Suchergebnisse

In current academic debates on a collective European identity, only those that question its existence keep referring to cultural elements, such as language, history, or philosophy. Thus, while some skeptics affirm that the enormous diversity of cultural elements constitutes proof of the absence of a collective European identity, others maintain that cultural formulations of identity should be abandoned, because such conceptions risk exclusionism, & this is not only an anachronism but dangerous in a multicultural, constantly changing Europe. Those who argue that cultural formulation of identity be abandoned propose instead that identity be formulated in strictly political terms, such as constitutional patriotism or transnational citizenship. Lom maintains that these attempts at invalidating or devaluing cultural elements when defining a collective identity are neither logically valid (since any procedural formulation that is purely political is based on substantive & therefore cultural notions), nor sociologically correct (since culture continues to play a crucial role in defining the self), nor politically healthy (since by eliminating all reference to human goals, they leave cultural goods at risk of being usurped precisely by those whom the architects of the EU wish to disarm: virulent nationalists). Adapted from the source document.

Although seemingly a purely negative position without any implications, scepticism is more often seen to lead to two entirely different prescriptive political and moral conclusions, either liberal or illiberal. This article explains how such opposing conclusions derive from insufficient attention to: the instability of scepticism, its tendency to collapse into varieties of unquestioned belief; its underdetermined character, since it is always expressed as a variable mixture of doubt and beliefs, which are often neither acknowledged nor recognized; and insufficient clarity about the motivational power of social or political theory generally.

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.