| dc.description.abstract | Over the last ten years or so we have become used to the idea and the formulation of ‘Europe at different speeds’, in terms of a conceptual and rhetorical response to the fact that the process of European integration, towards the goals of a common constitution, a common monetary system, a common foreign policy etc. have not unfolded in as a homogenous, linear and synchronous way as planned. The idea was a reaction to the unwelcome fact that some of the European countries were unwilling or indeed unable to keep up with the pace of integration set by some of the core countries. The global financial crisis of 2008, the Greek debt crisis, and most recently, the refugee or migration crisis, which hit Europe in the fall of 2015, have contributed to unveiling the multiple and often conflicting tempi and rhythms, the delays and accelerations in the Eurozone and turned them into a challenge that the EU can no longer ignore. In reaction to a speech by the British Prime Minister David Cameron, in which he announced a revision of Great Britain’s membership in the EU, the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt warned: ‘Flexibility sounds fine, but if you open up to a 28-speed Europe, at the end of the day there is no Europe at all. Just a mess.’
In other, less politically loaded contexts, this ‘mess’ is called historical contingency, or simply history. The phrase ‘Europe at different speeds’ is not just a rhetorical device, but corresponds to a fundamental historical reality: that the European countries have indeed never moved at the same speed, or, in other words, they have never been completely synchronous in their social and political development. On the contrary, the history of Europe, including the history of Europe’s relationship to the world at large, has always been a history of temporal differences, of forwardness and backwardness, relative to a given goal, of lagging behind and catching up, relative to a perceived avantgarde. Europe has ‘multiple modernities’, to use a term from S.N. Eisenstadt, or, with an even more general argument, is less dependent on the highly ambiguous idea of ‘modernity’: Europe has ‘multiple temporalities’. 3 Often these various political and social times are even recognized and given labels, such as the German Sonderweg, the Nordic model, British insularity, or they are documented, for instance in the EU progress reports.
This chapter appears in a larger collection published by © Berghahn Books (https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SteinmetzConceptual). | en_US |