ABSTRACT
Most of the papers collected here represent, not surprisingly, one of two contrasting views-individualism (cosmopolitanism) or communitarianism. The debate between individualists and communitarians which has been going on among Anglo-American political theorists for some time could not fail to re-emerge when the issues under discussion became the current controversies over sovereignty, the legitimacy of the nation-state, the future of Europe and a new international order. What we are witnessing today in Europe and even beyond its boundaries-and this diagnosis both individualists and communitarians tend to share-are two processes which apparently lead in opposite directions. On the one hand, we have a movement towards international integration, on the other, movements for local ethnic autonomy. It is important to note at the outset that this divergence cannot be seen in terms of a simple dichotomy of progressive and regressive forces. Both movements are progressive (in the common sense of the term), as they seem to undermine the traditional structures that have been with us for some time and of which the basic constituent was the nation-state, and to lead to some form of new world order, whether unified or pluralistic, or both. But looked at from a different angle, both movements may be regarded as partly conservative: the trend towards integration is an expression of the triumph of Western liberal democracy-it perpetuates and reproduces, on an international scale, the ideology and structures that are deeply embedded in the Western tradition; on the other hand, the trend towards local, ethnic, religious and national autonomies is, in fact, the triumph of pre-modern forms of social bonds that were supposed to have disappeared long ago-or to be reduced to a politically harmless folklore-not only in the
ideologically homogeneous Soviet Bloc, but also in the more or less spontaneously developing Western countries.
