The studies in this edited volume focus on the construction of ethnic and national identities in the European public and political spheres. In introducing the volume, Richard Mole points out the importance of reexamining national identity, owing to the uniqueness of Europe in a late modern context: The increasing significance of migration and supranational collaboration in the European Union necessitate a reevaluation of nationhood and ethnic group identity. The authors approach the construction of, and challenges to, identity discourses from a number of perspectives; disciplines represented are, among others, political theory, literature and international relations.
The first thematic section of the volume, “Discourses and Identity,” highlights theoretical issues in identity construction. Don Ellis locates the creation and maintenance of ethnic identities in the circulation of competing discourses of community and peoplehood, and suggests that these give rise to interethnic conflict. Ruth Wodak’s chapter examines discursive constructions of Europe across public domains and proposes a model of European identity that focuses on tensions between notions of inclusion and exclusion relating to issues of language diversity, migration, (de)centralization, and government. The two chapters by C. Claire Thomson and Mirca Madianou discuss the relationship between national identity and the media: Thomson finds Danishness reevaluated as post-national through a reimagining of classic historical fiction, while Madianou relates different topics in Greek news reporting to discourses of Greekness expressed by informants in post-viewing interviews.
The second section, “Discourse, Identity, and Politics,” includes five studies of identity discourses in European political contexts. Erik Ringmar illustrates how organic metaphors of the state – as actor, garden, family, team – are transformed by dissenters into constructionist metaphors in order to uncover dominant ideas of statehood. Gerard Delanty & Peter Millward link liberal ideas of sovereign peoples to everyday notions of racism and cultural differences, discourses that are unworkable in a Europe where statehood and peoplehood are increasingly transnational concepts. Richard Mole, in his chapter on the integration into the EU of the post-Soviet Baltic states, explains how a reimagining of Baltic identity as European is furthered by the othering of Russia and Orthodoxy in Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian political discourse. The ideas of “old” and “new” Europe are at the center of Jan Ifversen’s chapter. Europe is being discursively refashioned, as exemplified by speeches by a president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, as broadly postnational but united: Ideas of the “old,” closed and flawed fort Europe no longer apply. Rather, the “new” Europe has learned from its past mistakes and can now act as a global and positive civilizing force. Finally, Felix Ciuta argues that discourses of European security and the expansion of NATO are fundamentally grounded in narrativity, making sense of the meaning of “security” by tying past European realities to present events.
This diverse volume brings together many social scientific and philosophical perspectives on politics, nationhood, and identity, and would be of particular interest to those interested in macro-discourse processes and the interaction between public discourses and social theory.
