of all identities of rebellion and opposition with a logic of consensus can paradoxically tend to the very totalization that the deployment of a Kantian legal cosmopolitics intends to target. Indeed, a legal cosmopolitics may seek to limit the possibility of a civil war, produce solidarism, an ethic of care and a sense of social security for an ‘us’ – the citizenry – but it must simultaneously secure this ‘us’ from a host of ‘others’ conceived as threat to the social body and the two moves may be mutually dependent.

Indeed, while the ‘patriotism’ that Habermas advocates in the European space is based on allegiance to a constitution and is rooted in ostensibly universal principles, Habermas (Reference Habermas2001a, 107) acknowledges that it relies on some notion of cultural closure, of defining a self and other, insiders and outsiders:

Habermas's strong belief in the juridical-philosophical form, in Kant and enlightenment (see, in particular, Habermas Reference Habermas1990 (1985)), is perhaps because it is considered that it is discourses of race and permanent war as inevitable drivers of history, which have legitimated a practical politics of will to power. This is a politics that is conceived as having had such devastating consequence in the modern history of his own country, Germany, in the case of Nazism, and, for him, threatens to (re)-emerge in the egoism of a contemporary ‘post-modern’ neo-liberalism. In targeting a prevalent neo-liberalism, Habermas essentially reproduces the universal nation-state at European level; a sovereign nation-state that, in its appropriation of a historico-political discourse, claims to cast war to its margins. As Valverde (Reference Valverde2008, 141) notes, ‘in so far as sovereignty cannot be dispensed with, even in social democratic and/or republican regimes, racism continues to be not only possible but even necessary’. To be clear, this is not to claim that Habermas advocates an exclusionary politics – he clearly promotes the opposite – but aspects of his modernist mode of thought and certain of his legal cosmopolitical stances on/for Europe might inadvertently reinvent certain exclusionary or assimilatory features of the nation-state, along with the solidarist features of the post-war European state that he is so keen to preserve. In short, to paraphrase Foucault, the society that he cherishes and wishes to re-make as European, must be defended.

The exclusionary possibility inherent in the promotion of a culturally strong citizenship was something of which a market cosmopolitics associated with an ordo-liberal post-war rationality was, of course, acutely aware. Indeed, to the extent that any realization of a Habermasian legal cosmopolitics avoids certain of the exclusionary effects of its proposal for citizenship or constitutional patriotism, it arguably relies upon the non-exclusionary – non-discriminatory – aspects of a market cosmopolitics as its condition of possibility. Thus, while in his work on Europe Habermas pitches a legal and market cosmopolitics in opposition, they can, as intimated above, at the same time be conceived as mutually dependent. The spatial realization of a Europe relied upon a market conception, which Habermas seeks to mitigate, but surely not replace. This ambivalence is something that his own work implicitly acknowledges. For instance, in the context of his analyses of the public sphere he discusses the way in which civil society was co-constituted with bourgeois (liberal) conceptions of freedom and government. He emphasizes the ethical possibilities of this sphere as a space for/of resistance; as Calhoun (Reference Calhoun1999, 7–8) says, summarizing his position: ‘[c]apitalist market economies formed the basis of civil society but it included a good deal more than that. It included institutions of sociability and discourse only loosely related to the economy’. In other words, a substantive identity, Habermas's ‘constitutional patriotism’, is immanent in this sphere.

Ambiguity and resistance: the politics of EU citizenship and its ‘others’

From a Foucauldian perspective we might be wary of the tendency of much scholarship and practice to reduce the citizen-subject or ‘subject of right’ to self-interested entrepreneur or ‘subject of interest’ and vice versa. The former tendency is apparent in a liberal government in/of Europe, which emphasizes the dangers of intervention in the activities of the market and develops a ‘social’ policy that privileges and promotes subjects as entrepreneurs of themselves. The latter tendency is apparent in the efforts of a legal rationality that re-invents Europe as exclusive nation-state and requires the formation of delimited and exclusionary cultural identities. From an ontologically reflexive perspective, these subjectivities are singularities, but singularities that, in practice, are intimately and ambiguously related in a contemporary cosmopolitics. As Foucault (Reference Foucault2008, 302–03) asserts, ‘the bond of economic interest occupies an ambiguous position in relation to these bonds of disinterested interests which take the form of local units and different levels…’. Economic or particular interests pit people and groups against each other in economic competition, which may make for social disharmony, but also bring people together in the market, which is a social sphere that is co-constitutive of ‘disinterested interest’ or civil society. Thus, entrepreneur and citizen are at once mutually reinforcing and mutually destructive; they exist in an inherently ambiguous relationship.

Such ambiguity is present within the law and practice – the politics – of EU citizenship. Notwithstanding the aforementioned increased relevance of EU citizenship for member state nationals who do not move across EU borders, a post-national citizenship status is still meaningful for most Europeans as a consequence of their movement to a member state other than their own; with the claiming of the right to many of the rights granted to citizens of that member state (Bellamy Reference Bellamy2008). This is perhaps why EU citizens regard movement as of central importance to the European project; according to a recent Eurobarometer survey, when asked ‘What does the EU mean?’, 42 per cent of respondents answered that the EU means primarily ‘freedom to travel, study and work anywhere in the EU’ (Eurobarometer 2009). The right to free movement for EU citizens is enshrined in article 45 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Directive 2004/38 on ‘the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States’.

Of particular import for present purposes is the fact that the 2004 directive makes clear that the right of movement and residence is conditional. It specifies the rather vague reasons of ‘public policy, public security or public health’ as valid grounds for expulsion of EU citizens from a particular member state (Article 27; EEC 2004). As the European Commission (2008, 8) notes in its report on the transposition of the directive, ‘Member States remain competent to define and modify the notions of public policy and public security’. Crudely, it seems that such conditions correspond to a large extent with traditional or archetypical conditions of citizenship within the nation-state; what we might term social contractarian conditions, which impose obligations upon individuals to respect the law if they wish to maintain the freedoms and entitlements associated with citizenship. Of course, expulsion is not a tool that is used contemporaneously within member states, but general restrictions on liberty – through, for instance, imprisonment – are deployed. Nevertheless, EU citizens are, from this perspective, conceived primarily as ‘subjects of right’ and the category of post-national citizenship corresponds with the legal cosmopolitics discussed above. However, the directive highlights a number of further conditions or obligations commensurate with the right to movement, which effectively distinguish a post-national citizenship from an archetypical conception of citizenship commonly associated with the nation-state and a social contractarian rationality. These conditions demonstrate that while citizens have replaced workers as the category able to move freely in the EU, settled residence in another member state remains subject to an economic conditionality; the assumption of an economic subjectivity. Indeed, in order to remain resident in another member state – and effectively maintain the rights of EU citizenship – an individual must fulfil one or more of the following conditions: (a) be a worker or self-employed person, (b) have sufficient resources not to become a burden on the social assistance system of the ‘host’ member state, (c) be enrolled in education, and (d) be a family member of an EU citizen satisfying one of the other conditions (see Article 7; EEC 2004). EU citizens can only claim the rights to citizenship in another member state if they are, in effect, first designated as Foucault's mobile ‘enterpreneurs of themselves’.

The ambiguity in the citizen–entrepreneur relationship is thus reflected in the law pertaining to EU citizenship. It is also reflected in the related practice of EU citizenship, as I wish to explore with reference to the difficulties encountered by the EU's Roma citizens – perhaps the EU's contemporary internal ‘other’ par excellence. The situation and treatment of Roma in Europe has been an important preoccupation of the EU since the enlargement process to eastern and central Europe began in the 1990s. Since the accession of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 the ‘Roma problem’ as it is frequently termed, has become an increasing concern in ‘old’ EU member states and was widely mediatized in 2010 when the French government deported large numbers of Roma (who originated mainly from these countries). In late summer of that year, the French authorities received widespread criticism from media, civil society, and publics throughout Europe for their targeting of Roma populations. Such targeting appeared to be in contravention of a transnational anti-discrimination legislation that, as noted in the foregoing, is central to the post-war constitution of a European cosmopolitics. Thus, the European Commission strongly criticized the French authorities. Commission Vice President and Justice and Fundamental Rights Commissioner Viviane Reding (Reference Reding2010) characterized the French action as ‘a disgrace’, stating that, ‘I personally have been appalled by a situation which gave the impression that people are being removed from a Member State of the European Union just because they belong to a certain ethnic minority. This is a situation I had thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War’.

Such outspoken criticism seemed to be justified. An internal French administrative circular issued in August 2010 called for a ‘systematic dismantling of illegal camps, prioritising those of the Roma’. Following the leak of these circulars and the Commission reaction to them, on 22 September the French government notified the Commission that it had ‘corrected’ this circular, by effectively removing references to ‘Roma’; in other words, removing discriminatory language. On 30 September, the Commission nevertheless launched infringement proceedings, which focused, in particular, on the fact that France had not fully transposed into its national legislation aspects of the 2004 directive. It should be noted that France is not alone in this respect. Both the Commission and European Parliament have, in recent years, been critical of the manner in which these conditions have been deployed in national contexts, arguing that the directive has in many cases not been fully or correctly transposed (European Commission 2008, 2010c; Carrera and Faure Atger Reference Carrera and Faure Atger.2009). They have expressed particular concerns regarding the failure to develop in national law the legal safeguards (specified in the directive) pertaining to these conditions, which would delimit the potential for administrative authorities to enact restrictions on the general right to free movement of citizens. It was the failure to respect such safeguards in the context of deporting Roma populations – in particular, an apparent failure to treat cases on an individual basis – that led to the proceedings against France. When the French authorities agreed to ensure the correct transposition of this directive, the debacle drew to a close and it seemed that the EU's cosmopolitical rationality had triumphed, effectively quashing the violent excesses of a residual European nationalism in accord with its raison d’être as peace project.

However, of particular interest for current purposes is the fact that as late as August 2010 the French government had explicitly justified its actions with reference to the very directive (2004/38) that subsequently formed the basis of the Commission's infringement proceedings (Auffrey Reference Auffrey2010). While there was no explicit or publicized targeting of Roma as a group – no explicit ethnic discrimination – prior to summer 2010, the particular means deployed had led a number of French associations to suggest that it was indeed just such populations that the French authorities had in their sights (Cette-France-lá 2010). The point is that French policy has generally – and mostly successfully – been able to give the appearance of operating within the contestable boundaries of a cosmopolitan EU law (and, indeed, its own laws on discrimination), while deploying various of its conditions to in effect target the majority of the foreign Roma population in France for deportation. It has done this firstly by taking advantage of an anomaly in EU law that permits discrimination on the basis of nationality: namely, the transitional arrangements applicable to mobile Romanian and Bulgarian EU citizens (many of whom are Roma). Such measures allowed administrative actors to effectively block access to the French labour market for such citizens and pushed them into activities that are considered ‘delinquent’ by society and, in many cases, law. Thereafter, both the public order and economic conditionality in directive 2004/38 have been deployed in order to facilitate expulsions.

Discrimination on national grounds via transitional arrangements and their variable deployment by member states vis-à-vis recently ‘new’ member states has certainly been significant in the practical ‘proliferation of various statuses of European citizenship’ (Carrera and Faure Atger Reference Carrera and Faure Atger.2009, 21), but such a proliferation is not dependent upon discrimination on this basis. Indeed, harassment by local authorities and exclusion from labour markets and/or formal residence registration – the gates through which many social and political rights are practically accessed in most member states – has been a common experience for many migrant EU Roma even in those member states where such transitional arrangements have not been in operation (EU Fundamental Rights Agency 2009). And while a European cosmopolitics has in general certainly done much to raise awareness of and tackle the problems encountered by the Roma, it cannot be placed unambiguously in ethical opposition to the local denial of rights to Roma rooted in widespread public prejudice. The important conditions that a post-national government places on the claiming of citizenship rights can be deployed (regardless of transitory arrangements) to ensure that the experience of citizenship of those moving within the EU space is extremely variable. For instance, in France, the new law on immigration, passed since the events of summer 2010 (and in part designed to transpose directive 2004/38), includes a provision that opens the possibility to expel foreigners, including EU citizens, regarded as a ‘threat to public order’, in accord with the aforementioned conditionality in the directive. However, in an ominous indication that this provision was formulated with the socially excluded Roma specifically in mind, such a threat is defined to include ‘aggressive begging’ and ‘the illegal occupation of public or private land’ (Human Rights Watch 2011; Lemonde.fr 2011). Although it has been claimed that the new law is not in conformity with EU law, it represents an attempt to draw on such law, essentially connecting conditions of socio-economic poverty and public order in a manner that facilitates exclusion and deportation of EU citizens. The point, in short, is that a post-national citizenship or cosmopolitics more generally ought not be regarded as an ethical panacea. As discussed in the first and second sections, both a market and legal cosmopolitics can be deployed to exclusionary effect: they designate ideal subjects and their ‘others’. In the practical politics of EU citizenship and movement, we see how these exclusive practices can be used in combination to exclude Europe's most vulnerable.

It is, rather, in the ambiguity inherent in the relationship between a market and legal cosmopolitics that we might locate something ethically valuable in a European cosmopolitics, or any cosmopolitics. In highlighting the ambiguity within a European cosmopolitics, ‘the normal’ itself is rendered always-already ‘extra-ordinary’, insecure or uncertain and this opens a space for resistance. It is possible, in particular, to highlight an ambiguity at the heart of a cosmopolitical desire to at once promote citizens as settled national citizens and mobile entrepreneurs. With reference to the case under consideration, this might require the Roma and those advocating with them to variously associate with a market or legal cosmopolitics and accounts of post-national citizenship commensurate with both. Thus, the Roma might appeal to a ‘social Europe’ discourse that emphasizes the tensions in the relationship between market and welfare state. In France, a number of Roma representatives and human rights groups have in fact pursued this line of resistance, criticizing the French government's long-standing discrimination against the Roma, which, they say, is rooted in ‘a presumption of guilt based on poverty’ (Cette-France-lá 2010). Moreover, at European level, both the EU and Council of Europe have repeatedly highlighted the issue of social exclusion of Roma (for instance, Council of Europe 2010; European Commission 2010a). In so doing the market cosmopolitical rationality at play in many deportation decisions is confronted by a legal cosmopolitics that seeks to expose EU citizenship as an austere ‘market citizenship’; a citizenship that is unworthy of the name (Downes Reference Downes2005). From this perspective, resistance might pose such questions as: why is it that the Roma are not afforded the social and economic rights – the right to housing, education, health and welfare – of most EU and national citizens? Why are they denied those rights that would, in short, prevent their designation as delinquent occupiers of land and beggars? Where, in practice, is the solidarity and economic equality valued by a legal cosmopolitics; by a ‘European social model’? The Roma might at once find useful recourse to various other European institutions in seeking to oppose all forms of discrimination that are not based on economic reasoning (see, for instance, European Commission 2010a). Various actors in these organizations may be predisposed to oppose not only explicit discrimination on the basis of ethnicity (witnessed in summer 2010), but also the use of transitional measures, which effectively render permissible the discrimination of EU citizens on the basis of nationality. Many NGOs in France and elsewhere have highlighted the absurdity of EU-sanctioned transitional measures, which amount to EU-sanctioned discrimination of EU citizens on the basis of nationality (Haute autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité 2009). They ask: why is it that Roma are denied access to labour markets on an equal basis, even in those areas where the French state has identified labour shortages? More generally, why, when it suits local and national governments, do they fail to recognize and value the Roma's mobility as entrepreneurial, whereas the mobility of the wealthy is so often celebrated and promoted? Where, in short, is the much-vaunted equality of opportunity among EU citizens in practice?

Such recognition of the possibilities and realities of resistance within a European cosmopolitics should certainly not be read as complacency with regard to the precarious situation in which the Roma find themselves within France or contemporary Europe in general. Indeed, as argued herein a multi-level liberal government constantly attempts in both theory and practice to articulate its coherent ideal subjects at the expense of various ‘others’. In that sense it is consistent with a European modernity that has repeatedly excluded – and at particularly dark moments even exterminated – its internal ‘others’, including its long-suffering Roma populations (Bancroft Reference Bancroft2005). Habermas himself promotes a Europe where ‘a reciprocal acknowledgement of the Other in her otherness’ is possible (Habermas and Derrida Reference Habermas and Derrida.2003). I would argue that the case of the Roma suggests that we might need to go further and seek to render the very categories self and other constantly doubtful and precarious. This is to concur with Kristeva (Reference Kristeva1993, 51), ‘that, in the long run, only a thorough investigation of our remarkable relationship with both the other and strangeness within ourselves can lead people to give up hunting for the scapegoat outside their group’. To recognize an ambiguity at the heart of a liberal cosmopolitics is to recognize an ambiguity at the heart of the ideal liberal European ‘self’ against which any delinquent ‘other’ is produced. A recognition of the uncertainty of a European or liberal identity opens an important margin for manoeuvre within the imperatives of liberal government: an opportunity for resistance, dissent, and the possibility of being legitimately otherwise (Prozorov Reference Prozorov2007, 33). Ambiguity might be that which provides the motor for Foucault's ‘undefined work of freedom’.

Towards an ambiguous cosmopolitics

Foucault and certain secondary literatures deploying his concept of ‘governmentality’ have been critiqued for suggesting that a governmental rationality is that which essentially constitutes freedom as an idea and practice in liberal society. There is some truth in the charge. Such scholarship is certainly interested in understanding the manner in which the concept of freedom is deployed as a tool of government and given substantive content. In the analysis offered in this paper, freedom has thus been given content via both the constitution of an unencumbered utility maximizing ‘subject of interest’ – herein, an entrepreneur – and also of an autonomous reasoning ‘subject of right’ – herein a citizen. Freedom is, from this perspective, always governed. Thus, a ‘legal’ or ‘market’ cosmopolitics is, as noted throughout, associated with a particular vision of freedom; a particular, delimited ethic, ontology, or identity. Freedom, from this perspective, is no longer worthy of the name.

Habermas, among others, has identified a ‘performative contradiction’ at the heart of such thinking. He argues that in identifying the constituted nature of freedom, we are given no explicit indication from such scholarship of how we might adjudicate between different rationalities. Fraser (Reference Fraser1994, 12) characterizes such critique in a similarly dismissive vein, noting that, ‘it offers no solutions of its own, but only an extremely keen nose for sniffing out hypocrisy, cant and self-deception’. Such scholarship is interpreted, then, as making the claim that it is not possible to think outside of a particular social structure or discourse and therefore, it is not possible to know how or why to challenge such a structure. Habermas is concerned that this very idea lends itself to a political complacency and, therefore, potentially blunts any efforts to challenge the status quo. In short, he is concerned that the conceptualization of freedom as a historically contingent construction of a particular social order, potentially nullifies any motive for action, any pursuit of freedom as change; indeed, it begs the question, ‘why fight at all?’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1990 (1985), 283).

Fraser's words, it might be thought, are a particularly apt summary of this paper's central offering: it identifies contradictions and paradoxes, but offers no ‘solutions’. That said, the decision to avoid ‘solutions’ or prescriptions is a conscious one, based on the view that any supposed ethical shortcomings in European cosmopolitics are not due to a paucity of proposed ‘solutions’ in/for Europe. As Caputo has said: ‘the very business of coming up with normative ideas of what the individual should be, and of developing administrative practices and professional competences to see to it that such individuals are in fact produced, is precisely the problem, not [pace Fraser] the solution’ (cited in Prozorov Reference Prozorov2007, 43). As discussed, there are a plethora of cosmopolitical proposals professing to have the solution for Europe. Faith in a Kantian modernism prompts a form of critique that seeks to replace one ontology with another; one ideal subjectivity with another. This was, of course, decidedly not the form of critique pursued by Foucault (Reference Foucault1984, 45–6). As he said,

This paper has conducted critique in this vein. It has offered an investigation of market and legal cosmopolitical forms of criticism in Europe that are, ‘practiced in the pursuit of formal structures with universal value’. It has identified their ideal subjects – entrepreneurs and citizens – and the ambiguous relationship between them. With reference to the politics of citizenship as it pertains to Europe's Roma, it has shown that this ambiguity offers a space for ongoing resistance; ‘the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, or do or think’.

In contrast, many scholars and practitioners of cosmopolitics, including Habermas, remain wed to discovering and/or asserting the modernist ‘what we are’. For instance, pro-Europeans have repeatedly asserted the importance of establishing a meaningful European identity upon which the European project might be further developed (Elbe Reference Elbe2001, 263–7). Jacques Delors has, for instance, called for greater ‘meaning’ and ‘spiritual strength’ in and for Europe; Romano Prodi has called for the development of a ‘common European soul’; and Vaclev Havel has called upon Europe to find its ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ (cited in Guisan-Dickinson Reference Guisan-Dickinson2003). But the very desire for a truth or some meaning – and an associated pessimism associated with any perceived lack of such meaning – might itself be subjected to genealogical reflection. Indeed, Elbe, drawing on Nietzsche, has undertaken just such a reflection, highlighting the contingent Platonic and Christian roots of this European desire for meaning. Turning such reasoning on its head, ‘[i]t is… precisely by recognising the questionable status of Europe's Christian-Platonic heritage itself that Nietzsche could insist that the pursuit of critical distance from this heritage constitutes a sign of strengthened spiritual vitality’ (Elbe Reference Elbe2001, 275).

It is such vitality that Nietzsche associated with the virtue of what he called ‘good Europeans’ and it is a ‘spiritual vitality’ of this sort that this paper has sought to both draw upon – via the thought of Foucault – and promote and embody, via its critical exploration of a European cosmopolitics. It has sought, in accordance with Foucault's injunction (Reference Foucault1984, 45–6), to ‘transform critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’. More specifically, it finds its ethical motivation in a recognition that particular individuals and identities are excluded (and suffer) in the face of any government of ethics, including various (ostensibly ‘ethical’) cosmopolitical forms of government. Thus, I have been primarily interested in elucidating the potentially dangerous or violent pathologies that an ontological truth or certainty can precipitate.

An ambiguous cosmopolitics is rooted in a conception of freedom – what might be termed a ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ freedom – as the ‘potential for being otherwise’ (Prozorov Reference Prozorov2007). Freedom is not, then, a stable goal to be reached (say in human rights doctrine or in the expansion of citizenship), or truth to be discovered. As Foucault says, ‘[l]iberty is a practice. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to serve it. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are capable of being turned around’. And later: ‘“liberty” is what must be exercised. The guarantee of freedom is freedom’ (cited in Gordon Reference Gordon1991, 47). Elsewhere, he has described such a freedom as an ‘art of not being governed quite so much’ (cited in Prozorov Reference Prozorov2007, 33). Such a conception of freedom is, then, associated with the possibility of ongoing change and resistance: ‘[o]ur real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature’ (Rajchman Reference Rajchman1985, 123).

I do not consider this approach to be unambiguously opposed to a cosmopolitical mode of thought. Even as he rejects the ‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’, Foucault himself recognises that such thought has, since Kant, contained an important critical edge (Reference Foucault1984, 42). Indeed, the conception of freedom as the ‘potential for being otherwise’, shares a ‘thin’ cosmopolitan ontology to the extent that plurality or difference is promoted, not as a dogmatic end in itself, but as a means or instance of resistance. The cosmopolitan recognition of a potential for difference can be interpreted as establishing the necessity of resistance to prevailing discursive frames and the potential emergence of alternative frames. This is a resistance to which the paper has sought to remain sensitive throughout; a resistance that suggests the existence of an ‘austere ontology’. As Prozorov (Reference Prozorov2007, 34) says, this is an ontology that identifies ‘a capacity to act, be acted upon and resist force’. Its austerity lies in the fact that it does not require – indeed, positively avoids – the description (or performative production of) a substantive subjectivity. This, then, is a purposefully uncertain ontology, which does not know whether this ‘capacity’ will lead to action or, indeed, of what any potential action might consist. It is an ontology that identifies an essential vitality; this is, in accordance with the above reference to Nietzsche's ‘good Europeans’, a vitality associated with an absence of substantive meaning or certainty. It is to the extent that a cosmopolitical Europe can be identified as a space of potential dissent or an (ontologically) plural arena, that the paper would cohere with the notion that it can be understood as a ‘normative power’ (Manners Reference Manners2008), albeit one that is constantly under threat from a persistent will to knowledge, identity, or certitude (Turner Reference Turner2004). The European project was founded on an ambiguous or uncertain mix of cosmopolitan rationalities – a mix of solidarity and self-interest – and this inherent ambiguity may be what constituted its ethical value. Indeed, I would argue that it is the very contrary of an acceptance of this ambiguity – a yearning for meaning and an associated security in one's own identity – that constitutes Europe's greatest contemporary danger.

This is not to deny the ethically positive impact that both a market and legal cosmopolitics – and the associated promotion of entrepreneur and citizen – has had in Europe, as highlighted in the first sections of the article. Nor is it to understate the importance of tactically and contingently adopting positions commensurate with these rationalities in the confrontation with the totalizing tendency of the other (or in the confrontation with dangerous parochialisms, such as a resurgent ethnic nationalism) as implied in the discussion of the politics of post-national citizenship. In the context of what might be described as the ongoing ordo- or neo-liberal enactment of a politics of austerity in Europe in the early 2010s – and the associated ongoing promotion of individuals as austere entrepreneurs of themselves – I would concur wholly with Habermas's repeated calls for much greater post-national solidarity and associated citizenship (Reference Habermas2011b, Reference Habermas2011a). However, in focusing on the longue durée, the paper has been sensitive to the violent universalism inherent in the performative enactment of any ‘cosmo’-politics; the enactment of any particular identity. Indeed, the vitality inherent in an ambiguous cosmopolitics is based upon a happy reconciliation with the irreconcilability of one's own identity, which is constitutive of an empathy for difference and a resistance to totalizing identities. Such an ethic is perhaps best pursued via an aesthetic or poetic engagement, which draws attention to the gap between the represented and any particular representation (Bleiker Reference Bleiker2001). The paper has proffered what Butler (Reference Butler2005, 41) calls ‘an ethics based on our shared, invariable and partial blindness about ourselves’. This is to concur with Gordon (Reference Gordon1986, 85) who notes that, ‘…in order for [Foucault's] question of “what are we” actually to be a question at all, it may be vital to retain a margin of uncertainty or under-determination regarding the ethical status of anthropological categories, or whatever terms occupy their place: a possibility of knowing that we do not know what we are’.