The Struggle for Europe

European citizenship cannot be founded on national grounds, because it is transnational. … We must be capable of imagining a situation … in which your sense of citizenship, or rather your citizenship in the sense of legal and political subjectivity, must be detached from the sense of identity. I am against this closure by which you are something and belong to something: this is mad, it is a form of microfascism. Geopolitically, it is an absolute closure: I am from here, I come from here, this is my land, this is my language, therefore I belong. Postnationalism is thus, for me, a critique of the unitary subject, by which I mean citizenship, politics and the identitarian question. For a European, this entails putting an end to nationalism. (Rosi Braidotti) In this opening quote, part of a conversation I had with Rosi Braidotti (Andrijasevic 2002, 2008a) more than a decade ago on the future of Europe, Braidotti positions her work firmly and passionately in relation to the project or, better still, to the intellectual and political obligation of building a different Europe. Such a Europe would not be dominated by nationalist ambitions, would not view itself as white and Christian nor would put into place restrictive immigration policies that, in the eyes of many, transformed Europe into an exclusionary ‘Fortress’. The project of reconstructing Europe is, for Braidotti, first and foremost a matter of imagination rather than of rights. This is not to say that rights are not pivotal but, rather, that the logic of rights is often confined by a legalistic, technical and juridical language that results in an imaginary that is poor, does not excite us or make us dream and is incapable of conjuring up an alternative vision of democracy. [Opening paragraph]