The Rise of Euroskepticism by Martin-Estudillo Luis;

Author:Martin-Estudillo, Luis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2018-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

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On the Move in a Static Europe

Confining Europe

In recent years, the ways that Europeans think about themselves in relation to the space they inhabit and the history they come from have changed partly as a consequence of a number of unprecedented political and technological developments. The turn of the century brought revolutions in transportation and communications exemplified by high-speed rail networks, low-cost air travel, and the Internet. Along with the vast experiment in international relations currently known as the European Union—with its apparent dissolution of long-established political divisions—those new realities created the conditions for not only an extraordinary fluidity of movement but also the conflicts that stem from the resulting interactions. Mobility is a broad concept that comprises phenomena as diverse as capital flow, tourism, business travel, and migration. While the unrestricted movement of goods and services is considered one of the basic principles of the European Single Market and is rarely the subject of dispute, the flow of people within and into the Union raises a number of issues, some of them closely related to the evolving notions of Europeanness and European identity. These matters have become the source of conflicts and debates whose participants come in all guises and hold equally diverse views.

Mobility has been regarded as a fundamental factor for considerations of Europeanness at least since Immanuel Kant linked the development of European cosmopolitanism to the wanderlust of his idealized inhabitant of the continent. Nowadays, fluidity is the leading metaphor for the Europeanization process and the search for a pancontinental, cosmopolitan sense of identity for observers such as Vittoria Borsò, Jacques Derrida, Ulrich Beck, and Edgar Grande. Others, such as Claudio Guillén, reject the call for a common identity, nonetheless underscoring the importance of movement and fluidity for grasping Europe’s complexity, which Guillén finds to be “movediza” [movable, shifting] and “de perfil nunca fijo” [with contours that are never stationary] (“Europa” 377). Similarly, Denis Guénoun conceives of Europe fundamentally “as a passage” (4). Rosi Braidotti pushes the links between location, mobility, and identity even further with her notion of a “nomadic” identity, which would imply a European subject “in transit within different identity-formations, but sufficiently anchored to a historical position to accept responsibility for it” (75). In this sense, Braidotti’s approach prefigures “the end of pure and steady identities, or in other words, creolization and hybridization producing a multicultural minoritarian Europe, within which ‘new’ Europeans can take their place alongside others” (79). Braidotti’s is a bold alternative to the notion of static, essentialist “Fortress Europe,” whose proponents call—in more or less explicit terms—for the preservation of an exclusionary set of values that they relate to a restrictive understanding of heritage as the basis for a common Europeanness. These tenets, posited with some nuances by thinkers such as Giovanni Sartori and Samuel Huntington, and more crudely presented in recent times by politicians such as Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, and Umberto Bossi, are often used as rhetorical ammunition in conflicts regarding migration and the continent’s increasing diversity. They

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