European federalization paradoxically reinforces homogeneity at the center while fearing local heterogeneity

Evidence

The effect of European federalization, paradoxically, is to reinforce homogeneity across the generalization while worrying about (imagined) proliferation of heterogeneity at the level of the local. The proliferating lingua franca of English, seeping across the continent, reinforces the point. The popular slogan to “think globally, act locally” translates for the European dominant into acting as if homogeneous in the face of the challenges of the heterogeneous, of ballooning heterogeneity from below. But this hapless homogeneity is made also through various circumscriptions within Europe’s borders, restricting belonging – the “true Europe” – to an inner core buffered by at least a couple of bands of the less authentic, the at best partially European the further from the spatiocultural core one cast(e)s. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 927

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the concentric-ring logic of belonging found in colonial center/periphery analyses, and the definitional work on who counts as authentically European connects to Anderson’s imagined communities.