Enmity and Politics: Reaffirming or Rejecting the Concepts

Abstract

This volume attempts to contribute to the discussion about the nation, nationalism and its inevitable attendant, enmity. In what sense have friendship and hostility (Schmitt 1996, Derrida 1994, Bojanić 1995; 2015) gained new meanings, and what would those meanings be? Does nation-building always involve a common enemy one has to fight? Or does it meet its limits with being a mere remedy for contemporary forms of inequality, or a tranquilizer for those unsettled by the complexity and insecurity brought up by globalized capitalism? These questions become increasingly important as we witness the crisis of the collectivity-building process of the European Union. Do the contemporary politics of difference contest the notion of enmity or, quite to the contrary, reaffirm it?