Postmodern EU? Integration between Alternative Horizons and Territorial Angst

In the early 1990s, John Ruggie famously referred to the European Community as an emerging ‘postmodern polity’. This article elaborates on the ‘postmodern promise’ of European integration that Ruggie invoked, and formulates such a promise of European integration as one of radically breaking with the violent practices characteristic of the modern state. We argue that such a promise is immanent albeit historically marginalized in the project of European integration itself, exemplified in the article with a tradition called integral federalism. The article then evaluates such a ‘postmodern promise’ in current practices of European integration against the background of a poststructuralist-informed critique of the violent effects of desires for bordered entities and identities. Such a poststructuralist sensibility enables the article to point to the problems of ‘scaling up’ the state in a project of integration that also set out to challenge and subvert its organizing principles.