The discursive construction of Europeanness : a transnational perspective (original) (raw)
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THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF EUROPEANNESS: A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (E-thesis)
This thesis examines the construction of ‘European identity’ in the discourses of members of European Alternatives (EA), an association of citizens which characterizes itself as committed to the grassroots construction of a better society ‘beyond the nation-state’. By taking bottom-up and transnational perspectives, this study intends to fill a gap in the field of Critical Discourse Studies that seems to have largely underestimated the value of social action and the need to move away from ‘methodological nationalism’ in conceiving of how Europeanness is transformed and enacted. The study applies the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak 2001) to a corpus of data comprising of four focus groups and nine individual interviews with EA members from 10 different branches across Europe. The results suggest a complex and very dynamic picture of how European identities are constructed, challenged and transformed by members who, typically, adopted strategies of dismantling of nationhood, and strategies of ‘imagining’ new communities, spaces and social orders. Two key linguistic features conspicuously drive the members’ discourses of ‘belonging to Europe/being European’. One is the metaphorical scenario of spatial dynamics that, by and large, makes sense of the ‘European space’ as unbounded and interconnected with the world and whereby the European society is seen as progression and expansion of an ‘imagined’ community towards certain cosmopolitan ideals. The second element is the indexicality of transnationalism and Europe, two terms that members invested with a range of meanings including ideals of democracy, diversity, and equality but that were also constructed through the recontextualisation of historical discourses of nationhood. This thesis thus suggests that, for EA members, the transformation of Europeanness is not a linear process (as for example some theories of the 4 ‘Europeanisation’ of society would have it) but, rather a dialectic one which relates to one’s situatedness within temporal, spatial, and social dimensions and which is achieved via multiple and dynamic identification processes with different communities of relevance.
Introduction to the European Studies: A New Approach to Uniting Europe
Today, European Studies as broadly understood have become an important discipline within the humanities and social sciences. The reason for this is, first of all, the contemporary significance of the issues covered by European Studies, that is the processes of European integration and the functioning of Europe both politically and as a specific cultural area. These issues generate a great deal of interest owing to Europe’s fluid position in the contemporary world. While not without objective limitations, it remains one of the key actors in the international arena and its influence still extends to all corners of the world. At the same time, European Studies are one of the most interesting disciplines at they are in a state of constant development, still searching for its own field and research matter as well as its own methodology and research instruments. As demonstrated in this book, these complex issues often give rise to doubt and con troversy. Hence the attempts to analyse them are both fascinating and important, and have attracted the interest of a growing number of academics all over the world, and within the last 25 years increasingly often of Polish scholars as well. These Polish scholars include the research staff of the Centre for Europe of the University of Warsaw, one of the oldest academic units of this profile in Poland. Not long ago, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Centre. Although 20 years might not seem impressive compared to similar centres operating in the Western part of Europe, we have to take into account the speci ficity of the Polish context, which is dealt with in the first group of texts in this book. This is a time for a reflection, summing up the achievements made in various disciplines and emphasising that in the two decades of our operation we have come a very long way. The Centre for Europe started as a unit of the University of Warsaw established to promote knowledge and information about European integration. This task was realised in the form of trainings, conferences, seminars, exhibitions, etc. Over time, our scope of activity was considerably broadened and, what’s more important, gradually became ever more academic. Presently, the Centre has attained the status of an autonomous, full-fledged organisational unit functioning as a faculty of the University of Warsaw. Our intensive activity includes didactics in the form of both undergraduate and graduate programmes in European Studies (europeistyka), as well as academic research. The results of our research are presented at various scientific conferences in Poland and abroad, as well as in numerous publications. We still play an important role as a centre spreading information and knowledge, e.g. through our highly esteemed library, which also plays the role of European Documentation Centre. We also have our own Publishing Programme, under which we issue two academic periodicals: the Polish quarterly “Studia Europejskie” and the English-language “Yearbook of Polish European Studies”. Furthermore, we publish various books in Polish and in foreign languages in the form of academic textbooks, studies and monographs, including the present work. While not wishing to engage in self-praise, we nonetheless should point out that our activity has been appreciated by external entities, which is shown, for instance, by the fact that the Centre for Europe has been placed in the highest cat egory in the official ranking of academic units compiled by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. We also try to perceive our activity in the broader perspective, not only as the functioning of a single institution. The two decades of the Centre’s existence is an important symbol of the transformations taking place in Poland and in Polish science. The launching of studies on European issues was only pos sible because of the general democratic transformations taking place in Poland, and its opening up to the world, especially to Europe. Our activity constitutes proof that Polish academic science has made the adjustments necessary to meet the requirements of modernity and that it continues to focus on the important challenges accompanying the rapid changes taking place in the world. We would like our anniversary to constitute a symbol of the increasingly close ties between Poland and the European Union, of which Poles remain enthusiastic proponents, even despite the current problems facing the EU. At the same time, we desire ever fuller and closer cooperation with our EU partners, as we consider this an important element in furthering the development of Polish science. We hope that the Centre for Europe will continue to contribute to this development, which is one of the aims underlying this publication. This book is the result of an international research project conducted by the Centre for Europe, University of Warsaw, in cooperation with Ukrainian universities, in particular with the Institute of European Integration and Faculty of International Relations at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. The project was co-financed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland under the cyclical programme ‘Cooperation in the Field of Public Diplomacy 2012’. One of the key goals of this undertaking was to prepare a book containing a methodological and factual introduction to European Studies. Our publication is not aimed at presenting the achievements of Polish scholars in this discipline, but at facilitating university education and academic research in this field. Hence we are not trying to devise a full compendium of knowledge about the vari ous aspects of the phenomena and processes of Euro pean integration, or to put it broadly – Europe treated as a specific civilisational area. As the title suggests, in this work we try to outline the most important notions which, in our opinion, European Studies should be dealing with. We know that the issues in question are interdisciplinary, hence the authors approach them from various perspectives: political science, law, economics, social studies, cultural studies. The publication consists of seven parts, comprising a total of 33 chapters. They correspond to individual groups of notions and concern the following problems: the methodology of conducting research under broadly-defined European Studies; the genesis and course of the integration processes in Europe; the functioning of EU law and the EU institutional system; the principles and mechanisms of European economic cooperation; the analysis of the selected key policies implemented by the EU; issues related to EU foreign policy and its significance in the contemporary world; and social issues and the role of culture in Europe. Apart from focusing on the contemporary context of these problems, we also take into account their historical background and future prospects. The authors of this publication are mainly members of the research staff of the Centre for Europe, University of Warsaw, who have devised the concept of the work and wrote the majority of its chapters. In this endeavour, they enjoyed ample and invaluable support from researchers from other Polish and foreign universities, especially from the Insti tute of International Relations and the Faculty of Management at the University of Warsaw, as well as the Warsaw School of Economics, the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, the Kozminski University in Warsaw, the National University of Lviv, and the University of Latvia in Riga. Here with we would like to express our thanks to all those who contributed to the content of this book, as well as to those who helped us in terms of organisation and funding – in particular the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the University of Warsaw.
The focal concern of this lecture is the construction of the concept of Europe. With Europe as the principal theme, it first recalls the indispensable role social movements have played and still play in the production of modern society at certain historically important crisis points from the 18 th to the late 20 th century, and then turns the attention to the construction of the concept of Europe. This process is rendered intelligible by locating it in the context of the current crisis, the relations among the modernizing elite and the dialectically interrelating dominant and alternative branches of the new social movements, and finally the cultural structures implicated. The most important and innovative aspect of this account concerns these cultural structures: the presupposed cognitive (theoretical-technical-instrumental), normative (moral) and aesthetic (endeutic-conative) cultural foundations making the construction possible and the cultural model in the guise of the concept of Europe that is in the process of being symbolically constructed. Given the current crisis situation which once again brings out the historically long-standing ambivalence in European culture due to opposing interpretations and uses of the available foundational cultural structures, uncertainty prevails regarding precisely what concept of Europe can be expected to emerge from the constructive process. While the lecture is largely couched in sociological or social theoretical terms, it raises points that might also be of philosophical interest. Introduction It is in response to a suggestion of Mihály Vajda on our previous visit to Hungary that I propose to develop some reflections on the concept of Europe. The focus is on the construction of the concept of Europe and the role both social movements and culture play in this process. Absolutely vital to this account is the nature of the cultural structures implicated in the process of construction. The bulk of these reflections are of a sociological or social theoretical nature, but they are developed in a way that might also be of at least some philosophical interest.
http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/, 2005
This paper intends to approach the recent historical process of reconstruction of national identity inside the theoretical and explanatory perspective of social sciences-sociology and communication sciences. More precisely, I place my approach within the new scientific paradigm that opened the constructivist trend in human and social sciences. The study is an exploratory and theoretical one, representing the first phase of research on the identification of some characteristics of a possible future of national identity. My research project deals with the issue of national identity versus European identity in the process of the so-called »Europeanization« dealing with theoretical and empirical perspectives of communication. Therefore, I am first interested in this/these identities' construction on a discursive level inside of media communication.
Europeanization of Regional Identities in Romania. Case Study: The Land of Moti
Romania is known as a highly centralized country, where regional identities were strongly subject to uniformization. Cultural differences and identities have although survived even to the communist regime, often in an altered form. After 1989, in many parts of the country people began to rediscover their roots and the meaning of their local and regional identities. In the same time, the temptation and the benefits to takeover European values and behaviors were extremely high and therefore Romanians oriented their identification needs towards Europe. One of Romania’s region imbedded with a strong local identity, due to its mountainous specificity and its historical poverty, is the Ţara Moţilor (The Land of Moţi). Through this study we propose an analysis of the extent to which European values have influenced Romanian local values, in particular in the Land of Moţi, on the premise that the specific situation of this region predisposes to an orientation towards traditional values on the one hand, and to more openness and Europeanization, on the other hand. Both aspects are visible in the area, our analysis intending to clarify the reasons for one and the other orientations, in order to understand the identity issues of the area.