About Post-National Integration in Norbert Elias's Work Towards a Socio-Historical Approach

Abstract

In this paper, I will challenge a ‘national’ or culturalist reading of Elias’s work, a reading that insists on the importance of belonging to a national community. I will show that Elias’s intuitions, by giving a crucial role to democratisation processes, contributes to the conceptions articulated by the post-nationalist authors: the concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’ advocated by Jürgen Habermas and that of ‘post-national identity’ presented by Jean-Marc Ferry. My hypothesis is that, from an ‘Eliasian’ standpoint, the sociological study of long-term historical processes would not only reveal what separates Europeans from each other, but also what (temporarily) binds them together, ‘for better and for worse’, and what (more definitely) binds Europeans to the rest of the world.