Abstract

CASTALDO, Katia. The European Union, Between the Global Market and State Crisis. Frónesis [online]. 2009, vol.16, n.2, pp.291-318. ISSN 1315-6268.

Europe, which has always thought along global lines, has constantly sought to understand itself in world history and the history of the world in relation to it, today ought to make irony its category. The new Europe, given that its being is a power that dominates from a center, ought to know how to construct itself as a viewpoint about the world, not forgetting and starting from its own political-institutional heritage. If Europe would do this, she could not talk about herself without starting from the experience of her greatest invention: the Nation-State, the “greatest artifice capable of universality”. Facing what has most frequently been called a crisis of the State, Europe ought, then, to propose itself -in continuity with its history, which has been, from its origins, marked by multiplicity in unity- as the ‘place’ where the unity of a political-institutional ultra-state space happens through the re-composition of metaphysics and politics to a new level of unity that has had its origins in the state form.

Keywords : Europe; sovereignty; globalization; statehood; identity.