This article explores the meaning and relevance of the ‘Idea of Europe’ in the context of a multicultural and multi-ethnic continent that increasingly draws on the presence and practices of people from non-European backgrounds. The Idea of Europe, even in its contemporary use, remains an ideal based on a Christian-Enlightenment-Romantic heritage, mobilized by supporters of European integration as the bridge between diverse European national cultures. In a Europe of extraordinary cultural interchange and immigration from all corners of the world, the (...) classical Idea of Europe is strikingly exclusionary and backward looking – a poor motif for the future. The article tries to develop an alternative Idea of Europe, one based on a particular politics of the public domain and a particular ethos of belonging in Europe seen as a migrant space, rather than one based on the enduring cultural values of a body of people called Europeans. It outlines a commons, protected by appropriate EU-level rights, that can both support and bind cultural pluralism and difference, and it proposes democratic vitalism as Europe’s core political project, an idea of becoming European, read as the process of never-settled cultural invention resulting from the vibrant clashes of an equal and empowered multiple public. No myth of origin, no myth of destination, only the commitment to a plural demos. (shrink)

In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity, Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominent in social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis of Bauman's work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining to the nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary construction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the idea of the boundary are significant in Bauman's critique of (...) modernity's search for a meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates how this ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of modernity. Bauman's contention is that modernity's search for a meta-order leads to the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is the presence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order. Different images of the stranger in Bauman's work are identified and the ways in which Bauman's conception of freedom and `community' is intrinsically linked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated. (shrink)

To Bauman the incongruities of life are best reflected in an analytical effort that moves between perspectives without forcing them into a synthesis. He seems to arrogate the right to inconsistency when operating from points of view. This violates a curious requirement of scholarly discourse: an author is free to select his conceptual framework and method — but once they are selected, he must stick to them. This practically inviolable rule of consistency might come (as Bauman himself suggests) from the (...) juridical pretensions sociology had from its birth. Consistency gives an aura to academicians who feel called to legislate, judge and legitimize. To Bauman, however, truth in judgement, reality in empirical studies and responsibility in practical affairs are approached by a constant movement between incongruous points of view. These ambitions make heavy demands on the composition of his writing. In many stretches of linear argument, imagery is interjected, showing lateral connections and complications — conversely, in many pieces of interpretation causal explanations intrude. A discourse with all these boundary violations is rather suspect in modern eyes. When Bauman contaminates the purity of analytical lines with terminology from other branches, he is demonstrating in a stylistic way that our reality is multitudinous — be it premodern enchantment, ambivalence in modernity or liberated postmodern polyvalence. (shrink)

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural and reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel’s suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion and the attribution of strangeness. After showing that ‘the stranger’ must be rethought in a cultural-sociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a ‘discourse’ that structures Western projections of strangeness, I explore its relation to colonialism, racial and class domination, and national conflict in modern Western history. This approach suggests an alternative, not (...) only to Simmel but to Merton’s and Coser’s earlier structural-functional reconceptualization of stranger theory. (shrink)

According to ‘global institutionalism,’ individuals who do not share a state have duties of justice to one another, and this is explained, in part, by the institutional connections that obtain between them. In this chapter, I defend this view against two challenges. First, I consider challenges raised by ‘non-institutionalists,’ who deny that facts about global institutional interaction bear on the nature of duties of justice that arise between particular individuals. Second, I address challenges posed by ‘domestic institutionalists,’ who accept the (...) claim that facts about institutional interaction bear upon the scope of justice but deny that the right sort of interaction necessary to ground duties of justice is found in the global domain. (shrink)