Athanassopoulou, E. (Ed.), (2008). United in diversity? European integration and political cultures

Abstract

By setting a question mark behind the motto of the European Union, the title of this volume underlines the disruptive effects of cultural diversity in the functioning of a political system as the European Union. The collection of essays stems from a conference held in 2003 on the theme ‘‘Political culture(s) of Europe’’, the sixth symposium organised by the Eleni Nakou Foundation, this time in collaboration with ELIAMEP, the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. But the road between the original conference and the published volume was long and tortuous, as demonstrated by a comparison of the table of contents with the titles of the contributions on the programme of the conference organised in Copenhague in September 2003 and even the announced table of contents of the book on the website of the publisher. The book eventually consists of an introduction by the editor and three parts, featuring three, five, respectively four chapters. The notion of political culture is briefly introduced in the preface as the ‘‘basic orientations of the society’s members toward their system of government and toward the acquisition, exercise, retention and transfer of political authority.’’ The book is a timely and necessary reminder of the importance of political culture in the functioning of any political system and aims at offering a preliminary analysis of the diversity of political cultures in the member states of the European Union and of the consequences of this diversity for European integration. The different authors have however rather different understandings of what political cultures are. The contributors represent diverse disciplines including philosophy, political geography, political economy, political science and European politics, with a large contingent of historians. They work at universities and institutes across the EU (and beyond with one contributor based in Oslo), but predominantly in smaller member states like the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic; Rumania and the United Kingdom being the two exceptions. In her introduction, Ekavi Athanassopoulou discusses the importance of political cultures for European integration. She refers to The Civic Culture, the classic study published in 1963 by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, seemingly endorsing their definition of political culture as the attitudes of citizens towards the political system. In fact the contributions of the book rarely deal with individual