What is Europe?

Anna Triandafyllidou, Ruby Gropas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350311480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Europe is imbued with a multitude of social, cultural, economic and political meanings. The authors of this comprehensive text present an authoritative yet accessible introduction to understanding Europe today, moving beyond accounts of European integration to provide a holistic and nuanced study of contemporary Europe and its historical development. This book explores evolving definitions of Europe from antiquity, to the Cold War, right through to Europe in the midst of the Eurozone and global financial crises. By examining the different roles and meanings that Europe has held inside and outside of the continent, including the European Union's 'branding' of Europe, the text grounds its analysis in an understanding of Europes plural. Chapters explore concepts of Europe as civilization, Europe as progress, Europe as unity and Europe as diversity. How do Europeans think of themselves and their respective national identities in a multicultural and multi-ethnic age? How has modernity and the pre- and post-industrial values of Europe affected the Europe of now and what are the political legacies of Europe? To what extent are notions of social solidarity shared across the continent? This is the first text to systematically answer these questions, and others, in order to better determine 'what is Europe?'

Chapter 1

What is Europe? An Introduction

It was nearly 30 years ago when Edgar Morin, a famous French philosopher and sociologist historian was writing:

If Europe is law, it is also force; if it is democracy it is also oppression; if it is spirituality, it is also materiality; if it is moderation, it is also hubris and excess: if it is reason, it is also myth, even in the very idea of reason. (Morin, 1987, p. 23)

If one asked citizens the question, ‘What is Europe?’, they would probably disagree in their answers but many among them would assume that there is an absolute truth to be found – a definitive answer to be given. They would thus argue on the criteria or the historical evidence on which a definition of Europe could or should rest. Indeed, one might answer the question through reference to public opinion surveys, another may draw on historical works or quote the words of famous European thinkers, while many may privilege a politicized and ideological definition of Europe. More often than not, in such contemporary discussions, one would conflate the term ‘Europe’ with that of the ‘European Union’ (EU).

A basic answer to the question that we pose in this book is that Europe is a geographical space: it is a continent. However, Europe is also a place: it is a space that is culturally constructed. It is a reference to the European continent that includes cultural elements, a past that is both objectively (based on historical events) and subjectively constructed as European (the events are given a specific meaning and are put into a wider ‘European’ framework of meaning), and it also has a geopolitical power dimension (Europe is a contested and probably fragmented but still rather distinct global actor).

Why is defining Europe an important question today? The reasons are twofold: first, Europe has become a reality that cannot be ignored; second, Europe is relevant in the political, societal, cultural, economic and commercial fields, as well as in the domestic sphere and in the global arena. At the same time, Europe is in crisis – at all levels. A book that tries to answer the ‘What is Europe?’ question seeks to contribute to a debate on who ‘we’ the Europeans are, where ‘we’ come from and where ‘we’ are heading. This book aims to give the tools to readers to ask and answer the question themselves. It does not provide answers tout court.

Europe today is politically divided and without a sense of direction. Even though there is a wider acknowledgement that nation-states, while still important, are too small (economically or geopolitically) to face the challenges of the twenty-first century as single entities, Europe fails to inspire its residents as to the way forward. In some cases, the European integration project almost appears to be continuing simply out of momentum, or out of fear that scrapping it would be too costly. The reasons for which the European Community (today the EU) was created, notably to guarantee peace, are now largely irrelevant, as newer generations have faint memories, if at all, of war. The Younger generations appear to be more concerned with prosperity, and it is not clear whether prosperity and economic stability are easier to achieve at the European rather than the national or regional levels, with what benefits and, more importantly, at what costs.

The implosion of the communist regimes after 1989 and the end of the Cold War has left us without a clear ideological struggle between competing conceptions of ‘good society’. At the end of the day, all questions of social justice and equality appear to be technical problems that require more efficient administrative implementation rather than new policies. Politics seem to not matter or to matter very little. In this absence of an ideological struggle, populist parties and extremist forces appear to be filling the void and gaining power. Worse still, terrorism, bred through social and economic marginalization, is occurring throughout Northern Europe.

In asking and answering the ‘What is Europe?’ question, this book seeks to shed light on the main differences and the tentative similarities that countries and people in Europe face, thereby pinpointing the main challenges that we share.

One may argue that Europe has become a central dimension of the wider societal transformation of modernity, since questioning what Europe is reflects also a questioning of what late modernity is, and how we orient ourselves towards the future (Bauman, 2004; Delanty, 2013). However, this book intends to take a somewhat different perspective: it aims to question the different facets of the Europe concept to reveal the internal diversity of the concept and not just its diachronic evolution. We wish to engage in a critical reading of the different perspectives on Europe: who decides what Europe is and what are the competing hegemonic discourses? We also seek to disassociate the concept of Europe from the current European integration project and consider how it can develop in new directions, deconstructing its past uses to inform our future plans. This does not mean ignoring the importance of the European Union project – actually this would be quite impossible. It does mean tracing its historical character and political limits with a view to opening up the horizon for considering anew the question of Europe.

Defining Europe

Defining ‘Europe’ seems to be an ongoing story that appears as an incessant effort to revisit the core existentialist questions of what makes up a definition of Europe. Throughout the course of the continent’s history, politicians, political elites, academics and thinkers have been tackling and returning to this question in elaborate, critical, as well as in simplistic, populist ways. Here, we highlight the historical and ambivalent character of the term, and offer alternative views of Europe by putting current developments into perspective. We adopt a critical viewpoint with regard to social and political developments in Europe today, and more generally in the post-Second World War period. This book is distinctively European, in that it tries to emancipate the concept from the specific project of the EU and look both wider and deeper into the origins, evolution and future of Europe in a variety of levels and from an interdisciplinary point of view.

We argue that there can be no single definition of Europe. The dynamic nature of what Europe represents is not new, nor is it a trait particular to the more recent phase of European history, namely, the EU. Therefore, we take the position that Europe is a concept that becomes meaningful in relation to its specific historical context. Mikael Af Malmborg and Bo Stråth (2002, p. 3) have argued that Europe is the invention of nation-states. By this provocative statement they wanted to highlight not only that there are different national answers to the ‘What is Europe?’ question but also that Europe is essentially a constructed nation. Stråth, like Delanty (1995), among other-well known contemporary historians and sociologists, points to the diverse meanings that Europe has assumed in history. They pay, however, less attention to the fact that Europe may have multiple meanings also synchronically. At a given point in time, depending on the perspective we adopt and the situation in which we find ourselves, Europe may represent very different things. Thus, perhaps we should speak of ‘many Europes’ rather than of just one.

Not only has the definition of Europe varied through the past centuries and even decades – as historians and sociologists argue – but its content and meaning also varies in relation to the different realms of social life. Delanty and Rumford (2005) argue that Europe has become a dimension that cannot be ignored at both the societal and the political level. Rather, we would say that there are different Europes operating in various social realms: there is a Europe in culture and/or something called ‘a European civilization’ (even if its meaning is highly contested); there is a Europe in politics and a social Europe; there is also a Europe in history and there are boundaries to Europe that are constantly shifting and changing. From a conceptual viewpoint, there is no need – and it is not possible either – to define a single Europe, drawing together all these meanings and perspectives into a single container. From an ideological viewpoint, however, it is possible to provide not only a critical review but also a synthesis of what Europe is – and also of what it should be at present.

Brand Europe

The issue of the European-ness of its people and countries that are at the geographical or cultural margins of the current EU project raises the question of power: who has the power to decide what Europe is and who belongs to it? This is a question seldom dealt with in academic and media debates, perhaps because it is judged as self-evident or, by some, as less important. For instance, decisions on who belongs to the EU are taken by the European Council, consisting of the member states, which consider themselves, and are largely recognized by other countries, as the legitimate owners of the ‘brand’ name ‘Europe’.

Their ownership of the European-Union-slash-Europe as a geopolitical project is not argued on the basis of a crude power rhetoric. The political dimension of Europe’s ‘ownership’ is largely framed into a wider claim of ownership over culture and symbols (Handler, 1988, p. 142). The Copenhagen criteria for new countries’ accession to the EU, the political conditionality principles of EU international aid programmes, as well as the official EU negotiations’ debate with associated countries, such as Turkey, or other Balkan states, supposedly reflect this value dimension rather than a crude difference in power. Nonetheless, this value debate presupposes a power dimension: the EU and the countries that currently belong to it have the power to judge whether other countries, nations, ethnic groups, territories, traditions, cultural forms or symbols are ‘European’. And as Bourdieu (1991, p. 236) has argued, to name something is to bring it into existence. The political and symbolic power to assign the European label as a brand name that belongs to the EU has gone largely uncontested in recent years. However, this was not always the case and this is one aspect of the ‘What is Europe?’ question that needs to be critically explored with a view to uncovering how this power of naming has been used in the past and what its implications are today for defining Europe. Chapters 2, 4 and 5 on the Changing Shape of Europe, on Cultural Europe and on European Identity, respectively, tackle some of these issues.

Historical trajectories

In scholarly debate, some researchers have proposed theoretical or historical models from which a definition of Europe will emerge somehow ‘naturally’ and ‘objectively’ from historical inquiry. Europe has existed in history, albeit in different shapes and with different meanings or modes of organization. The EU is simply a landmark in the historical trajectory of the larger entity called ‘Europe’. In effect, however, much of the political and public discourse assumes an a-historical perspective: it treats the EU as a development unique in history and once formed, destined to be there until the end of time. This implicit view that many media and politicians take for granted leads to the search for absolute and timeless definitions of Europe often disguising the power differentials and (geo)political dynamics behind them.

Adopting a critical perspective, Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume discuss the origins of the term ‘Europe’ and the different meanings it has acquired over the centuries, as well as the different European unification projects that have developed in the last 100 years. More specifically, Chapter 2 looks at how the term emerged, mainly as a geographical expression demarcating the Christian world and how it changed in the mid-fifteenth century. In particular, a milestone occurred after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the colonial expansion of European powers after 1492, giving way to the notion of European identity as a system of ‘civilizational values’. It is argued that after the fall of Constantinople, when the Greek Christian Eastern Empire disappeared and Europe was confined to the Latin West, the idea of Europe began to replace Christendom and eventually became a new cultural frame of reference.

The meaning of Europe is examined during the period of European explorations of other parts of the world, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Christian universal mission was replaced by the ‘white man’s burden’. ‘Europe’ as a term is of course also linked to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment philosophers identified with the idea of Europe as the process of modernity and valued the primacy of science and rationality. Europe provided the symbol of the new universal civilization predicated by the Enlightenment.

The changes in the meaning of Europe during the era of nationalism, notably in relation to both early nation formation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the more recent nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are herewith discussed along with how the term was used within nationalist discourses to signify specific geographical areas, values or populations.

A European value system?

Chapter 3 investigates the visions that Europe has stirred in recent centuries among thinkers and statesmen. However, to understand the various visions that Europe has inspired in the minds of European thinkers and leaders, it is necessary to understand the political context within which these have been formulated and the drivers of these narratives. It is also necessary to trace the values and ideas that have been associated with these visions of Europe. Chapter 3 discusses what has inspired attempts at defining Europe and unifying it and the context within which these narratives co-existed, antagonized, impregnated and succeeded one another. The chapter offers a critical reading of the various projects of a united Europe promoted by different thinkers, intellectuals and politicians in the interwar period, during the rise of fascism and Nazism as well as in the post-war era and during the Cold War. We highlight the different variants of this imagined European unity and critically discuss its west-Eurocentrism, pointing to how such projects were perceived and conceived in Central Eastern Europe. The chapter concludes with a forward-looking reflection on the meaning and relevance of Europe in the near future.

European cultural dimensions

Complementing the political dimension of Europe, Chapter 4 discusses its cultural dimension. It actually highlights the ambivalence of any reference to a European culture or value system. We try to unravel European culture and what it represents, or rather what it has represented at different times, and in what ways these representations are relevant to the present. By navigating between the ideas of Europe as civilization, Europe as progress, Europe as modernity, Europe as unity and Europe as diversity, we explore the key themes that have been dominant in Europe’s cultural battleground and their significance today. We also try to pinpoint some of the dissenters and exceptions to this theory.

We highlight some of the complexities and contradictions that make up the way culture is understood and explore the ways in which European culture has been defined, the heritages that constitute it and their relevance in contemporary understandings of European culture. We also present some efforts that have been made to attribute meaning and offer definitions of ‘European’ culture on the part of international and regional inter-state organizations, whose scope of competence covers issues of culture, education, democracy and cooperation. We also delve into Europe’s relationship with the ‘Other’, in order to underscore the cleavages, contradictions and alternative visions that have been put forward as representations of European culture and European values.

Throughout this parcours culturel, we seek the dominant, the alternative and the dissenting definitions of what is included and represented within ‘European culture’. Just as importantly, we explore what ‘European culture’ aspires to. This latter aspirational dimension is probably its most distinctive feature, as it has shaped its universalist and forward-looking dimensions. European culture acquires meaning when the commonalities, shared values and experiences of the past are constructed in a forward-looking manner. In other words, references to a European culture seem to mostly be made when its constituent parts claim their belonging to a shared cultural space in order to express a political vision of Europe and the ideals it represents – or ought to represent.

Political and public discourses also refer to the social dimensions of Europe, notably the welfare policies that aim at taking care of the most vulnerable populations in society, on the basis of a shared notion of social solidarity. However, such discourses hugely differ both among European countries and within each country. Any similarity among them must be understood in relative terms: national social models of European countries, and their ideological variants, differ significantly from one country to the other. However, they are more similar with one another than with the social protection models that exist in other countries outside Europe. Indeed, any discussion of the social dimension of Europe today must acknowledge both the different welfare models and value constellations that prevail in each society and the different historical experiences that, for instance, characterize Western/Southern European countries from their Central and Eastern European neighbours.

Loaded meanings

The different meanings and outlooks of Europe through history raise, unavoidably, the question of whether a European identity exists, or has ever existed, and in what form. Do the Europeans feel European? And if they do, how does a feeling of belonging to Europe relate to other important collective and political identities, such as national identity or indeed ethnic/minority identity?

This set of questions is unpacked in Chapter 5. First of all, we need to discuss what kind of identity is, or would be, a European identity. Should we expect it to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. What is Europe? An Introduction
• 2. The Changing Shape of Europe
• 3. Visions of a United Europe
• 4. Cultural Europe
• 5. European Identity – European Identities
• 6. The Borders and Boundaries of Europe
• 7. Political Europe
• 8. The Social Dimension of Europe
• 9. Global Europe
• 10. Europe is…
• Bibliography
• Index