ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a critical cosmopolitan critique of Europe is itself one of the legacies of the European heritage and gives to the present a possible direction for the future. Europe unbounded is to retrieve encounters, resistances, and relations to otherness within the European heritage in ways that challenge some of the received views about the exceptionality and universality of European culture. Europe's cultural heritage entails a critical-normative evaluative standpoint and an approach that recognises cosmopolitan currents within European culture and which need to be reconstructed for the present. The notion of critical cosmopolitanism is used here as a wider framework to approach the complexity of the European heritage and the limits of the notion of Eurocentrism. The notion of Eurocentrism as a condition that derives from the dominance of European colonisation fails to give due regard to the precolonial heritage of Europe.
