The Current Crisis of Europe: Refugees, Colonialism, and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

‘Cosmopolitan Europe’, the normative commitment that is widely understood to undergird the project of the European Union, is under threat as never before. This is manifest perhaps most prominently in Europe’s collective failure to respond to the crisis for refugees. As people flee war and destruction, we, in Europe, debate whether now is the time to give up on our human rights commitments. France is under a state of emergency and the UK in the process of withdrawing from the European Union and its associated institutions (including the European Convention on Human Rights). Voices have been raised against the burdens, financial and social, placed upon us by those we see as Other, with few public voices calling for Europe to remember its traditions of hospitality and stated commitments to human rights. In this article, I discuss the growing distance between the claims and practices of European cosmopolitanism, its roots in our shared colonial past, and the implications for the future.