ABSTRACT
The European Union is a political project that insists on depicting itself as normatively driven. It presents both democracy and fundamental rights as constitutive of its project of supranational integration. This chapter challenges this description by first contrasting the Union’s normative commitment to assist and protect asylum seekers with its actual refugee policies, stressing that the Union falls short of respecting the standards set in the Geneva Convention. It then casts a critical glance at the intellectual tradition within political thought that portrays the European Union as a cosmopolitan polity in the making. The chapter argues that the Union’s failure to live up to its commitment to provide asylum makes this cosmopolitan label inappropriate. It concludes this enquiry by taking issue with the argument that the Union must make a dramatic choice between cosmopolitanism and democracy. Using the question of asylum as a case in point, the chapter argues that the concepts are mutually supportive and that respecting unconditionally the Geneva Convention would make the Union both more cosmopolitan and more democratic.
