Norbert Elias’s sociology is hardly considered as a reference of primary importance to think about the future of political communities in a globalized world. In his work, some of the major terms used in political theory for example – such as “legitimacy”, “sovereignty” or “citizenship” – are rarely mentioned. However, a closer examination of The Civilising Process (1939, 1997) reveals that at an early stage Elias questioned the relationship between nation states, democracy and citizenship and continued to do so in later essays, especially “Changes in the We–I Balance” (1987, 1991). In this text, Elias did not explicitly examine whether a democratic political community can or should exist beyond the nation state. His originality is elsewhere. It firstly lies in the suggestion that such a problem has to be considered in an all-embracing and very long-term perspective. Elias’s originality also consists in his determination not to transform social facts and observations into norms or values that could legitimate political conceptions. That allows him to overtake the common oppositions between the “post-nationalists” authors and the nationalists, on the one hand, and between cosmopolitanism and scientific realism, on the other hand. At first glance, Elias insists on the primacy of power balance and struggles, not only in politics but also in social life, in a quite “Hobbesian” way. Furthermore, his writings lay stress on the importance of the “national habitus” and emotions to define the community. In this paper, I nevertheless intend to show that Elias’s intuitions contribute much more to enforce the idea of a post-national integration, following Kant this time, considering “humanity as a whole” as the “real survival unit” but on a “realistic” basis, i. e. accordingly with his “reality congruent” conception of social sciences. My hypothesis is that the sociological study of long-term historical processes would then not only reveal what separates people and countries from each other, but also what binds them together in Europe and all over the world, through global interdependencies, for better and for worse.
