Making Sense of the EU: Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe

The globalization of the world’s economy and society has strained the limits of the nation-states capacity—both for democratic political life and for the redistributive policies upon which basic social justice depends. Moreover, individual states can no longer adequately protect their citizens from such increasingly globalized challenges as environmental degradation, epidemics, or the security risks created by advanced technologies. The European Union represents an opportunity not only to fashion a postnational welfare state capable of responding to a postnational economy, but to lay a groundwork that will ultimately make possible a global domestic policy.