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European political, social, and cultural life. By providing what Mannheim calls ‘fundamental integrative attitudes and formative principles,’ the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School pushed individuals to interpret the events of the interwar years and the Second World War as a historical rupture. 49 Using the theoretical tools provided by Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, subsequent generations were more likely to see the events of the early twentieth century as a ‘Benjaminian moment’ of rupture. The resources of collective remembrance Although none of
The book addresses the concept of sovereignty as a sociological topic. It examines sovereignty as a fundamental and contested concept at the heart of European politics and constitutionalism since early modern times. The history of the concept of sovereignty is a tale of absolute power, and over the years it has referred to God, the king, the people, the nation and the state. It has constantly been at the centre of controversy, revolution and war. Just as central here, in its various versions it has served as a response to incessant paradoxes of power. With an emphasis on the sociology of Max Weber and Niklas Luhmann, The sociology of sovereignty addresses intellectual understandings of the concept since Jean Bodin, and it examines dilemmas of sovereignty in the wake of state expansion, human rights and federalism. A presumption of the book is that, on the one hand, popular sovereignty in European states exists independently of political, military and federalist manoeuvres. On the other hand, it is argued that the concept performs as a semantic formula to handle unavoidable paradoxes of democracy and power. The book marks a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on constitutional democracy and its problems.
itself to non-Europeans.’ More specifically, they pointed out that the ‘bellicose past [that] entangled all European nations in bloody conflicts’ had led the continent to integrate based on a number of differences from other parts of the world – even from other parts of the developed west, such as the United States. These characteristics include the secular nature of European politics, the continental faith in government, a preference for the welfare state, a suspicion of under-supervised markets, an aversion to the use of force, and a desire for multilateral diplomacy
features listed in his definition of sovereignty that can hardly be satisfactorily fulfilled, such as a demos with a European public sphere, and genuinely European political parties (rather than aggregates of the national). For these historical (political, legal, cultural, economic) reasons, constituent power manifests itself only at state level. Bellamy's republican intergovernmentalism ends with a supranational political structure of federal, double delegation: citizens delegate their sovereignty to their representatives, who delegate power to supranational entities
greater European political control over international market forces are already visible in the emergence of two differing models of globalisation in the post-Cold War world. The first, American path is driven by bilateral agreements, limited planning, and the idea that the power of multinational corporations and other economic interests should predominate ‘without organizing or even supervising, markets.’ 32 This approach builds on the United States’ hegemonic position in global politics to support its vision of globalisation based on market liberalisation. In
European integration in the first two chapters of Part I showed how the leaders of Europe built on the cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources of collective memory to create a European political community over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. In the previous chapter I then traced how the project has started to sputter with the passing of the generations that had experienced the rupture of 1945 first-hand. Since the turn of the millennium these new leaders have found it difficult to resolve the interlocking economic and political
earlier. Mudde has made clear in his subsequent prolific work that his focus has been the classification of the rising, predominantly European, political parties and ‘party families’ broadly identified as populist. Such taxonomies were certainly another of Sartori's interests. 7 Indeed, empirical ‘party-centrism’ is a core feature of the hegemonic political science literature on populism. Mudde's earliest work addressed ‘extreme right’ parties and he subsequently sought to distinguish his position
picture, which when read alongside Foucault’s thought on the matter proves to be a highly productive way of describing the origins and characteristics of modern Statehood. For now, it suffices to note that these two analogies exist and have generally informed attempts to understand or define the State through to the present day, and that indeed the “political imagination” of modern Statehood is itself constituted by the tension between them. About this, Oakeshott is very firm: “my contention is that the modern European political consciousness is a polarised
European political life. The next three sections recount the origins and early history of the ECSC in order to demonstrate the role the constructive resources of the past played in helping Monnet, Schuman, and Adenauer to imagine, stick with, and argue for a supranational European community. The failed rupture of the Great War In the previous chapter I argued that while the First World War was a calamity that shook European society, it was not a rupture that destroyed the existing narrative threads of the past. Instead of enabling a rethinking of the continent
.socialeurope.eu/migration-and-forgetting-in-central-europe (accessed 20 December 2018); S. Benhabib , ‘ The Return of Fascism ,’ The New Republic (29 September 2017 ). 7 Z. Bauman and C. Bordoni , State of Crisis ( Cambridge : Polity , 2014 ), 7 ; R. J. Holton , ‘ The Idea of Crisis in Modern Society ,’ The British Journal of Sociology , 38 : 4 ( 1987 ), 504 ; S. N. Kalyvas , ‘ The Intellectual Impact of the Euro Crisis ,’ European Politics and Society Newsletter , Summer ( 2012 ), 11 . 8 P. J. Verovšek , ‘ Critical Theory as Medicine? On the Diagnosis and Treatment of Social Pathology