Europe and Beyond

Abstract

The purpose of this final chapter is to suggest that the European Union can be best understood as a post-modern polity, and perhaps, as a post-modern text. Indeed, this has been the ultimate ambition of all the chapters which make up this book. From a textual perspective, the European Union is beset by problems of identity, and so, too, are European legal studies. From a political and constitutional perspective, the European Union continues to defy objective determination. It does not fit comfortably with the familiar modernist theories of law and society. The fit that it presently enjoys is as unconvincing as it is uncomfortable. In the first section of this final chapter I want to discuss further the pervasive questions of identity which the new Europe has thrown up. In the second and third sections, I then want to rewrite a distinctively post-modern identity for the new European Union. In doing so, I want to emphasise the extent to which such a rewriting can effect a Europe ‘beyond’ that which is presently described, and which can better realise the aspirations of a twenty-first century, and distinctly post-modern, society.