The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives

Three illustrious historians—Anthony Pagden, Biancamaria Fontana, and John Pocock —have contributed to this volume, and it is not easy to follow them. Rather than advance another survey of ideas of Europe, I would like to accept one of the ideas they present and investigate it from what aspires to be a postimperial perspective. The idea I wish to examine is of Europe as a federation of independent states, and this as a prototype for the rest of the world. It is closely associated with Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant. For shorthand, I will call it the Kantian or federal idea of Europe. My thesis is that a survey of the critical attitude that has developed in response to this idea over the past two hundered years will change our idea of Europe and its relation to the rest of the world, from an Eurocentric to a more cosmopolitan conception.