ABSTRACT
It was perhaps inevitable that the EU would come to be viewed as an empire, given the vogue for that term. What is surprising, however, is that the idea has been taken up by commentators from such diverse theoretical perspectives. In this chapter we examine the idea that the EU might be best thought of as an empire, looking in particular at Jan Zielonka’s book Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged EU (Zielonka, 2007) and Beck and Grande’s Cosmopolitan Europe (Beck and Grande, 2007), which contains a chapter on “Cosmopolitan Empire”. Both books make a strong case for rethinking the EU through the lens of empire, particularly from the point of view of developing a new politics of space and more especially fi nding a way to understand the EU which does not involve the assumption that it must be some kind of state. (See Delanty and Rumford [2005], particularly Chapter 8).
