The desire for Europe: European integration and the question of state violence

This dissertation critically examines whether and how the practices involved in the crafting of the European Union may be said to go beyond modern statecraft. European integration should in part be seen as an attempt to transcend the modern state. Among many of the early proponents of European integration, the nation state had become associated with militarism, jingoism and ultimately, at least partly, to the blamed for the many devastating wars on the European continent, and even a normative order that made the Holocaust possible. Most other studies that have dealt with the EU's alleged difference from the modern state have employed an understanding of the state which confers a certain ontological standing and status onto its purported object of study. This dissertation argues that a critical approach to European integration needs to go beyond such a representationalist, ontologizing understanding of a political entity. Instead, in order to start addressing the question of state violence that European integration emerged as a response to, the crafting of the Europe Union needs to be problematized in relation to practices of statecraft. The dissertation also contends that previous engagements of European integration in relation to the modern state have neglected engaging the broader normative horizon in which the modern Westphalian state is inscribed. The first chapter puts forward a way of understanding modern statecraft. The subsequent chapters examine four different legitimation discourses of European integration against such an understanding: EU's failed Constitutional Treaty, EU's foreign policy discourse, European integration theory, and an instance of European migration policy. The dissertation concludes that the crafting of Europe in many ways resembles the crafting of the modern state. In fact, the crafting of the European Union is plagued by similar ethical dilemmas as the modern state, and ultimately animated by a similar desire to either expel or interiorize difference.