Postface

Abstract

The essays assembled in this book seem to me to raise some fundamental questions. They are rooted in the specific history of these two great nation-states of Western Europe, but they also involve global problems which testify for the universal importance of population shifts and the hybridization of cultures in today’s world. They demonstrate the strong impact of such social changes on the constitution of our political systems which, in the first years of the twenty-first century, appear much less stable in their legitimacy and much more hesitant in their commitment to equality than we had imagined only a decade ago. It is precisely in order to give the governing institutions a renewed and broader basis, and to associate an increasingly multinational civil society with the ideals of liberty and justice that the European construction was approved by the public opinion of its member states over half a century. It is therefore a test of its achievements and failures to closely scrutinize how the progressive (albeit uneven) integration of such powerful constituencies as France and Britain within the communitarian framework has influenced their own democratic evolution.