Solidarity as Freedom: Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Future(s) of the European Project.

The book-chapter begins with the claim "We have never been Euroepan" in order to dismantle the Habermasian European Project down to its elements and trace its limitations back to what I call Habermas's "political solipsism." While, in toto, Habermas's ethics is pluralist qua its discursivity, its epistemology remains solipsistic qua its universal-pragmatist epistemological assumptions. This also has far-reaching consequences regarding which political model of identity should be furthered. As I argue, Habermas's new concept of a "legally constituted civic solidarity" that came to replace his older moral understanding of solidarity cannot rectify these problems. Nevertheless, the concept of solidarity needs to be upheld. In the last section, I turn to Nancy's concept of freedom and interprets it as a model for European solidarity that results in the creation of a third space, where the differences of the various national states, while being respected, encounter each other and give rise to a shared and common European form of life.