Politics & Power Quote by Ulrich Beck

Beck skewers Europe’s recurring fantasy: that democracy works best when it can pretend the people are one people. The sting is in “finding or inventing.” He’s not describing a neutral institutional debate but a political act of make-believe, where “Europe” gets imagined as a tidy nation-state scaled up, complete with the old legitimizing myth of a shared culture, a shared story, a shared “we.” That obsession is the problem, not the solution.

The intent here is diagnostic and admonitory. Beck is warning that the EU’s legitimacy crisis can’t be solved by copying the nation-state template, because the template’s hidden precondition is “homogeneity” - historically produced through language policy, assimilation, border-making, and sometimes violence. When he says homogeneity “guarantees” an “appropriate form of democracy,” he’s channeling a common assumption in European political thinking: that majority rule needs a bounded demos, and a bounded demos needs sameness. Beck flips that assumption into an accusation: if you require homogeneity for democracy, you’re already excluding the Europe that exists.

Context matters. Beck’s broader work on “risk society” and cosmopolitanism sits in the post-Cold War, post-Maastricht Europe of deep integration, migration, and uneven globalization - conditions that make older national containers feel both inadequate and politically seductive. The subtext is that calls for more centralization and “proper” European government often smuggle in an ethnic or cultural premise they can’t openly defend. Beck’s provocation is to force a harder question: can Europe build democratic legitimacy without the comfort blanket of sameness?