"The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others"
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Beck is taking a scalpel to one of modern politics' most lucrative myths: that sovereignty is a sacred, zero-sum possession you either guard intact or lose forever. He calls the “surrender your identity” story “unhelpful” not because it is merely inaccurate, but because it’s strategically disabling. It traps publics in a nostalgia loop where borders are treated like emotional prosthetics and complex problems get reduced to a chest-thumping referendum question: us or them.
The provocation is in his reversal: relinquishing certain national powers can produce more, not less, sovereignty. Beck is redefining sovereignty as capacity rather than ceremony. In a world of cross-border financial shocks, climate spillovers, migration, pandemics, and supply-chain dependencies, the old, solo nation-state toolkit becomes performative. You can still wave the flag while failing to govern. Cooperation, in Beck’s framing, is not moral uplift; it’s an upgrade in problem-solving power.
Context matters: Beck’s career tracks the “risk society” thesis and Europe’s late-20th/early-21st-century integration debates, when the EU became both a practical governance machine and a symbolic punching bag. His “intelligent way” clause is doing quiet work, too: he’s not naïve about technocracy or democratic deficit. He’s insisting that shared institutions can be designed to expand agency rather than hollow it out.
Subtext: identity politics is being used as a decoy for administrative impotence. Beck’s wager is that dignity comes less from pretending to stand alone than from actually being able to act.
The provocation is in his reversal: relinquishing certain national powers can produce more, not less, sovereignty. Beck is redefining sovereignty as capacity rather than ceremony. In a world of cross-border financial shocks, climate spillovers, migration, pandemics, and supply-chain dependencies, the old, solo nation-state toolkit becomes performative. You can still wave the flag while failing to govern. Cooperation, in Beck’s framing, is not moral uplift; it’s an upgrade in problem-solving power.
Context matters: Beck’s career tracks the “risk society” thesis and Europe’s late-20th/early-21st-century integration debates, when the EU became both a practical governance machine and a symbolic punching bag. His “intelligent way” clause is doing quiet work, too: he’s not naïve about technocracy or democratic deficit. He’s insisting that shared institutions can be designed to expand agency rather than hollow it out.
Subtext: identity politics is being used as a decoy for administrative impotence. Beck’s wager is that dignity comes less from pretending to stand alone than from actually being able to act.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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