Construction Of European Identity Research Articles

European Identity: Diversity in Union

This paper discusses the dynamics of identity within the European Union. The authors describe the necessary preconditions for the development of European Identity; including the value of freedom, equal rights and a re-conceptualization of the concept of solidarity in the context of citizenship. Highlighted are how debates about immigrant rights, the rise of neo-racist movements, and the role of political parties create a sociopolitical context for the reassertion of nation-state power, giving rise to neo-national and neo-communitarian sentiments. In contrast, the construction of European Identity requires the development of intercultural competencies and shared framings of common interests.

The Vision of a Future Europe: Infectious or Infected? The Position of Education

This essay aims to examine the discourse that conceptualizes the educational exchange and the European culture within the framework of a theory of European identity construction. Then, I shall discuss the main positions of this discourse, their concern with the global market and their indifference about political and material inequalities. The following question is posed: which are the innovative proposals that could set in course an ideal of a unified, just and radical Europe? A first approach to it is provided by Habermas' and Derrida's recent publications. Their views constitute the starting point of my intervention in the debate on the educational future of Europe and the inculcation of a European identity in students' consciousness. But my response to the above question challenges the kind of European philosophical discourse that does not rethink the main objectives of the social and political elites of Europe. I suggest that we criticize the dominant position of those elites and that we promote an alternative normativity of equality and justice. In the absence of such a normative condition, the bad side of modernity may continue to prevail and serve the material and symbolic interests of the privileged European classes.

Dogville Characterized by The Grapes of Wrath: European Identity Construction through American Genre Conventions

Dogville's (Lars von Trier, DK, 2003) widely recognized anti-Americanism is most apparent in the end credits, a montage of documentary photographs of American deprivation, accompanied by David Bowie's Young American critics have reacted strongly to the film and to the credits' photomontage. Many photographs are of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the time frame of Dogville's story. The Farm Security Administration's photographs in Dogville's credit sequence particularly recall another fiction film set in the Depression years, The Grapes of Wrath ( John Ford, US, 1940), based on John Steinbeck's novel-both Steinbeck and Ford were inspired by the FSA photos. A closer look at the FSA pictures and a specific analysis of some crucial scenes in The Grapes of Wrath may help to explain what it is about Dogville's European outlook on America that is so disturbing for Americans. More significantly, a closer look at The Grapes of Wrath helps to focus on Dogville's Europeaness. Both Dogville and The Grapes of Wrath are critical about the narrow mindedness of local communities, notoriously unable to deal with the arrival of refugees into the relative quiet of their own circle. The Grapes of Wrath explicitly depicts the fate of Oklahoman victims of capitalist agricultural reform, and ultimately legitimizes Roosevelt's New Deal federal policies overcoming regional protectionism. Dogville allegorizes the contemporary plight of economic refugees and political asylum seekers and ultimately represents the revengeful consequences of misunderstanding the intruder's motives for fleeing. The Grapes of Wrath is a road movie depicting the construction of identity of the American people, a newly created self-invention in a settler society. Dogville, on the other hand, with its dead-end community, may metonymically depict the disintegration of American identity, but at least also presents us with the reluctance of Europeans to overcome their own nation-state confines. Dogville's Credit Sequence Dogville the DVD includes coverage of the press conferences in Cannes 2003 and other PR materials. The film's production notes and von Trier's ironic statements about the legitimacy of his judgments as an outsider regarding American mores, both in Dogville and in his media-hyped performances at the Cannes film festival, have generated attention beyond the scope of film journalism. The production notes and the Cannes events relate Dogville to Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, US, 1942). In von Trier's own words: I went to Cannes with Dancer in the Dark, and I was criticized by some American journalists for making a film about the USA without ever having been there. This provoked me because, as far as I can recall, they never went to Casablanca when they made Casablanca . . . Although I must say, I am better informed about the USA than the people who made Casablanca were about Casablanca.1 Hollywood never really bothered about the actual Casablanca before releasing Curtiz's Casablanca in 1942, so why should von Trier be required to check whether or not his depiction of small-town America would be an accurate representation of moral crisis during the Depression of the 1930s? This jesterlike gesture, of course, was meant as a provocation, and it should not be taken all too seriously as an argument qualifying von Trier for moral judgment or political criticism. And of course, Casablanca has not been canonized because of its accurate representation of Casablanca, but because it is recognized as a great Hollywood studio film. Even though representations may appear to be questioned here, then, representational accuracy is not von Trier's major issue. Not that accuracy is beyond von Trier's interest; his concern for a narrative, voiceover solution to the fact that there are no elms in the Rocky Mountains and thus no elms on Elm Street in Dogville proves otherwise. But then again, Elms are not important for moral judgment, American appropriations of the so-called universal human condition are. …

Migrating borders: an introduction to European identity construction in process

This introduction to the edition provides the historical, geopolitical and methodological context for a programme of collaborative research conducted between 2000 and 2003 in sets of communities on the border between the EU and its south-)eastern ascendant nations. Our analysis is framed by interlinking comparative themes which form the cores of the different articles contained in this special issue. This opening article argues that the geopolitical dimension of the border needs to be understood both as an axis of past conflict and painful memories, and as an axis of contemporary socio-economic inequality. Only by understanding this double legacy and its effects on the communities along the border can ongoing conflicts between the people on either side of the border be fully understood.

The E-economy and the Culinary Heritage

The A. shows how the rhetoric of food can be used as a tool in the construction of European identities. Meals, shopping, cooking, manufacture and marketing are used as a mean to achieve the goal of a distinctive European character - particularly through the encouragement of culinary diversity. By talking of identities in the plural, the A. wants to demonstrate that, parallel to the intention of strengthening a pan-European community, food can be used to highlight many contrastive identities. The labelling of food with texts and pictures offers a symbolic field that is redolent with meaning, where questions of distinction and categorization, belonging and anchorage in a changeable world are both raised and answered.

Discourses of globalization and the social construction of European identities

Debates within international political economy have revealed the problematic nature of the relationship between globalization and regional economic integration. The literature in European Union studies has tended to treat global context as external and structural to the processes of integration and the Europeanization of governance functions. This article develops a constructivist position on this issue by investigating the operation of discourses of globalization within selected EU policy circles. It explores the proposition that- to an extent- globalization can be a powerful component of the social construction of external context that in turn helps to legitimate certain sorts of policy at the EU level. The article explores the types of knowledge about globalization at work in EU policy-making and how and why this knowledge is used. It suggests that a narrow, economistic conception of globalization dominates, but that this can lead to a variety of policy pathways.