ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 questions one of the principal ‘founding myths’ of the EU, which is that it is an assembly of nations seeking to avoid the recurrence of war through a brand of cosmopolitanism that balances national difference with European commonality. This is selective remembering, or a kind of tacit, discursive trick, to evade engagement with the different backstory of European colonial endeavour. This means that the ‘diversity’ of EU member states is misrecognised, the historical nature of those states as colonisers goes unacknowledged, and their multicultural societies are seen as an imposition of the recent past and present (a cause of crisis), rather than as foundational and fundamental constituents of Europe. Such disjunction allows powerful actors to claim that multiculturalism has ‘failed’ but this is to misunderstand and misrepresent the very nature of Europe, with the effect that othering and differencing continue to be reproduced.
