We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship

by Étienne Balibar, James Swenson (Translator)

étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe? , he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship.


Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Étienne Balibar is emeritus professor of philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is also professor of modern European philosophy at Kingston University, London, and professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia, 2015).

Reviews

[A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some essays are thought provoking, others are a bit to general. Balibar's problematization of the border, formulated in the 90's, remains important for us to understand the so-called rise of the far-right and the authoritarian border policies of the European Union.

[Daniel Hammer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book entirely for his chapter "Europe after communism." The book was published in 2004 and I had hoped for a relatively recent reflection on changing European ideological currents since 1989. Instead, it turns out this chapter was a lecture he gave in 1991, when almost no time had passed in order to develop some critical distance.
Other than that disappointment, Balibar offers a few interesting points on citizenship and universality in Europe. He is under-specific on many points, however, and much of what excited me about this book were his descriptions of things other scholars are doing with ideas of citizenship and nation, rather than his own.