Abstract
The ideology of Europeanism – defined as a commitment to the political, economic, and cultural consolidation of the European continent – has undergone major transformations during the twentieth century. Yet the study of Europeanism has not as yet systematically examined the range of conceptual meanings that the various strands of the Europeanist ideological family exhibit. Instead, Europeanism has typically been treated either ahistorically as a set of desirable social ideals and values, or reductively as a quality exclusively associated with European institutions in their current form. Both obscure the fundamental, wide-ranging debates over the nature of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanness’ that have shaped the substantive development of Europeanist ideologies over the last century. This article maps out the key areas of conceptual contestation that are consistently shared by all Europeanisms regarding the boundaries of Europe, the degree of European consolidation, and how ‘Europeanisation’ is to be realised.
Highlights
Europeanism as an IdeologyIdeas of European unification and integration can draw on a significant prehistory, with individual precursors lying as far back as the Enlightenment or even the Renaissance, the crystallisation of these ideas into a determinate ideological form is indisputably a modern phenomenon.[2]
The turn of the twentieth century is often seen as an unusually fertile period of ideological innovation
This article maps out the key areas of conceptual contestation that are consistently shared by all Europeanisms regarding the boundaries of Europe, the degree of European consolidation, and how ‘Europeanisation’ is to be realised
Summary
Ideas of European unification and integration can draw on a significant prehistory, with individual precursors lying as far back as the Enlightenment or even the Renaissance, the crystallisation of these ideas into a determinate ideological form is indisputably a modern phenomenon.[2]. In order to counteract these tendencies, European studies – especially but by no means exclusively in its social-scientific guise – needs to adopt a ‘longitudinal’ account of Europeanism as an ideology, drawing on recent developments in the intellectual history and historiography of European integration The onus for this account lies on capturing the changing structural configuration of Europeanism’s constituent concepts as well as the cumulative and (dis)continuous development of these concepts’ meanings, and contextualising these meanings to the intentions with which they were introduced within different Europeanist intellectual traditions.[18] it needs to recentre ‘Europe’ or ‘Europeanness’ (not ‘European values’ or the European Union) as the constitutive subject of Europeanism within its conceptual content – i.e. the place(s) and people(s) around which the Europeanist ideological family is built, and which act as the unique loci and objects of contestation for Europeanism’s conceptual meaning. It discusses different historical approaches towards the strategic sequence and speed at which European consolidation is to be realised, and whether its final achievement marks a teleological point of closure for Europeanist ideological aspirations
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