December 29, 2007
Gerard Delanty argues in Peripheries and borders in a post-western Europe that Europe is taking not just a post-national form, but also a post-western shape. The periphery can be seen as a zone of re-bordering. Delanty says:
The earlier expansion of the EU in the pre-Cold War period differed in that it was premised on the certainty offered by the Iron Curtain. While the Treaty of Rome declared that any European country could join, it was evident that there were political limits to expansion. It was primarily a western European interstate system. Moreover, it was an enlargement that was based on what was believed to be a common European political heritage. It is certain that this heritage was often a divisive one, and the southern European countries – Greece, Portugal, and Spain – joined the EU in the early 1980s only after a prolonged period of military rule. Yet, despite these caveats, prior to the current enlargement the EU was a fairly cohesive entity that underwent relatively deep socio-economic and political integration.
The EU does not have a political or cultural identity in any meaningful sense of the term, while on the other side, the identity of nation-states has been undermined partly as a result both of Europeanization and wider processes of globalization.
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