Europe and Its Complexity: What Would Like to Be Said?

This article is concerned with contemporary developments in European culture, with particular respect to new forms of transnational and transcultural mobility and communication. There is a growing sense that Europe has become a space of complexity and diversity—although, of course, the reality is that it was always so. In the context of the new articulations of complexity, however, it becomes crucial to develop more imaginative and resonant forms of understanding and dealing with cultural change. Certain possibilities are put forward—though only as possibilities among many potential others. The article is critical of many attempts to deal with the vital political issues by mainstream social sciences. The key issue, it is argued, concerns how we might elaborate upon actually existing discourses of cosmopolitanism. European cosmopolitan thinking has a long history and provides both intellectual and imaginative resources for the present conjuncture.