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A Reply to Bellamy and Castiglione

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9248.2004.00473.x
Published date01 March 2004
Date01 March 2004
AuthorJustine Lacroix
Subject MatterDebate
A Reply to Bellamy and Castiglione P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 0 4 V O L 5 2 , 1 9 4 – 1 9 6
Debate
A Reply to Bellamy and Castiglione
Justine Lacroix
Université Libre de Bruxelles
I am grateful to Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione for their sophisticated
response, which has the merit of clarifying their positions and of enriching the
ongoing debate on European constitutional patriotism. Nevertheless, I still believe
that we are facing two misunderstandings regarding both their typology and their
results.
Regarding their typology of schools of thought on European Union identity, I fully
agree with the new one which they offer in their response. Yet one has to admit
that this typology differs from the one proposed in the paper (Bellamy and
Castiglione, 1998) on which I focused my criticism. In that earlier paper, they chose
to include the supranationalists and the post-nationalists in the same category, that
of cosmopolitans, and conflated this category with that of ‘pro-Europeans’. This
assertion is founded on a scrupulous reading of their paper, which states explicitly
that the distinction between cosmopolitans and communitarians ‘often provides
the background assumption of pro- and anti-Europeans respectively’ (Bellamy and
Castiglione, 1998, p. 153). The authors then add that ‘cosmopolitans’ include both
supranationalists and post-nationalists (p. 156), while ‘communitarians’ include
conservative Eurosceptics and civic nationalists. In my own article, I questioned
this typology in order to show that the supranationalists who plead for a federal
Europe have actually more in common with the civic nationalists than with the
post-nationalists, since they both consider the nation as the ultimate horizon of
democracy (Lacroix, 2002, p. 953). This is why I believe that supranationalists are
closer to ‘communitarians’ than to ‘cosmopolitans’.
This conclusion means that, ironically, I fully agree with the new typology pro-
posed by Bellamy and Castiglione, since I consider, as they do now,...

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