European identity

Innerhalb der radikalen Rechten in Europa lässt sich zunehmend eine ideologische Verschiebung weg von exklusiven Nationalismen hin zum exklusiven ‚Zivilisationismus‘ feststellen. Dabei werden im Rückgriff auf historische Ereignisse und Entwicklungen Mythen und Konzeptionen Europas geschaffen, die das Potenzial bergen, eine rechtsradikale paneuropäische Identität zu begründen. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht und vergleicht die mythischen Konstruktionen Europas durch rechtsradikale Akteur:innen in Polen und Deutschland. Dabei werden Publikationen ins Auge gefasst, die ideologisch im Bereich zwischen Nationalkonservatismus und Rechtsextremismus angesiedelt sind. Der zugrundeliegende gemeinsame Nenner der Europakonzeptionen ist dabei insbesondere eine binäre politische Geografie eines zu verteidigenden, christlichen Europas als ‚Eigenem‘ und eines monolithisch begriffenen, bedrohlichen Islam als ‚Fremdem‘. In diesem Zusammenhang hat sich die Schlacht vom Kahlenberg 1683 – die Verteidigung Wiens gegen ein osmanisches Heer – zu einem Erinnerungsort der radikalen Rechten entwickelt. Die lokalen geschichtspolitischen Aneignungen durch deutsch-österreichische und polnische rechtsextreme Aktivist:innen stehen im Fokus der abschließenden Untersuchung, die nach dem Potenzial dieser Erinnerungspraxis für eine transnationale Konstruktion europäischer Identität fragt.

This study focuses on the European Union’s (EU) discursive construction, and representation in the process of its enlargement. It problematizes the presently common tendency of doing so in ways which portray EU expansion as an expansion of Europe. At issue are thus practices conflating and equating the EU and Europe which pervade much of related academic, political and public debates and discourses, and so structure how we know of and imagine enlarging EU. Embracing post-structuralist and discourse-theoretical analytical and interpretative framework, this work points to the political character of representing the EU in this and, for that matter, any other fashion. Pursuit of this assertion necessitates a ‘step back’ from, and critical consideration of mainstream political and scholarly presuppositions concerning the Union and its enlargement in their arbitrariness. The very problematization of practices equating the EU and Europe, or of their allied ‘Europe-building’ concept of ‘European identity’, is conceivable and ‘meaningful’ only once we admit that these are not politically innocent components of an ‘objective’ grasp on ‘present’ or ‘emergent’ social realities in Europe and the EU but instead ‘merely’ value-laden interpretative possibilities biased in favour of the EU-official federalist integration project. Anticipating a divergence in conceptions and portrayals of the Union by senior EU members, elite and institutions on the one hand, and the new post-communist Member States on the other, this study examines national discursive spaces in the so-called Visegrad countries. On the basis of this extensive empirical enquiry, it reports rather distinctive understandings of the EU/European integration therein, affirming thus the suspected dissonance from the EU mainstream. They are attributed to several factors, considerations and concerns which are posited to be very likely shared more widely among post-communist member countries. The Visegrad societies’ conceptions of the EU and of its relation to Europe converge on a number of crucial points. These can be seen and interpreted as combining into a latent alternative European integration project which envisions persisting primacy of national identifications and maintenance of the current social and political organization of European space. The EU is conceived of as enlarging common political superstructure of Europe of nations and their states rather than a certain culture-bound, ‘thicker’ community of ‘post-national’ subjects of a ‘pan-European’ federal entity with centre in Brussels. The study challenges in this context the prevalent political and scholarly tendency to reduce debates on and contention over the character and future of European integration to a binary conflict between the so-called ‘Euroenthusiasts’ vs. ‘Eurosceptics’. Building on insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis as deployed by discourse theorists, it suggests that it may be precisely the suppressed democratic conflict of competing visions and projects of European integration which greatly contributes to the lacking popular identification with the process and the EU, and prompts some ‘obscene’ or more ‘excessive’ expressions of discontent with it.

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The European Union (EU) has closely correlated different aspects of the peace process in Bosnia with progress towards European accession. The ‘power of attraction’ of EU membership would presumably induce the Bosnian authorities to accept the adaptation costs of political and economic transformation. However, the Europeanisation approach has not produced the expected results. The track record of the EU’s policies towards Bosnia represents a paradigmatic case of what would happen if almost nothing works as efficiently as in the case of the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. The article investigates the causes of EU policy failure in Bosnia and claims that the EU has not effectively responded to three challenges: 1) adjust the process to the needs of an ethnically divided post-war state; 2) preserve the credibility of accession conditionality, and 3) convey the proper messages on how to comply with EU rules. Therefore, the article argues for a more cohesive and consistent EU approach towards Bosnia.

This article contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion on textual-contextual analysis in political communication and media research. It argues that taking into consideration both text and context throughout an analysis of the process of production enables the observation of the relation between the social and the linguistic. It opens up a non-deterministic perspective for the analysis of the above relation. The article rests upon an empirical study on the production of discourses for the campaign of European Parliament elections. The use of such a multilevel approach adds important elements to the research findings, particularly in terms of showing on the one hand how power relations within ‘Europarties’ results in the construction of common European identities in different European Union (EU) states, and on the other hand how professionalization of political communication reinforces discursive dissimilarities between parties of the same ideological family in different EU states.

This chapter argues that the literature on European identity has advanced constructivist IR theorizing on collective identity mainly in three ways. First, it has allowed for an empirical analysis of the ways in which collective identities relate to their constituent national identities, underlining that collective identities do not replace, subsume, or replicate national identities, but coexist with them as an alternative form of identity. Second, it has paved the way for the empirical analysis of the ways in which collective identities relate to 'other' identities, and the conditions under which different forms of self/other relations materialize. Thirdly, the debate around 'normative power Europe' has deepened our understanding of how the foreign policy/identity nexus operates in international relations. All of these aspects had remained undertheorized in the constructivist IR literature, although their important implications had been acknowledged. Research on how the European collective identity coexists with national identities has demonstrated that even in the context of a shared institutional discourse, collective identity remains pluralistic, contested, and negotiated differently in different national contexts. Similarly, EU enlargement debates have stimulated a large body of empirical research on how European identity is constructed in relation to other identities, focusing in particular on peripheral/outsider states, such as Central/Eastern European states, Turkey, and Russia. Contrary to abstract theoretical debates on self/other relations in constructivist IR theory, the empirical research on European identity has shown that self/other relations cannot be reduced to a singular form, and that multiple and conflicting practices co-exist in the construction of collective identities. Finally, the foreign policy/identity nexus in the EU has forced constructivist theorizing to adopt a more critical approach, with a specific focus on the normative implications of the Union's actorness in world politics. The Normative Power Europe scholars and their self-reflexivist critics have merged the debates about European integration (especially about the interplay between the national level and the European level) with the debate on how the EU places itself in world politics and pursues a specific role which emanates from its normative difference.

Olaf Asbach (Hamburg) Der Wert ›Europa‹ -seine Bestandteile, Definitionen und Funktionen (aus politikwissenschaftlicher Sicht) INSTITUT FÜR EUROPÄISCHE GESCHICHTE -MAINZ 7| I. Irritationen: ›Europa‹ -›Wert Europa‹ -›Europäische Werte‹? Wird man vor die Aufgabe gestellt, den »Wert ›Europa‹ -seine Bestandteile, Definitionen und Funktionen« aus politikwissenschaftlicher Sicht zu reflektieren, sieht man sich nicht unerheblichen Problemen gegenüber. Fast unwillkürlich führt es zu dem, was manchen selbst ein Spezifikum -oder gar ›Wert‹? -europäischer Geistes-und Kulturgeschichte zu sein scheint: zu einem ob der jähen Erkenntnis des eigenen Unwissens verwundert innehaltenden Staunen samt darauf folgendem, mehr oder weniger naivem Be-und Hinterfragen des Gegebenen bzw., in diesem Falle: des Aufgegebenen. Nimmt man die Aufgabenstellung näher in den Blick und sinnt, auf der Suche nach einem griffigen Ansatzpunkt, ihren Implikationen und Dimensionen nach, so macht man eine Erfahrung, die für die Beschäftigung mit dem Europabegriff selbst höchst aufschlußreich ist: je näher man sich ihm zuwendet, desto unschärfer wird das Bild. Beschränkt man sich nämlich nicht, wie es häufig geschieht, auf die bloße Bestandsaufnahme eines spezifischen Europaverständnisses innerhalb eines vorgegebenen Quellenkorpus oder auf die Verteidigung spezifischer normativ aufgeladener Varianten, so brechen schnell Ratlosigkeit und eine neue Unübersichtlichkeit aus. Da jedoch die Vermutung naheliegt, daß diese Unsicherheit darüber, was es mit der Frage nach dem »Wert ›Europa‹« auf sich hat, ihren Grund in der Komplexität des damit bezeichneten ›Gegenstandes‹ hat, sollte sie als durchaus produktiv verstanden werden. Dient sie dazu, solchen und ähnlichen Wendungen den falschen Schein der Eindeutigkeit und Klarheit zu nehmen, so ist sie die Vorbedingung eines notwendigen Prozesses der Aufklärung über diesen ›Gegenstand‹ und den eigenen Sprachgebrauch. In diesem Sinne soll im folgenden der Arbeitsauftrag der Veranstalter interpretiert werden, wenn sie mit Konrad Jarausch zu einer »selbstreflexiven Historiographiegeschichte« auffordern, die gerade »über die Untersuchung einzelner Europakonzeptionen« hinausgeht und untersuchen muß, welche systematischen und erkenntnistheoretischen Voraussetzungen, Spezifika und Problematiken zugrunde liegen. in: Kerstin Armborst / Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele (Hrsg.) : Der Wert »Europa« und die Geschichte. Auf dem Weg zu einem europäischen Geschichtsbewußtsein,

This article aims to give a broader understanding of Lithuanian music’s contribution into the formation and transformation of historical and cultural images of and narratives about European identities after the end of the Cold War. Based on a new post-historical approach to the description of history and culture ‘in many different voices’, it is intended to explore post-communist musical imagination in Lithuania and its international reception through analysis of assembled case studies and musical criticism. In addition, it is aimed to discuss how individual artistic expressions of belonging to or exclusion from the European past and present were included or rejected into artistic discourses and cultural exchange on both sides of the ‘Velvet Curtain’, a metaphor for the post-communist state, that is, an invisible yet palpable divide, which separated “Old Europe” and “New “Europe” in the period of eastern enlargement of the European Union at the turn of the 21st century.

The idea of building a European democratic polity has been a part of the European integration process from the beginning. Advocates and critics of further integration agree that the process increasingly depends on the existence of European political identity as both a project and a legitimation of the "ever closer Union." Prosperity and peace in Europe have become inseparable from ever more cultural and "civilizational" reflections on European integration.

В статье, приуроченной к выборам в Европарламент, автор, широко привлекая данные социологических исследований, рассматривает проблемы и перспективы формирования общеевропейской идентичности. Критически анализируются различной природы основания и системообразующие компоненты таковой идентичности. В итоге автор приходит к выводу о том, что речь следует вести отнюдь не о поступательном развитии процессов общеевропейской консолидации, а скорее об исчерпании потенциала и побудительных мотивов такового движения.
In his article, timed for the elections to the European Parliament, the author, drawing widely the data of sociological studies, considers problems and prospects of the formation of common European identity. Foundations, as well as systemic components, - of different nature - of the said identity are critically analyzed in the article.

Comunicare l'Europa è un obiettivo strategico e sempre più funzionale a ridisegnare il futuro equilibrio della sfera sovranazionale, a fronte dell'emergere di sentimenti antieuropeisti e nuovi nazionalismi che minano le basi dell'identità europea. Come comunicano oggi le istituzioni europee? Che ruolo svolgono i media digitali? Con quali modalità si esprime la partecipazione dei cittadini nello spazio comunitario? Il volume risponde a queste domande, focalizzando la riflessione sull'accresciuto impatto della comunicazione dell'ue nei diversi e variabili flussi che traggono origine dall'attività istituzionale svolta dagli organi rappresentativi centrali e nazionali e dall'informazione prodotta dai media. Uno scenario contrassegnato da armonie e disarmonie, in cui la dimensione specifica della comunicazione pubblica si configura come parte essenziale del processo di costruzione della governance comunitaria. Il libro si propone come un utile strumento di approfondimento per studenti universitari, studiosi, esperti del settore e per quanti operano nell'ambito delle istituzioni nazionali ed europee per favorire la comunicazione dell'ue. Lucia D'Ambrosi è ricercatrice presso il Dipartimento di Scienze politiche, della Comunicazione e delle Relazioni internazionali dell'Università di Macerata, dove insegna Comunicazione pubblica e open government. I suoi interessi di ricerca sono rivolti allo studio dei rapporti tra cittadini e istituzioni in Italia e in Europa, in una prospettiva di valorizzazione della dimensione partecipativa. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni: Giovani oltre la Rete (Bonanno, 2012), Dal comunicare al fare l'Europa (curato con A. Maresi; Eum, 2016). Per Carocci editore ha pubblicato, con M. V. Giardina, Amministrazione pubblica e partecipazione (2006).

Based on fifteen months of fieldwork with television and new media producers at the transnational "European" public television channel, ARTE, this article describes the ways in which staff are in the midst of reimagining the channel's "audience." On the one hand, staff continue to understand television audiences as primarily national, and only nationally coherent; on the other hand, ARTE's audiences are understood to be fast-dispersing as a result of new broadcast technologies and streaming web content. To reach dispersing audiences, and to better articulate its programming across borders, ARTE has partly shifted its efforts toward regathering its public through international events, festivals, and other off-screen engagements where its viewers become differently coherent and knowable. The article argues that such a strategy re-emplaces "fans and followers" of ARTE in ways that might foster collective identifications in ways that may be literally re-placing those engendered by traditional public broadcasting.

"La démocratie est un projet idéal qui a joué un rôle clef dans les évolutions des deux derniers siècles, en se matérialisant de façon imparfaite dans une variété de constructions politiques. L'Union européenne ne fait pas exception, en présentant un discours dont la démocratie est certes une valeur essentielle, mais qui est néanmoins différent de celui des États-nations à cause de l'emphase qu'il met sur des valeurs dites "européennes" (diversité, tolérance, liberté de mouvement des personnes et des biens, etc.).

Or ce discours ne dit pas tout sur les idéaux philosophiques qui ont mené à la construction européenne, ni sur les compromis quotidiens voire les contradictions de la politique communautaire. Dans une perspective historique, cette contribution illustrera l'évolution de ces trois "niveaux" des valeurs, du XIXe siècle à nos jours. Leur opposition dialectique, toujours en mouvement, fournit un éclairage sur la "crise identitaire" que vit l'Europe élargie d'aujourd'hui."

What are the myths of Europe? This article provides the conceptual framework through which this question may be approached. It begins by defining myth in such a way as to distinguish it from other forms of political myths. From here, the relationship between mythical and historical narratives is analyzed via a study of how the main narrative cores through which Europeans have perceived themselves have worked in different periods and contexts as both. It concludes with a more detailed analysis of some of the icons that convey the myths of Europe.

Although history textbooks are highly revealing sources of what is considered worthy of being included in collective memory, they only tell half the story. The study of the non-official "parallel pantheons" of popular culture also contributes signifcantly to understanding patterns of perception and self-perception as well as mental representations of "Europe". This articles focuses on the "popular maps" of Europe that soccer has drawn over the last half-century and hints at the myths of cultural communality that underpin them. It appears that while soccer represents a somewhat ambiguous metaphor for contemporary Europe, it can also supply interesting insights into the emergence of horizontal bonds between Europeans.

As Derrida suggests in the opening pages of The Other Heading, the question of Europe is both “a question that will always be of current interest” and the product of the pressure exerted by a particular imminence.  The question, and the response to this question — what is Europe? — always refers both to the ever-present (the essential Europe), the particular or contingent (Europe as it is), and demands an equation or conciliation of the two.  In the two decades since the publication of Derrida’s text, the question of Europe has been promoted by the apparent crisis of an engagement with two imminent Others: in the form of the seemingly permanent presence of Muslim migrants and demands by Turkey to gain membership in Europe.  In response to these Others, a dual and seemingly contradictory definition of Europe has emerged — Europe as secular and Christian.  Europe is secular in relation to its Muslim migrants, and Christian in the face of secular/Muslim Turkey.  Within this dualistic definition, often voiced by the same figures, no contradiction, excess or difference is permitted.  Instead, a socio-historical paradigm in which Christianity and the secular form a necessary and symbiotic relationship is evoked.  This chapter will investigate this response to the imminent question of Europe and suggest that Derrida’s notions of Europe as difference-to-oneself, of the other heading, and the other of the heading, permit an opportunity to re-evaluate the relationship between Europe, Christianity and the secular, and open new possibilities for a Europe to come.

The EU sees itself as a beacon of LGBT-friendliness and seeks to promote these norms in its external relations. However, such identity claims and norm promotion are inherently political and should be critically examined as such. Taking a relational approach, this article conceptualises and examines the Othering processes within the EU enlargement to highlight the political nature of what is often described as a technocratic. Through exploring the triangulation of the EU enlargement, Othering processes, and crises, it is argued that 1) the use of LGBT rights as a measure of Europeanness is based on a longer tradition of defining the EU’s symbolic boundaries, but that 2) it is in perceived moments of crisis that the EU redraws and strengthens the boundaries between the Self and the different type of Others through changing combinations of Othering mechanisms. Finally, the article also argues that LGBT rights promotion is not only a tool in constructing the EU’s identity but also a source of an identity crisis, as is shown by the rise of anti-gender politics.

“Our European film culture (...) is specific, full of local colours and tastes, of accents and languages. It celebrates diversity, even more so: It keeps cultural diversity alive!” (Wim Wenders, 2010). This paper looks at the way cultural diversity is portrayed in the movie L’auberge espagnole, Cédric Klapisch’s 2002 movie about student experience in the ERASMUS exchange Program, we pose the question of how contemporary European cinema relates to intercultural identity and diversity in Europe.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (London, 1954) is one of the most renowned philosophers of contemporary thought. His work in the field of ethics and moral reach diverse subjects as sexual orientation, nationalism, social discrimination on ethnic or religious reasons and responsibility of governments and international organizations in development and poverty eradication.

The European Union has long sought to bolster its resonance with the peoples of Europe. Particularly over the last twenty years, major institutional and policy reforms have been accompanied by attempts to mould a united European citizenry. Constitutional patriotism has been seized upon by many in the EU as a potential identity building mechanism in an entity that is neither a state nor a nation. However, the attempt to take the doctrine out of its original context (post-war West Germany) has not succeeded, as the history of the failed Constitutional Treaty attests. The jurisprudence of the German Constitutional Court shows that constitutional patriotism can be deployed in support of the identity and values of the democratic state. Yet, this only reinforces the doctrine’s limitations at the supranational level, as the prospects of closer political union are circumscribed by the constitutional boundaries drawn by member states.

In this paper I argue that European Union can't help giving itself a kind, even if light post-modern constitutional frame. Among the different dynamics of integration inside the European Union, I'll focus on the conceptual alternatives that currently dominate the social science debate, which can be divided in the conceptual pairings neo-federalism and intergovernmental voluntarism. The first, the neo-federalism, refers to the dynamics that envisages the intentional establishment of a political order for all of Europe, oriented towards the fulfillment of shared values and standards (J. Habermas). The second, the intergovernmental voluntarism, analyzes functionalist dynamics driven by national and sectoral interests or contractual compromize, wherein progress is made through cooperative tactical moves that cumulatively fulfill emergent functional necessities. I conclude suggesting a kind of post-modern constitution-frame, grounded on European and cosmopolitan ethical perspectives. Among the models that are on offer it seems to me the one most likely to be well equipped to face the challenges of 21st.

This paper first draws attention to the scant literature in population geography on international student migration, or ISM. Yet students comprise an important element in global and European population mobility, especially of highly skilled movements. This study is set within the context of intra-European ISM and looks specifically at the ‘Year Abroad experience’ which has been subsidised over the past 15 years by the Erasmus and Socrates programmes. Empirical data come from questionnaire surveys to three groups of University of Sussex students, surveyed during 2000–01. The main survey was a large postal survey to graduates who had spent a year abroad (YA) in another European country as part of their Sussex degree. This questionnaire was designed to test two sets of hypotheses: firstly that the YA had given students/graduates a more ‘European’ identity or consciousness, and a greater insight into European issues; and secondly that YA graduates would be more likely to pursue their subsequent career/migration paths in continental Europe. These hypotheses were tested against a control sample of Sussex graduates who had not been on a YA, matched by degree type and time of graduation. A third sample was undertaken with second-year undergraduate students about to embark on their YA, in order to test pre- and post-YA perspectives. The results broadly confirm the research hypotheses, although with a variety of nuances and outcomes.

In this paper, the ‘Frame Problem’ in AI is mobilized as a trope in order to engage the ‘question’ concerning the inclusion and/or exclusion of Islam (and Muslims) from European – and, more broadly, ‘Western’ – society. Adopting a decolonial perspective, wherein body-political, geo-political and theo-political concerns are centered, the meaning and applicability of categorical dichotomies such as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and their relationship to the historical entanglement of ‘religion’ and ‘race’ in the formation of the modern world are interrogated in the context of understanding the nature of the relationship between Islam and Europe / ‘the West’. It is argued that the tendency within Western liberal democratic discourses to (1) frame the problem of Islamophobia and ‘the Muslim question’ in terms of misrepresentation – that is, misinformation, disinformation and ‘distortion’ of the flow of information – and (2) frame the issue of “Islam and Europe / ‘the West’” in terms of inclusion and/or exclusion of the members of a ‘religious’ minority into a post-modern, post-Christian / ‘secular’ polity circumvents disclosure of the violent historically-constituted structural background or ‘horizon’ against which such ‘options’ are generated. The essay concludes by sketching some possible decolonial responses to this critical and existentially-problematic state of affairs.

Abstract
Europeana is a large project funded by the European Union with the goal to digitize all of Europe's heritage and to make it publicly available for everyone. One of the goals of the European Union is to construct a European identity with the use of cultural heritage. In this thesis I take a closer look at the Europeana project in relation with the EU's cultural policy and the idea of constructing an identity with the use of archives and heritage. The goal of this thesis is twofold. The first is to discuss why and how the European Union uses cultural heritage to promote and construct a European identity. Second, I will discuss how different European countries are constructing their own national identity within a European context. By studying the attitude of six contributing Western countries towards the European Union and the ways they contribute their national heritage to Europeana, I hope to get a better understanding about how both nations and Europeana deal with this heritage and how it can help constructing a European identity.
This study shows that the European Union's cultural policy, with the goal to construct a European identity, uses the same strategies as nations. By adopting symbols like a 'European national anthem' and a standardized passport, the European Union wants to become more present in the everyday life of its citizens. However, the European Union can not be compared to a state because of its immense diversity and the fact that its borders can not be defined. The country research shows big differences between the amount and types of material that is contributed to Europeana. This is not necessarily related to the attitude of the country towards the European Union.
The theoretical analysis combined with the study of the European Union and the country research, has led to a number of conclusions. First of all, the European Union should not try to become a 'United States of Europe'. The European identity consists out of the variety of all the different states in it and is constantly changing. The EU must try to show its ‘unity in diversity’ and the Europeana project is more than suitable for this since it combines all of Europe’s heritage. Second, The current interface of Europeana is not able to show the cultural objects in a European context. When an object is clicked, it is shown individually on the website of the contributing institution. This way, the European context is not present. Europeana can achieve this with the help of experts who can use the primary and secondary sources in the Europeana database to create new insights in the history of Europe. The last conclusion is the fact that the Europeana project fits perfectly in the cultural goals of the European Union. Because of its role as an aggregator of aggregators, it can also very easily adopt new institutions, aggregators and even new members countries. This allows Europeana to show the diversity and commonalities of the European culture, as well as new stories and insights in the history of the world. This way Europeana can become the representation of the diversity that unites Europe.

Studio qualitativo sulla relazione tra la partecipazione al programma Erasmus e il sentimento di identità Europea. Sono stati intervistati quattro partecipanti provenienti da diversi background accademici e di diverse nazionalità. La tecnica di rilevazione utilizzata è stata quella dell'intervista semi-strutturata.

Tesi di laurea in Sociologia. Corso di laurea in Comunicazione Pubblica e d'Impresa. Relatore: professor Francesco Mattioli.

The idea of an authentic Greek national cinema and the notion of Greekness have been passionately and recurrently debated by filmmakers, critics and scholars alike, while inspiring the creation of important films. However, despite being local and national in various ways, Greek cinema did not grow in isolation but has always been in dialogue with international developments. This chapter illustrates how a new and distinctive emphasis on the European, the transnational and the cosmopolitan has gradually become an overarching and, in my view, the most representative characteristic of Greek film culture of the past ten years. It focuses on how different levels of transnationalism (political, cultural, industrial, textual) helped redefine Greek cinema and reintroduce it in the domestic and international markets. It thus provides a contextualising overview of the flourishing post-2008 Greek film culture aiming to briefly explore its major trends and patterns. By doing so, the discussion points to how these trends Europeanise and transnationalise the Greek experience, secure international funding and address non-national audiences, while simultaneously renegotiating national identity. In the process, issues regarding (co-) production, circulation and consumption practices, as well as critical and audience reception, are also considered.

AbstractIn
Politics of Friendship
the
aporias
of friendship transposed to democracy indicate that if democracy is a promise of the universal inclusiveness of each singular one counting equally, and if its fraternal or national limitation naturalizes the ineluctable decision of inclusion and exclusion, then true friendship requires dis-proportion. For Derrida it demands a certain rupture in reciprocity and equality, as ell as the interruption of all fusion beteen the you and the me. In this ay democracy remains an un-fulfillable promise.

In hat follos, an imaginary voyage to !urope inspired by the so-called "yracuse-paradigm, by means of a close reading of Derrida#s
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's !rope
, a sort of $untimely meditation$ a la %ietzsche, I critically argue that Derrida$s idea of !uropean identity, begotten by the
irr!ption
of the other, involves the radical other as a force that shos the limits of identity and of the self. &e-vieed, revisited and re-thought in the optic of the deconstructive standpoint,
The Other Heading
acquires a ne light focusing on the possible'impossible relation beteen the political and the ethical (the )ther *eading, i.e. democracy to come, !urope to come+. he deconstructive standpoint I use here falls ithin the ell non Derrida$s binary conception that undergird his ay of thining presence'absence, speech'riting, and so forth. /ey ords he philosopher and the tyrant0 the metaphor of navigation0 he )ther *eading and !uropean identity )dysseus and *amlet0 !urope and democracy to come.

This chapter deals with the refugee and migration crisis and the many challenges posed to the European Union and its member states, from the fracture of the solidarity between Europeans to the lone-wolf terrorism of young European citizens, the lack of common policies in the European Union, and the flaws of the Dublin and Schengen agreements, to the rise of new populist politicians and Euroscepticism in Europe. These correlated events generated a structural crisis of the European Union and the emergence of new alliances between some member states against further migration to the European Union and those more open to diversity and for maintaining an open European society. This paper will look at the current and future trends in the policies of European Union, but also to the position of member states, particularly Central and Eastern European countries concerning the refugee and migrant crisis, and ultimately to the rise of the new populist politicians and the failure of a common understanding of the European identity as shared solidarity and political culture.

Beyond challenges inherent to any crisis, the difficulty of finding the unifying concept for a common European identity remains. The relationship between an individual and the state is absolutely necessary for building identity, but the European identity should complement the national identity (Barber 2002). Since the European Union is not a state, rather a supranational entity is hard to imagine what type of citizenship should entail, therefore Europeans remain more attached to a national identity, however reluctant they may be to identify with one nation in such a post-modern globalized reality.

Considering that many of these trends are still developing, the aim of this chapter is to contribute to the current legal and political debate about the future of Europe, the European identity and the European response to the global migration.

STATE HERALDRY IN THE SERVICE OF FORMATION OF  NEW IDENTITIES
State symbols as an element of religious and national identity

Heraldic and vexillological ensigns represent one of the most exclusive expressions and visible manifestations of identity of their bearers, regardless if that is a physical or collective entity. This is especially valid for an armiger which is actually a state, because it represents а visible manifestation of its very essence, as well as the nature and legacy of its nation. More than often it represents a symbolic reflection of a certain national programme, as well as aspirations and pretensions of a particular state, union of states or some other pseudo-state entity. Therefore, heraldic and vexillological expressions, albeit ancient in their origin, remain contemporary and important for the preservation of state and national identity, for its formation or re-composition. It is our intention to cast some light upon certain new state symbols in Europe in connection with the aspiration of some countries in the process of their approachment to the ideology of European integrations and formation of new national or religious identity, with all of consequences emanating therefrom, especially from the standpoint and area of politology of religion.

(The English summary at pages 96-97)

Хералдичко и вексилолошко знамње представља један од најексклузивнијих израза и видљивих пројава идентитета својих носилаца или титулара, без обзира да ли је реч о физичком или правном лицу.
Ово нарочито важи када је реч о титулару који је, заправо, држава (или неки пседвдодржавни ентитет), јер она тиме настоји да символички представи саму своју суштину, као и природу и наслеђе одређеног државотворног народа, а често представља и вузуелни израз одређеног националног програма, па и аспирација и претензија одређене државе, заједнице држава или псевдодржавне творевине.
Због тога хералдички и вексилолошки израз, иако древан по свом происхођењу, остаје актуелан и важан за очување државног, верског или националног идентитета или за успостављање или прекомпоновање истог, а у складу са дражавотворним или политичким аспирацијама одређеног титулара.
Наша намера је, заправо, да овде бацимо мало светла на нове државне символе појединих европских земаља, а у склопу процеса њиховог уподобљавања идеологији тзв. европских интеграција или покушаја формирања нових националних или верских идентитета, са свим последицама које то производи, а нарочито са становишта религиологије и политикологије религије.

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
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‘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.

As Europe is facing its most severe crisis since the end of World War II Second World War, populist nationalism is on the rise again all over the continent. Parties like the AfD, Ukip, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Front National refer to nostalgic imaginaries of their respective countries, while emphasizing the divisive character of national idiosyncrasies. Simultaneously, a shared European heritage and cultural values are mobilized as uniting factors against a shared Other: Islam. These constructions of both, disjunctive and shared European pasts, however obliterate rather forgotten memories of its origins – memories of colonialism and fascism. By referring to the German context in particular, and by drawing on and expanding Homi Bhabha’s conception of national temporalities, this article argues for a melancholic character of Europe in its relationship to the past – a Europe that is nostalgic for its lost Empire(s) and anxious about its fragile territorial as well as ideological borders. Giving the example of the popular song “Wir sind Wir (Ein Deutschlandlied)” by Paul van Dyk and Peter Heppner, utilized as its anthem by the German AfD in its 2015 election campaign, I will exemplify how the unresolved past is tantamount to the present, both on a national as well as the European level.

The great conversation about America that took place in European letters throughout the nineteenth century was characterized by a tendency towards polarization and routinely cast the NewWorld either as a “dream” or a “nightmare” (Arendt). This polarization was due in part, especially in the first half of the century, to the relative scarcity of reliable information about the United States. Yet the main reason was that writers and intellectuals tended to approach America strictly in Eurocentric terms, perceiving this country, not in its own right, but as a foil for political and social issues within a European setting; those with a liberal outlook, for example, tended to extol America as a way of implicitly criticizing the prevailing conditions in Europe, whereas conservatives, for the opposite reason, often opted for a strongly dismissive attitude. In the absence of sustained, dispassionate enquiry, the European image of America, not least in the context of fictional literature, remained a battleground of opposing mythologies, pitting enamored accounts of American freedom and authenticity against glum visions of moral and cultural decay.

The Lost Valley of Iskander: Robert E. Howard, Colonialism, and the Search for Alexander in Afghanistan. Paper presented at the Fourth Meeting of the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network "Entangled Pasts and Presents: Temporal Interactions and Knowledge Production in the Study of Hellenistic Central Asia", University of Freiburg March 24, 2022.

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the entanglement of popular culture and archaeology. From the early nineteenth century, the conceptualization of ancient Greek culture as “western” stimulated a profound interest in the alleged influence of Hellenism on Central Asia and India among European scholars. Archaeologists in British India looked for Greek influence on early Buddhist art while explorers ventured into Afghanistan in search of archaeological traces of Alexander’s campaign. The travel accounts they published inspired fictional accounts, most prominently Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 story “The man who would be king”.

The development of the “lost city” theme in Victorian literature—found also famously in Rider Haggard’s colonial fantasies King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887)—went hand in hand with sensational archaeological discoveries by actual treasure hunters such as Henri Layard, Heinrich Schliemann, and Aurel Stein. Central Africa and Central Asia were the main loci for such stories, which in the latter case were closely connected to the colonial myth of Central Asian remoteness. The idea that a substantial Hellenistic legacy was yet to be discovered in dangerous and isolated mountain lands of Central Asia became widespread in western popular culture. This in turn, I argue, influenced scholarly interest and encouraged attempts to travel through Central Asia “in the footsteps of Alexander”—until finally a forgotten "Greek" city was actually uncovered at the site of Ai Khanoum.

My paper explores the topic of Alexander’s presumed hidden legacy in Afghanistan by focusing on a lesser known but paradigmatic adaptation of the theme: “The lost valley of Iskander”, an adventure story by American pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) set against the background of the Great Game. My paper highlights the colonialist and even racist ideas underlying the modern western appropriation of the so-called Greco-Baktrian kingdoms and the western obsession with finding the traces of Alexander in Afghanistan.