Von Westfalen nach Kosmopolis? Die Problematik kultureller Identität in der europäischen Politik

In recent debates, the problems of furthering the political integration of Europe have often been associated with the weak cultural foundations available for constructing a European "state". At least, this is an important starting point of "Westphalian" approaches to European integration, which contend that cultural heterogeneity inhibits the formation and articulation of a common political will among Europeans. "Cosmopolitan democrats", on the other hand, welcome the EU as a unique chance for constituting political community which is truly "civic". The paper will follow a different line of argumentation and argue that the regulation of cultural pluralism at the European level is characterized by the general contradictions underlying the EU's institutional development: The principle of inter-governmentalism stresses the role of nation-states and tends to reaffirm the weight of the corresponding national cultures. At the same time, however, European transnationalism offers possibilities for articulating cultural identities below and beyond the nation-state, contributing to some extent to the "denationalization" of political cultures. This is illustrated by examples taken from the area of European language policy. The last section of the paper deals with the potentials of subsidiarity for inducing "reflexive identity management".[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]