Bøger i Europe plurielle/Multiple Europes serien

In the 19century, the metropolis became the soothsayer of societies. Here, probabilities of progress could be perceived, felt and smelt; here was the showcase of each nation¿s prime productions and representations. Travellers took to the metropolis in order to unravel the foreign society, in order to understand and learn about social characteristics and future developments, about cultural distinctions and commonalities, about banalities and extraordinary events. Travel writers mapped the development of Europe¿s metropolises and wrote for a large market using the form of a highly popular and established genre. In travel writing, popular sentiments, market-driven imaginations of the audience¿s interests, and on-the-spot analysis of cultural and political conditions are bound together in one account. This book surveys the history of cultural perception in Western Europe from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the National Socialists¿ party rallies in the Berlin of the 1930s. Travel writings are used as source material to enter the intricate discourses on national stereotypes, the metropolis and on the usage as well as the perception of authenticity.ÿ

The texts collected in this book are all produced and located within the converging fields of navigation and displacement. The connection between navigation and narration becomes clear when we realise that most of the authors and heroes of the accounts discussed by the author were, in one way or another, involved in shipping and navigation and that their accounts were produced within fluid and floating spaces and in the course of intriguing voyages and long cruises. In all cases, these narratives start with the narrators on board ships and end with them once again taking charge of their ships and sailing back home. In this book, the author argues that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English narratives of adventure and captivity were not produced within clearly demarcated territories and on dry land, but within spaces of indeterminacy, struggle, and transition.

Across and beyond Europe, history is being rewritten in the wake of the Cold War¿s dissolution. An example of this process is the re-evaluation of the part played by resistance movements during World War II in country after country. This book deals with the role of myth and memory in the formation of collective identities with a particular emphasis on national identities. Myth and memory should not be seen as clearly demarcated from history. They are history in ceaseless transformation and reconstruction, the image of the past is continuously reconsidered and reconstituted in the light of an everchanging present. History is an interpretation of the past; not the past as it really was. The key question of this book concerns the role myth and memory play in the construction of communities, and what the distinction between collective myth and memory signifies. The discussion of this question is undertaken in theoretically oriented chapters as well as 15 case studies of national patterns from Scandinavia in the north to Italy and Israel in the south, and from the USA in the west to Russia in the east, as well as local community constructions in working-class districts in Glasgow and Roubaix and the national politics of architecture in Berlin and Rome. This book appears within the framework of a research project on the cultural construction of community in modernisation processes in comparison. This project is a joint enterprise of the European University Institute in Florence and the Humboldt University in Berlin sponsored by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund.

The fundamental contrast between convergent and divergent tendencies in the development of Balkan cultural identity can be seen as an important determinative both in the contradictory self-images of people in the Balkans and in the often biased perceptions of Balkan societies held by external observers, past and present. In bringing together case studies from such heterogeneous lines of research as linguistics, anthropology, political, literary and cultural history, each presenting insightful analyses of micro- as well as macro-level aspects of identity construction in the Balkans, this collection of essays provides a forum for the elucidation and critical evaluation of an intriguing paradox which continues to characterize the cultural situation in the Balkans and which, moreover, is of undeniable relevance for our understanding of recent political developments. As such, it also provides a window into the actual state of scholarly interest in the rich interdisciplinary field of Balkan studies. This book contains a selection of papers presented at the international conference «Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans: Convergence vs. Divergence», organized by the Center for Southeast European Studies at Ghent University on 12 and 13 December 2003 in Ghent.

Today¿s world is a world of nation-states; few have survived since the early modern period, some have existed for three hundred years, most came into being during the second part of the last century. Yet the equation between the state and the nation does not go back far in history, despite the prevailing tendency to view the state as closely linked to ethnicity. To challenge the latter this book attempts to examine statehood separately from the concept of ethnicity; it asks what is non-ethnic about statehood by looking at ¿statehood before and beyond ethnicity¿. A non-ethnic statehood is analysed in two forms: as a historical phenomenon at the time of the emergence of the early modern state (Part One) and as a historical tradition which had been pursued by the nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Part Two). Instead of looking at great powers as traditional models of statehood, individual chapters focus on minor and less familiar states in Northern and Eastern Europe from the period c. 1600-2000, including Belgium, Bohemia, Greece, the Netherlands, Romania, Poland-Lithuania, Serbia and Montenegro, Sweden, Scotland and Transylvania.

This volume is a collection of contributions about the history and practice of travel and travel writing from a variety of academic disciplines including anthropology, history, linguistics and literary criticism. It brings together scholars from over ten different countries and reflects on what travel is and how travel writings function. It traces the history of travel and travel writing and the notion or idea of a European civilisation that permeates performances and perceptions. The notion of Europe appears as a set of quality standards as well as guidelines for experiences against which civilisations are measured. This set of standards and guidelines, however, is far from stable. It is a floating foundation carrying different versions of Europe throughout time. The authors tackle the problem from different angles: travels from Europe across the seven oceans transported the idea of European civilisation just as travels to Europe or within Europe. The volume explores the different meanings attached to the term ¿Europe¿ and ¿civilisation¿ throughout history and shows how different political or cultural contexts affect the notion of what Europe is or should be.

An accepted narrative within European integration history is that the issue in which city to locate European Community headquarters was decided on the intergovernmental level between the member states. In the present volume, this view is expanded with the example of Strasbourg by arguing that activity at the local level is an important factor as well. A set of highly active political and associational local agents used different strategies to consolidate the city's position against competing cities and the European Communities. This study finds that a highly specialised group of municipal politicians and civil servants were an important factor for bringing the European institutions to the city.

After successive waves of «enlargement», the European Union has been struggling with political integration. The project of the «constitutionalisation» of the EU was therefore launched to cater to a growing need of institutional reform, but it also intensified debates about the underlying conceptions, norms and values of the European polity as well as the meanings and identities of entire Europe. This book approaches the ongoing legal and political re-construction of the EU through a focus on the Convention on the Future of Europe (2002-2003) which produced a draft of the EU¿s first constitution. The Convention is studied from a multidisciplinary perspective integrating approaches from ethnography of institutions, political sociology and linguistically-based discourse-analysis. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and multiple textual data, the book offers an inside perspective on the multitude of ways in which politics in supranational environments works in practice. The book also contributes to the ongoing research on the discursive (re-)negotiations of meanings of Europe and European integration in the institutions of the European Union.

It is always the future that makes the past; the future as it is wished for, as it should be or as it is expected to be. Claims on time, which become claims on normative order, are looked at through varieties of regional and thematic cases and taken as a methodological route through which this book contributes to the writing of global history.

Courage and inspiration are needed to renew the European dream and rediscover the purpose of a European civilisation project which responds to the cultural and moral traditions rooted in the vision of its founding fathers. A mobilising and forward-looking interaction between globalisation and Europeanisation can provide some answers in the emerging global transnational era. This book offers an interdisciplinary in-depth analysis of the relation between globalisation and Europeanisation from a value driven and human-centric perspective. It proposes a broad, diversified and innovative framework and analysis of concepts based on a human rights, cosmopolitan and public goods perspective of sustainable statehood. This approach is applied to interconnected policy areas and issues that are crucial to Europe's future, such as external relations, culture, intercultural dialogue, citizenship, education and territorial cooperation. The book's multidisciplinary readings and critical reflections address the complex issues at play in today's European societies, which require sustainable, cohesive and responsible answers at conceptual and policy level.

This collection of essays expands the focus of historical studies of international public law in modernity to include the novel insight of the cosmopolitan imagination's past and present force. Featuring a line-up of leading international scholars it argues that Europe has recurrently implemented legal cosmopolitanism at home and exported it abroad.

The Space of Crisis investigates how notions of crisis and changing perceptions of space influenced the way Europe imagined itself, helping reassess some of the assumptions of historians and political theorists about the way intellectuals interpreted Europe's crisis during the 1920s and 1930s.

When Dutch and subsequently French voters rejected the Draft Treaty for a Constitution for Europe in Spring 2005, many voices called for a pause for reflection. This book is, in part, a result of that moment of reflection. We wanted to contribute to the debate about Europe but crucially, we sought to do so by taking a step back from the problem formation and agenda-setting of Brussels. For the authors of this volume, one key to establishing critical distance has been the reappraisal of the historical perspective. Another has been the problematisation of ¿Europe as a space¿ as opposed to looking for a definition of borders. The authors also seek critical distance through a focus on the tension between Europe as a culture, as a polity and as an economy. These tensions have often been neglected or even ignored and the relationships have been seen as more or less synonymous and harmonious. The aim of this volume, then, is two-fold. It wants, developing a critical distance to the present Europe, to contribute to the vivid academic research and debate on Europe, which too often either develops distance without commenting on the present state of affairs or comments on the present without critical distance.

While concentrating on the activities of a small European nation, Estonians for Europe provides a long-term review for nearly eighty years on the history of European unification. The fresh perspective illustrates the dilemmas and struggles of the common European history in the 20th century.

This book gives an up-to-date analysis of the EU's current enlargement policy with focus on current and potential candidates in the Western Balkans as well as the controversial case of Turkey. The issues are put into the context of the widening versus deepening debate. Despite enlargement fatigue the porocess of widening is expected to continue.

This book is about authority, more precisely, about figures of authority. The editors have put together an international group of renowned scholars to discuss the emergence of modern notions of authority from different angles. Modern authority is no longer legitimated by status and social position, but rather by institutional affiliation and performance. To research the genealogy and intricacies of this kind of authority, the chapters in this volume cast a closer look at the various institutional actors on whom authority has been bestowed. The authors use a case study approach to look at the instances in which modern authority emerged, was ridiculed, contested, or even failed. Taken together, the individual contributions shed new light on the intricate relationship between the subjects and their organisations; they challenge any Whig historiography of rationalisation and modernisation, and they help us to rethink the inter-relationship between modern and even postmodern institutional arrangements on the one hand, and their subjects on the other.

The development of a fully fledged European Public Sphere is seen by many as the solution to the legitimation crisis the European Union is suffering today. It is conceived as a space in which a Europe-wide debate about the current economic, social and political crises can take place and through which solutions can be developed. This book proposes a new multi-disciplinary approach to discuss the European Public Sphere, arguing that it should be approached as a complex and interlinking concept, considering issues such as identity, citizenship building and multi-level governance structures and actors, and that it should not be analysed merely from the traditional perspectives of information and communication policies. The volume presents both academic papers and more policy-oriented contributions, offering perspectives from scholars, politicians, consultants and administrators to give the reader a truly multidisciplinary understanding of the European Public Sphere.

This book explores what happens with ethnic and national identifications built on the same ethnocultural grounds, but under different socioeconomic circumstances. Territorial and non-territorial minorities have traditionally been considered not susceptible to comparison because it was assumed that groups organized on different grounds were distinctively separate phenomena. In this study, the comparative method is used to throw new light on how ethnic and national identifications are constructed, negotiated, and re-constructed in territorial and non-territorial minority contexts. The author investigates whether the ethnic and national identification and articulation processes of Hungarians in Slovakia and Hungarians in Sweden constitute different types of Hungarianness. Drawing on extensive interview material the empirical focus is on the interaction of self-narratives and public narratives. The author seeks to challenge the notion that national minorities and diaspora communities are fundamentally different in their understanding of nationhood and their relationship to an external national homeland.