(Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies)

The financial collapse of 2008, and its consequences of recession in the Eurozone and beyond, has exacerbated tensions at the heart of the postwar European project. The politics of austerity has provoked populist and far-right political responses, scapegoating migrants and minorities and increasingly calling the project of integration into question. In this essay I focus on responses by social theorists to the emerging crisis. In particular, I address the contrast between their reaffirmation of ‘European’ cosmopolitanism and their associated criticisms of multiculturalism, which, instead, is posed as a threat. In this way, while they challenge those who wish the dissolution of the European project, they do so at the expense of those seen to be internal ‘others’, whose scapegoating is one aspect of the populist threat to that integration. It is their failure to address the colonial histories of Europe, I argue, that enables them to dismiss so easily its postcolonial and multicultural present. As such, they reproduce features of the populist political debates they otherwise seek to criticize and transcend. A properly cosmopolitan Europe, I suggest, would be one which understood that its historical constitution in colonialism cannot be rendered to the past by denial of that past.

In a recent discussion of European cosmopolitanism, Jürgen Habermas stated ‘the universalist project of the political Enlightenment in no way contradicts the particularist sensibilities of multiculturalism, provided that the latter is understood in the correct way’ (2009, 68). Of course, the proviso is precisely what is at issue: who defines what is the correct way? And, if its correctness is challenged, are those who do so placed in contradiction to the universalism of a European Enlightenment? These questions have become particularly acute in the context of a renewed atavism in Europe.

The fiscal crisis, and the related continent-wide politics of austerity, has provided perhaps the greatest threat to the stability and continuance of the postwar European project since its inception as the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. One aspect of this, the decline of the welfare or social settlement across Europe, has been explicitly discussed in the context of the perceived rise of multiculturalism, which is seen to undermine civic solidarity. This view is promoted by political elites who otherwise show very little commitment to the plight of the poor, wedded, as they are, to neoliberal agendas explicitly promoting economic liberalism in preference to the reduction of social and economic inequalities. Such a view is also promoted, at least implicitly, by Europe's most prominent public intellectuals. Habermas's association of multiculturalism with what he calls ‘postcolonial immigrant societies’ (2009, 65), for example, demonstrates a parochial understanding that limits the ‘postcolonial’ to those ‘others’ who migrate to Europe, and renders invisible the long-standing histories that connect those migrants with Europe. In this way, the issues that reference to the ‘postcolonial’ signifies are seen as beginning with immigration and carried by the non-European ‘other’. These multicultural others are not seen as constitutive of Europe's own self-understanding – or as legitimate beneficiaries of the postwar social settlement – emerging from its history of colonialism; a history that is carried by individual nation-states and, as Hansen and Jonsson (2014a, 2014b) have argued, by the common European project itself.

The failure to address their own colonial history is part of the explanation for why Europe and European politicians and intellectuals are seemingly unable to address their postcolonial present, or even recognize it as something other than an external intrusion disrupting an otherwise ordered European polity. The first section of this essay addresses the normative response to the fiscal and political crises as presented by public intellectuals supportive of the European project, in particular Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck. It addresses their reaffirmation of a cosmopolitan commitment to Europe and their attempts to rethink an elite project of integration under neoliberal conditions. It also addresses their critique of the turn to Eurosceptic nationalism and their understanding of European integration as having been the successful overcoming of past divisions, but now facing new ones. These new divisions are associated with the rise of multiculturalism and, in their view, the threat posed by the latter must be tackled if Europe is to make good on its earlier commitments to social and economic justice. In the final section of the essay, I take issue with the parochial historiography that underpins their accounts, namely that the multicultural diversity of populations within European states is a recent phenomenon and is unconnected to Europe's own history. In conclusion, I argue that insofar as the cosmopolitan project of Europe does not come to terms with its colonial past and postcolonial present, it establishes a form of neocolonial cosmopolitanism that legitimizes neocolonial policies both within and outside Europe...

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