European Ideas Research Articles

Seeing Blackness through Black Expressive Culture: A Reading of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness

This article examines visual and textual representation of blackness in contemporary black expressive culture. Its primary objective is to discern what blackness means and looks like when seen from the point of view of contemporary black expressive culture. To assess this, I first, briefly, analyze and interpret blackness. Second, I interrogate how contemporary black practitioners critique European ideas of blackness and mirror the complex multidimensionality of black subjecthood by conducting a formal analysis of two pieces of South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness series. Third, I explore the relationship between visual and textual imagery and their involvement in discourses on race. My intention is to reveal the role text and images play and have played in shaping the concept, perception, and representation of blackness; the visual effect they have had on the black imagination; and the heavy responsibility placed on black writers and artists not only to correct these images but to create images for the collective more often than for themselves.

The Effectiveness of Energy Cooperatives Operating on the Capacity Market

The European Green Deal aims to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 by shifting to a clean circular economy, combating biodiversity loss and reducing pollution levels. In Poland, whose economy invariably remains one of the most dependent on coal consumption in Europe, institutional responses to the above EU objectives have taken the shape of energy cooperatives aimed at filling the gaps in the development of the civic dimension of energy on a local scale and the use of potential renewable energy sources in rural areas, including in relation to the agricultural sector. This article is a continuation of the authors’ previous research work, which has so far focused on the analysis of the development of profitability of Polish institutions that fit into the European idea of a “local energy community”, which includes energy cooperatives. In this research paper, they present the results of subsequent research work and analyses performed on the basis of it which, on the one hand, complement the previously developed optimization model with variables concerning actual energy storage and, on the other hand, analyze the profitability of the operation of energy cooperatives in the conditions of the “capacity market”. The latter was actually introduced in Poland at the beginning of 2021. The research took account of the characteristics of energy producers and consumers in rural areas of Poland, the legally defined rules for the operation of the capacity market and the institutional conditions for the operation of energy cooperatives that can use the potential of energy storage. A dedicated mathematical model in mixed integer programming technology was used, enriched with respect to previous research, making it possible to optimize the operation of energy cooperative with the use of actual energy storage (batteries). Conclusions from the research and simulation show that the installation of energy storage only partially minimizes the volume of energy drawn from the grid in periods when fees related to the capacity market are in force (which should be avoided due to higher costs for consumers). The analysis also indicates that a key challenge is the proper parameterization of energy storage.

EU institutions and ICT: a new challenge in transparency and dialogue with citizens

PurposeThis paper starts by presenting a theoretical framework based on the evolution of this problem through the EU treaties and a literature review. The focus is then turned to the role of some European institutions, namely, the European Parliament, through the Committee on Petitions, and the European Ombudsman for their close relationship: the information and communications technology (ICT)channels that introduced new mechanisms of communication and information; and what level of use this system of dialogue assures citizens’ rights to petition and to complain.Design/methodology/approachThe first decades of the history of the European Union did not consider the link with citizens as a central priority in the evolution of the European integration process. The idea of Europe, built step by step, was much more dependent on the states’ political elites and bureaucratic European institutions. The democratic deficit, however, changed the perspectives of the different actors involved in the institutional framework. New initiatives were introduced alongside treaties to make the integration process more transparent and closer to European citizens.FindingsThose results can be confirmed through the statistics and reports presented annually by those institutions.Originality/valueDue to innovation in the use of ICT, transparency and dialogue with citizens became much more effective.

Fear of the angry mob

ABSTRACT The Capitol breach that occurred on 6 January 2021 immediately revived images of protest crowds as irrational, emotional, violent, and out of control. This frame had flourished for millennia, but had been displaced by more sympathetic ideas about protest in recent decades. Inspired by the civil rights and feminist movements, scholars had come to see street protest as politics by extraordinary means for those closed off from more mainstream channels of influence. Journalists, politicians, and police did not entirely change their minds along with researchers, but they had softened their views somewhat: protestors are not necessarily criminals to be attacked. In a society where protest is common, Americans had developed more nuanced thinking and feelings about crowds – all of which went out the window on January 6th. In this paper I trace some of the history of European and American ideas about crowds in order to show how easy – and how mistaken – it is to see a crowd of protestors as “a hostile crowd” or “a violent crowd,” or simply “the mob.”

Próby normalizacji polskiej terminologii ekonomicznej w XIX wieku na podstawie prac Fryderyka Skarbka i Józefa Supińskiego

The object of the linguistic analysis is the Polish economic terminology, which intensively evolved in the 19thcentury under the influence of new Western European ideas related to technological progress and develop-ment of the capitalist economy. This paper presents the rules for coining new terms and assimilating bor-rowings (mainly from French) into the Polish scientific literature. Attempts at standardisation of the Polish economic terminology, consisting in the systematisation of notions, polarisation of terms, and specification of their semantic scope are characterised based on studies by Fryderyk Skarbek and Józef Supiński. The aspi-ration for separating economic categories from legal ones and terms from colloquial lexis is illustrated with selected examples. The methods of popularising the knowledge of economics and the related terminology in the society applied by both scholars are also indicated here.

Institutionalizing cultural Europeanism: between transnationalism and national identity (1948-1954)

Cultural Europeanism is a variant of the process of European integration attested within the framework of the Cold War. It will be mostly anti-communist, although it will couch elements favouring West-East dialogue. The governments will promote an intergovernmental model based on multilateral cooperation and national identity, and put into practice in institutions such as the Western Union or the Council of Europe. Non-governmental organizations, such as the European Movement, will be committed to a more transnational model based on the affirmation and promotion of the idea of Europe through institutions such as the College of Europe, the European Centre for Culture or the European Cultural Foundation. Within cultural Europeanism, networks of secondary institutionalization, such as educational seminars, ended up having as much or more impact than the primary entities from which they emerged.

Questioning territories and identities in the precolonial (nineteenth-century) Lake Kivu region

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

Mapping the Idea of Europe – Cultural Production of Border Imaginaries through Heritage

ABSTRACT In contrast to recent reinforcements of Europe's internal and external borders due to the refugee situation on the Mediterranean and the Covid-19 outbreak, talk of European borders has in the past decades focused on the freedom of mobility guaranteed by the Schengen treaty. In many senses, free intra-European mobility has become a recited truth in the EU discourse: a phrase that hides under its repetition the gap between its implied content and empirical realities of many of those who are affected by European borders’ exclusive tendencies. Through the concept of borderscape, this article focuses on the role that cultural products – especially maps exhibited at heritage sites – have in reciting ideas of European borders. In this context, ideas of European heritage are approached as a bordering practice – as an active process of creating, sustaining and challenging cultural border imaginaries and the many in/exclusion they imply. Empirically the article is focused on the European Heritage Label (EHL), a recent heritage action of the European Union (EU). The article asks what is the relationship between national and European representations of space; how are Europe's external borders represented; and what kind of cultural power hierarchies can be identified behind these representations?

Agon, los a może fatum? Milana Kundery zmagania z Europą Środkową

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the Central European idea in Milan Kundera’s work. The study analyses key works for the Central European category: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe. This text is an attempt to create the Kundera’s dictionary of Central Europe, and therefore it addresses such categories as fate and fate, memory and forgetfulness, scapegoat theory and the metaphorical death of the novel. The article highlights the key role of culture as a matter of Central European identity in opposition to the dominant historical-political discourse.

The influence of Joseph de Maistre on the monarchical idea of Kuga Katsunan

ABSTRACT This article aims at clarifying the influence of Joseph de Maistre on the monarchical idea of Kuga Katsunan. Whereas the first generation of Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji era like Fukuzawa Yukichi tried to unconditionally absorb and assimilate European ideas and knowledge, Kuga Katsunan learned from de Maistre how to resist the Europeanisation of Japan. Kuga’s nationalism maintained Japan’s ‘independence’ without, however, rejecting European ideas and knowledge, and considered Japanese nationalist ideas and knowledge as the new ones that were born internally from the spontaneous development of a set of Japanese traditional ideas and knowledge. These values derive, concretely, from the communitarianism of knowledge that Maistre developed against the individualism of the Enlightenment. According to Joseph de Maistre’s thought on the sovereign, the sovereign’s function consists in connecting all nations to their national reason. This thought influences Kuga’s ideas on the emperor of Japan: his emphasis on Japan’s ‘unbroken line of emperors’, on the emperor’s coordination of three political powers, on the Constitution’s superiority to the emperor, and on the emperor’s lack of any particular inclination.

The Perception of Time in European and Chinese Cultures

The article provides a comparative analysis of the perception of time in Europe and China. Time is considered as one of the fundamentals of mentality. The author presents the specifics of mythological time, distinguishing sacred and profane times and analyzing the correlation between time, space, things, and their repetition. European logos time, which becomes mainstream in Modern Times, is examined. The article describes the postmodern period that took shape in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The formation and contemporary image of time in China is traced in detail. This perception of time suddenly turns out to be the most relevant to today’s needs: in Chinese culture, time and space are closely connected, linearity is combined with cyclicality, involvement is combined with distancing, immovability and the ability to wait for the right moment – with an instant reaction. In Chinese culture, innovations are introduced under the guise of tradition (repetition), and activism, which has always been especially emphasized as the specificity of the modern Europe, as it turns out, is the most important characteristic of the Chinese (in contrast to traditional European ideas about Chinese passivity). Under modern “network” conditions, the substantial understanding of things, which is characteristic of European culture, has given way to a networking perception, which is specific to the Chinese (things as a network, a person as a plurality). This is a network in which interactions are carried out simultaneously and in different directions. By itself, a comparative analysis of mentalities yields important results and allows to draw far-reaching conclusions that are essential for understanding both the European and Chinese visions of the world. In conclusion, it becomes clearer what features of the Chinese mentality made possible not only the entry of China into the group of developed countries but also its transformation into one of the leaders among the world powers.

Wollstonecraft in Jamaica: the international reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Men in the Kingston Daily Advertiser in 1791

ABSTRACT Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days earlier in November 1790 than previously documented. Second, Wollstonecraft’s first known instances of public reception beyond Britain were in a major Jamaican newspaper from January to March 1791. Thirdly, and most notably, in February 1791, the Kingston Daily Advertiser published a lengthy excerpt from her Rights of Men that called for the abolition of slavery and the realization of justice for the poor and oppressed. Long before Hegel probably developed his master-slave dialectic in response to journalistic accounts of the independence of Haiti in 1804, there was Wollstonecraft’s actual reception in the international news in Jamaica, amid the spread of reports of the rise of slave unrest in the broader post-revolutionary Caribbean.

Study on thermal performance of a PCM enhanced hydronic radiant floor heating system

Radiant floor systems enhanced with Phase Change Materials (PCMs) could achieve significant energy savings while improving the thermal comfort of occupants in lightweight buildings. Effective integration of PCMs typically requires customised solutions based on a comprehensive analysis due to their complex nature. The objective of the present study is the experimental and numerical investigation of a hydronic radiant floor heating system integrated with macroencapsulated PCM. Experimental tests were carried out on a laboratory-scale by the University of Ferrara, Italy, within the H2020 European project IDEAS. A 2D model was then implemented in COMSOL Multiphysics and calibrated in steady as well as in transient state according to the experimental tests. The behaviour of the system, including temperature distribution and heat flux, were analysed under different conditions. The impact of using dry and wet sand, as well as the effect of the position of PCM – above or under heating pipes – on thermal performance, were investigated. Results showed that the use of high thermal conduction in mortar increases much faster the overall performance of the PCM integrated underfloor heating system. Furthermore, the coupling technology with PCM containers installed under piping significantly enhances the positive effect of wet sand.

‘Indian Gowns Small and Great’: Chintz Banyans Ready Made in the Coromandel, c. 1680–c. 1780

The article focuses on the close study of a group of eighteenth-century chintz nightgowns that were ready-made or partly ready-made in India for the European market. Whereas nightgowns are usually associated with the taste for the exotic and the spread of the fashion is sometimes linked to the availability of the garment on the ready-made market, the production of ready-made gowns in India and the methods put in place to manufacture these commodities have not been studied. Based on a close reading of surviving chintz nightgowns, the article attempts to understand production techniques put in place by Indian craftsmen to meet European demand. Material evidence suggests streamlined production processes were in place in India from the end of the seventeenth century that had no real equivalent in Europe. The article thus sheds further light on the idea of Europe's ‘Indian apprenticeship’, showing that Indian mastery of colour was coupled with production methods combining artisanal, non-mechanized work with a level of bulk production and enhanced efficiency.

Ambivalent Mestizaje

This essay examines the complex legacy of Chicanx encounters with the enduring sixteenth-century “idea of Europe”: that is, Europe as an epistemic category signifying the modern “civilized” Western world. Chicanx intellectuals contest the presumption that Europe is the enlightened antithesis to Mesoamerica. But Europe has always occupied a vexed status in the Chicanx literary imagination. Even Alurista’s seminal 1971 collection of cultural nationalist poetry, Floricanto en Aztlán, involves an eclectic blend of the Spanish Golden Age literary mode of “desengaño” (an ecclesiastical form of demystification) and the Nahuatl “In Xochitl In Cuicatl” (Flower and Song) ritual poetics of transcendence. Chicanx life writing has never resolved this paradoxical filiation with Spanish culture, which persists as a specter. This essay recovers and reassesses select twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chicanx testimonial journalism, autobiographical fiction, memoir, archival documents, and an opera to show how various Chicanx invocations of Spain involve predictable as well as unexpected encounters, exchanges, and alliances that illuminate a profound ideological dissensus in Chicanx self-fashioning. These variously globalized Euro-Chicanx syntheses, or Euro-Chicanidades, pressure teleological models of Chicanx ontology and epistemology and gesture toward post-Chicanx and broader post-Latinx modalities that portend a global Latinidades paradigm.

THE ENDURING PUBLIC STRUGGLE TO CONSTRUCT, CONTROL, AND CHALLENGE HISTORICAL MEMORIES

ABSTRACTSumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts.

Global History, Area studies, and the Idea of Europe

In most history departments on the European continent Europe is History while the history of other regions only can be described as “area studies.” This paper investigates the long-term origins of these attitudes, since Humanism and the Enlightenment, down to Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries forms of history writing. It finally suggests to overcome area studies and decentralise social sciences.
 
 Image Caption: Giovanni Maria Cassini, Globo terrestre, in Nuovo atlante geografico universale delineato sulle ultime osservazioni (Rome, 1790). © 2000 by Cartography Associates, under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence.

Ideas about Trans-Pacific Origins and Voyages in Early Spanish Chronicles from the Americas

ABSTRACT During their explorations of the Americas and the South Sea, the Spanish pondered the question of the origins and ancient voyages of the Indigenous people they encountered. They also documented sightings of local raftsmen along the American Pacific coast and chronicled knowledge gained from them about lands to the west. These writings are not only part of the history of ideas of trans-Pacific contact; they have also been used as evidence demonstrating these contacts—as secondary sources concerning pre-European Indigenous traditions. This article describes and analyzes the earliest European ideas about trans-Pacific contacts or origins concerning the Americas, based on a detailed reading of some of the earliest chronicles. It argues that the central influence of the European intellectual landscape appears to have been the belief that both the biblical traditions and new geographical theories were converging in order to motivate the discovery of lands to the west.

Recognition Across French-German Divides: The Social Fabric of Freedom in French Theory

ABSTRACT In his recent book, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European ideas (2021), Honneth has explained how he understands the French concept of recognition. This article places Honneth's latest interpretation in the context of his long-standing and evolving engagement with French theory over several decades. Honneth acknowledges his significant debt to a French tendency to view recognition as a problem for self-realisation (and not an opportunity). Bourdieu's and Boltanski's account of how ambitions become limited by the availability of capital and the internalisation of class was a major breakthrough in Honneth's intellectual development. Other formative French influences included the articulation of denigration in existentialist phenomenology, and the idea of regulative power in Foucault, with “deconstructive” asymmetrical care presented as productive but comparatively less important. The discussion also reveals why Honneth presents the “German” concept of recognition as having basic explanatory force (as an opportunity for self-realisation), and why he resists what he views as a French-influenced tendency (also present in some contemporary German critical theory) to depict recognition as ambivalent. The discussion reveals, on one hand, how working across perceived divides can be immensely productive, and, on the other hand, why a French-German divide remains entrenched in contemporary thinking.

The Idea of Europe in Football

The Idea of Europe in Football