‘United in diversity’ is a self-defining slogan of the European Union. The claim it entails is normatively innocent enough, and at the same time historically irrefutable, so that everyone ought to feel satisfied with it. However, this is not the case. The construction of European political institutions has been accompanied by a discussion about a ‘European identity’, which suggests a much stronger understanding of commonality and constancy than the official slogan. The term was first officially mentioned in 1973 (see Stråth, 2000) and found emphatic expression in the debates about the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2000, as well as...

Europe made up of a Protestant North, a Catholic South and an Orthodox East, Europe divided into an enlightened, democratic and technically advanced West and a despotic and backward East – who would not be familiar with these kinds of assertions? In the historical, social and political sciences of today, the use of concepts such as ‘civilizations’ or ‘backwardness’ has become problematic thanks to the critical thrust of the cultural turn, which forced upon scholars the recognition of their own limits of objectivity and of the restrictions of macro-analysis. However, the political changes and conflicts in Europe over the last two...

In a recent survey on shared memories in European countries as crystallized in name recognition, Etienne François and his collaborators found the name of Marie Curie among the first four, next to Winston Churchill. The commitment to science as a unifying idea shared among the European nations is embodied in the name of this heroine and martyr of the pursuit of knowledge.

When we speak of European unity across different domains, we need to ask about ideas and ideals acting out the drive towards European unity. Science – I propose – conceived as a moral ethos, is one of the ideas unifying...

The so-called ‘spatial turn’ is still in full swing: by now, almost all disciplines in the humanities are affected by it (Bachmann-Medick, 2006; Schenk, 2006). Historians have been particularly receptive, eager to explore the space–place dichotomy and fascinated by aWiederkehr des Raumes, a ‘return of space’ (Osterhammel, 1998; Schlögel, 1999; see also Troebst, 2007b). But among those who are sceptical about this sudden rediscovery of geography are, naturally enough, the proponents of area studies. For them, territoriality, spatial categories and regionalizing concepts are a constituent part of their toolkit. Yet it is surprising that the new general interest...

Any discussion of Polish thought and policy regarding unity and division in Europe in the modern world – defined here, on the basis of the Polish convention, as the period since the late nineteenth century – must focus on speculation and on proposals which were largely theoretical rather than actual policy initiatives: this is because of the inconsequentiality of Poland as a geopolitical actor in the era. However inefficacious and episodic, these notions nonetheless reflect a rich tradition of speculative thought on this important subject.

I focus attention in this chapter on two political figures – Józef Retinger and Józef Piłsudski – and two...

Not all of us may be aware that among the prominent European historians who have joined the debate of the last decades over (East) Central Europe as a historical region, we find the name Krzysztof Pomian. In an interview he granted to Michel Espagne, Jacques Le Rider and Fred E. Schrader in 1993, and which was published in theRevue Germanique Internationalethe following year, Pomian offered a most noteworthy and quite original definition of Central Europe as an object of historical study (Pomain, 1994). While insisting that Eastern Europe (i.e. the world of Orthodox Christianity) represented a historical space...

In this chapter, I explore what was generally European and what was specifically Central European in the formation of modern nations in that region, and perhaps how important the continental consequences of these regional processes have been or still are. Comparing this case with other parts of Europe, I ask whether there exists something like a specifically Central European type of nation formation and ‘nationalism’.

To be better understood, I have to clarify some points concerning space and time. If we accept the opinion that European regions do not exist as timeless geographical units, we must also then define our...

East Central European perspectives on Europe are the theme of this chapter. But before tackling that topic in a direct fashion (and that means, in this case, on a textual basis), a few words must be said in defence of a presupposition: in what sense and within what limits can we speak of East Central Europe? To repeat: East Central Europe, and neither Central Eastern Europe nor Central and Eastern Europe. The former notion makes no sense, whereas the latter casts the typological net too widely and tends to lose its contours when it comes to concrete historical use.

Let...

Cultural difference between Eastern and Western Europe is often explained in terms of a civilizational divide. The most well known thesis in this respect, Huntington’s notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Western, Orthodox and Islamic constellations,² understands this difference in mutually exclusive terms and as the outcome of centuries of divergent crystallizations. The emphasis is on closed cultural configurations, whose historical development has been mostly of an indigenous nature and of a self-referential kind. As Victor Roudometof argues (1999), these assumptions are equally reflected in social theory with regard to modern nationalism and citizenship, social theory often drawing a...

In 1911, Serhii Yefremov (1876–1939), a literary critic associated as perhaps no other with the Ukrainian national movement, had the following to say of Ukrainian literature after the appearance of the first literary work published in the vernacular Ukrainian, Ivan Kotliarevsky’sEneida(1798), his travesty of Virgil’sAeneid: ‘Traversing from this time onward the phases of common European development and succession of literary forms, Ukrainian literature is marked, above all, by a struggle for national individuality’ (Iefremov, 1995:32).² To Yefremov, six years before the emergence of the short-lived Ukrainian independent state of 1917–21, it was so obvious as...

A region can be understood as an entity defined by means of ‘objectivized’ geographical, historical, economic, demographic, statistical or similar data. An alternative conceptualization focuses on self-reflection and patterns of identification of a population. (I use the softer and more fluid term ‘identification’ rather than the harder and essentialized notion of identity.) It is in this latter sense that I approach the question of Norden as a European region in this chapter. There is, of course, a link between the two approaches. Identification is based on and is reinforced by ‘objectivized’ data, and the selection of such data is influenced...

This chapter is concerned with the appearance in Western Europe of that form of civilization often referred to simply as ‘modernity’. It focuses on modernity’s fundamental inner tension, epitomized by the conflict between capitalism and democracy, and on the conditions in which a new social configuration was engendered. My objective is to explore how this tension was shaped by the historically constituted cultural trends of the countries that first contributed to its formation in the eighteenth century: France and Britain. To this end, the essay draws on the work of the French thinker Marcel Gauchet and his theory of European...