Stop Calling the EU Cosmopolitan

Despite the EU’s trials and tribulations, the triumphant narrative that the EU is a cosmopolitan regime en herbe has been strangely resilient. This narrative rests on three purported parallels between the EU and Kant’s scheme of cosmopolitan right. First, the EU’s extensive rules on free movement and non-discrimination are said to mitigate the salience of bounded communities (Hoogenboom 2015). Second, the EU is treated as validating Kant’s prediction that commercial interdependence will generate a supranational rule of law to constrain state sovereignty (Ward 1993, Petersmann 2002). Finally, constitutional democratic standards that EU member states are expected to uphold recalls Kant’s emphasis on a pacific federation of republican states (Habermas 2008, Beetham 1998). Leaving aside the obvious snag that its scope is explicitly regional and not universal, this paper exposes the flaws of the cosmopolitan thesis in light of the EU’s current constitutional configuration, and vice versa. First, the EU’s mobility regime does not efface the significance of borders, but instead reinforces them by magnifying the fortress mentality of its member states. Second, unlike cosmopolitan norms, the obligations the EU imposes on member states are based on expectations of reciprocity. Third, the EU’s ability to safeguard republican principles in the domestic context is circumscribed by the functionalist nature of its authority. The paper uses the Kantian framework to clarify the principles that undergird the European integration project and to mount a critique of the EU’s constitutional structure on the basis of its own aspirations.