Civility, Legality, Publicity: these are three principles that emerged in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries respectively. They can be seen as the legacy of historical Europe to political Europe. Under the aegis of the principle of Sovereignty, their coherence was achieved in the democratic rule of law. In this way, it was possible to manage the tension between, on the one hand, the demands of popular sovereignty and civic autonomy, the pole of the Common (the political will of a people), and, on the other hand, those of fundamental rights and political justice, the pole of the Universal (the principles of a just society)... A delicate synthesis, and one wonders what happens to it in a context of globalization.
The question of the meaning of European construction is part of this context. The alternative is clear: pure and simple economic adaptation, or catching up, political reconquest?
It is argued that the appropriate political response to economic globalization, as far as the European Union is concerned, does not lie in supranational federalism, but in a processual cosmopolitanism whose basic structure, at a distance from contemporary theories of so-called "cosmopolitical democracy", articulates, following Kantian inspiration, "three levels of public law relations".
