What Is the Other of Europe?

Abstract

The problematic of European integration has come to occupy a privileged position in the discussion of Self-Other relations in International Relations theory.1 The experience of the ‘European project’ is held to demonstrate the possibility for political identity to be constituted in the absence of any spatial delimitation of otherness. Instead, the Other of today’s Europe is found in its own past, that is the Europe of sovereign nation-states, founded on the principle of territorial exclusivity. Casting its own past of fragmentation and conflict as the Other, from which it must delimit itself, contemporary Europe defines itself as an open and non-exclusive ‘peace project’ of self-transcendence that no longer requires a concrete figure of the territorial Other to constitute a positive entity. Thus, while the project of European integration remains territorially limited, it nonetheless allegedly succeeds in suspending the operation of the logic of sovereign territoriality by reconstructing the figure of the Other, logically necessary for se If-identification, in a reflexive manner that converts the antagonistic process of othering into a drive for self-transcendence.