Europe in the global imaginary, the globe in the European imaginary: The legacy of sovereignty

In his chapter, Neil Walker notes: ‘we cannot simply dismiss the sovereignty legacy when investigating the EU, and we never could’. Instead, he invites us to consider two puzzles. The first concerns a world of external relations that remains dominated by states who engage with one another as sovereign entities. In its external relations, as an international organisation, the EU is an outlier in an area dominated by states. As Walker asks where does the EU ‘fit into this overall system of mutual sovereigntist expectations, and of practice predicated upon these mutual expectations?’ The second puzzle relates to the broader potential of sovereignty to frame issues of identity and self-identification. To the extent that the EU does not conform to a sovereigntist logic, how, if at all, might the global political configuration be (re)modelled in the European political imaginary? In addressing these two puzzles (or these two sides of the one puzzle) Walker reflects first on the questions posed about Europe as it has been framed through the still globally-dominant lens of sovereignty, and so very much from the perspective of the global political imaginary. In the second place, the contribution reverses focus, now posing the question of how to frame the global level from a distinctly European-centred perspective. It does so by reference to what escapes the lens of sovereignty – to those elements of the European polity that are structured by the absence rather than the presence of sovereigntist considerations, and which combine to form a powerful alternative world view within the EU’s own political imaginary.