Cosmopolitanism and the Construction of Cultural Models in Contemporary Europe
This article outlines a cognitive approach towards analysing and evaluating the process of building a transnational normative culture in Europe through a number of steps. In a first step, employing a number of social theory traditions, a brief outline is offered of European transnationalism as a territorial form. The second step, which is oriented by Habermas's idea of democratic learning processes that bridge national and post-national democratic levels, explores the relationship between democratic communication and normative culture formation on the transnational plane. This leads into the third step that outlines the cognitive mechanisms that affect the formation of post-national democracy. These mechanisms will determine the emergence of transnational normative culture understood as a process of forming suitable cultural models, entailing an ontological, epistemological and methodological shift away from a narrowly conceived normative model. Such a normative model bypasses or minimises the cognitive-communicative mechanisms involved in the dynamic, public construction of meaning and validity. The implications of such a revision of perspectives is further developed in a fourth and concluding step by addressing the kind of transnational deliberative-discursive complex required for the needed cognitive innovation that would in turn make possible appropriate normative innovation informed by a cosmopolitan perspective.