This article examines and assesses Pierre Manent’s critique of the European political project and his concomitant endorsement of the nation-state. It first presents Manent’s basic arguments against the European Union, focusing on his Aristotelian understanding of political forms and his notion of the body politic. Subsequently, it argues that Manent’s position, in part due to its Aristotelian underpinnings, is deeply problematic, in that it disregards the contingency and the element of representation that are necessarily inherent in the foundation of every (...) body politic. As a result, Manent’s critique tends to downplay the contingency of the nation-state and to overplay the contingency of the European Union. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism and republicanism are both inherently political ideals. In most discussions, they are taken to have contrasting, if not conflicting, normative aspirations. Cosmopolitanism is “thin” and abstractly universal, unable to articulate the basis for a “thick” citizenship in a republican political community. This commonly accepted way of dividing up the conceptual and political terrain is, however, increasingly misleading in the age of the global transformation of political authority. Rather than centered on community, republicanism is in the first instance an ideal (...) of political liberty in terms of which one is free to the extent that one is not subordinated to others. To be free is not to live under the power of some master, but rather to live as an equal in “a free state”. According to the republican ideal of freedom, the purpose of the political community is to maintain and promote the equal freedom of its citizens in this sense. Hardly a community in either the universalist or the particularist sense, the international society of states at best satisfies Berlin’s demand for a “maximum degree of noninterference compatible with the minimum demands of social life”. (shrink)