shared political identity. There are democratic limits to European integration,
therefore, that suggest it should remain a predominantly intergovernmental
organization in which a national rather than the European parliament can
exert control over what the executive might agree to. In particular, welfare
and redistributive issues have to remain the preserve of the member states
(Scharpf 1999 ;OVe 2000 ).
Those who take a more instrumental view of political decision-making are
potentially less cautious. They believe it is suYcient that citizens have a
common interest in securing some beneWt or protecting themselves against
some harm (Niada-Rumelin 1997 ; Pogge 1997 ; Weale 2005 ). To the extent
these beneWts have to be obtained at a level above the nation state, then
citizens have good democratic reasons to set up supranational political
institutions that give them the opportunity to control the forces aVecting
their lives. The EU is preferable to a series of issue-speciWc agreements by
allowing spill-over between issues to be addressed. The socio-psychological
element will comepost factoonce citizens begin to interact regularly with each
other. Indeed, to some degree, globalization has already created a global
political community in this fuller sense. English now operates in much of
the world, and certainly in Europe, as a common second language. The
introduction of the euro has become a tangible symbol of EU citizens’ shared
fate and identity for those in the euro zone. The media oVers twenty-four-
hour coverage of world events and alerts people to natural and humanly
created disasters in far corners of the globe and, as events such as Live Aid
demonstrate, can elicit global solidarity with the plight of their victims. On
issues such as the environment and the oppression of woman there are now
well-organized transnational pressure groups that bring global action to bear
on local problems. Perhaps most signiWcantly, all these groups increasingly
express their demands in a common discourse of human rights. Through
bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights, these norms now
constrain the sovereignty of states and even provide grounds for intervention
by other states in domestic aVairs. Far from threatening the pursuit of social
justice, cosmopolitan institutions—of which the EU forms but a compon-
ent—oVer ways for institutionalizing international redistributive schemes
that could raise standards. Even minority languages and cultures might be
better protected through a global language rights policy than through a
system of nation states that allow the rich and powerful to dominate the
poor and the weak (Van Parijs 1997 ; and in Rawls and Van Parjis 2003 ). The
challenge of immigration has led some to advocate decoupling citizenship
254 richard bellamy