Abstract

This book discusses a number of important developments in Europe, developments that challenge our most basic ideas of the nature of political community and of membership within it. This chapter has a different interpretation of some of these developments and of their implications for political philosophy, which it tries to spell out here. It discusses that the predominant ideal of political community and of citizenship has two main features. They are underlying values, which have typically been defined in liberal-democratic terms and national terms. The chapter believes that people exercise self-determination through electing national legislatures, and that citizenship rights are protected by national constitutions. Empirically, it argues that developments in Europe are serving to tame, rather than transcend, liberal nationhood. Indeed, they are intended not only to help tame liberal nationhood where it already exists, but also to help diffuse the model of a liberal nationhood to countries where it does not yet exist.