This article analyses the central themes in the works of Claudio Magris through a critical reading of Danube, A Different Sea, Microcosms, Utopia e disincanto [Utopia and disenchantment], Blindly, Journeying, and Alfabeti [Alphabets]. Magris’s work, be it his fiction or essays, abounds with descriptions and narrations of spaces and places, which become central to his world-view as an author. These spaces and places, located primarily in Central Europe and in the surroundings of his own city, Trieste, inspired his turn (...) to Eastern Europe, including the Slavic countries. Conscious of the Western Europeans’ often condescending view of the East, Magris became a vocal critic of Western Eurocentrism, which he attributed to their insufficient familiarity with the cultures and histories of their Eastern neighbours. Magris’s primary interest has always been Europe’s ethnic and cultural coexistence, with a particular affinity with dissident, nationless, and exiled literary figures, in line with his notion of hybrid, fluid, and multiple identities. The works of Magris offer compelling reflections on a Europe viewed through the contradictory encounters between East and West. As such they have contributed to the gradual creation of hybrid identities, which, through their historical palimpsests, have become part of a broader cultural geography. (shrink)

L’Europe et les géographes arabes du Moyen Âge : “La grande terre” et ses peuples. Conceptualisation d’un espace ethnique et politique. By Jean-Charles Ducène. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2018. Pp. 502. €27.

Le texte reproduit ici et traduit en français par Eva Beate Fuhrmann est celui d'une conférence donnée le 12 mai 1981 à Constance lors de la session d'introduction de la Fondation Alexander v. Humboldt et publiée sous le titre ‘Europa — Zur Geschichte einer kulturellen und politischen Idee’ dans Universitätsverlag Konstanz GmbH.

Religion in Eastern Europe, Paul Mojzes and Walter Sawatsky, eds.

This article argues that there is a discrepancy between Jürgen Habermas's initial plea for critical and rational identities and his more recent glorification of the European model. Initially, Constitutional Patriotism could be apprehended as a critical standard for existing political practices. However, Habermas's recent political texts tend to lose all kind of reflexive distance in their apprehension of the European identity — which is presented as distinct and even superior to its counter-model, the US. Such a `Europatriotic' temptation should be (...) resisted. The `thick' European identity advocated by Habermas has no truly federative dimension and could undermine the unique normative potential of a political entity composed of distinct identities. Consequently, the article suggests an elucidation of liberal postnationalism with a view to explaining its refusal to tie Europe's legitimacy to an identification logic. (shrink)

Rosi Braidotti, interviewed by Antonella Corsani, describes her dream of a post-national Europe, napped by plural and flexible identities. Feminists and post-colonial studies give good examples of situated ways of thinking which permit those new social cartographies. She does not urge to push margins in front; she thinks of building new transversal roads in a world whose center is wholly under capitalist power and no longer able to lead any positive transformation.

Firstly, politicians tend to define Europe in terms of space. Scientific connotations of space, however, make such procedures less suitable for cultural expression. Since Europe is obviously constituted also by various concrete elements, it cannot be located in a purely abstract sphere. Secondly, Heidegger argues that mortals should first have to "put up" with the space they are living in before developing a "technological" relationship with this space. What is lacking in Heidegger's place is the--typically European--element of multiculture. (...) Thirdly, Nietzsche recognized the crisis of eurocentrist culture in his time, all too apparent in the bourgeois German Bildung. Nietzsche suggests however, when thinking of the future of Germany, no "regionalism" which makes him different from Heidegger. Further on, the article demonstrates that as much as Heidegger is moving from spirit to Gemüt, Nietzsche moves in the opposite direction, which is from spirit to style. (shrink)

During the post-1989 period, various forms of nationalism came back to haunt Eastern and Central Europe. Why are they so virulent and so dangerous in modern times? Since the modernization of the nineteenth century, language has not only been a normal means of communication and a substantial part of human identity but also plays an increasingly important political role: public opinion, media and politics all depend on a common language, which tends to become the language of the state. The (...) process of linguistic homogenization by the state, which had already been completed in Western Europe, failed in this context. Europe will therefore have to come to terms with its linguistic diversity in the future. Is this nothing more than a hindrance? (shrink)

How can we justify a comparative study between one idea that is originally essentially geographical and another that is essentially religious? If, on another hand, we examine the two terms on the basis of their currently accepted meaning, and the two realities on the basis of their present content, such a comparison may not become more comprehensible. But in reality, Europe has expanded beyond its physical boundaries: in this sense it is the matrix and historical point of reference both (...) for America and Australia, and even for Russia. With reference to scientific and technical civilization, its inventions and attainments coincide with the modern strata of activity of all contemporary societies. On the contrary, politically it crouches within its West-European nucleus, trying to construct a new identity, limited and distinct, based on specificities that should distinguish it from everything it has projected outside, and from everything it has subjected and denied. This suggests the multiplicity of levels and perspectives. (shrink)

This article focuses on Claudio Magris’s reflections on time by interrogating two time-related notions from which his entire narrative oeuvre develops: the idea of eternal con-temporariness and his reworking of Carlo Michelstaedter’s concept of ‘persuasion’. Furthermore, it aims to explore the implications of these notions for the ways in which Magris revisits and represents both the familiar and the less familiar places that make up the fabric of his literary journeys. The discussion of Magris’s use of the two notions of (...) time begins with Danube, where he recounts the experiences of the traveler-narrator on the vast itinerary from the river’s source to the Black Sea. Following the curved and sinuous path that runs parallel to the Danube’s riverbanks, the traveler-narrator records his reflections on the ways in which the historical and intellectual European figures, as well as the ordinary characters around which the book centers, have dealt with the experience of time. In his two later novels, Microcosms and Blindly, Magris picks up the theme of reflection again as it continues to shape his wanderings through global and familiar places. In the short stories of Tempo curvo a Krems [Curving time in Krems], in contrast, the aging characters have somehow come to a standstill after migrating from Central and Eastern Europe to northern Italy. Here, Magris seems to take a different perspective, since the elderly protagonists have renounced the search for persuasion and tend to withdraw from life. At the same time, however, the narrator’s conjectures from the seashore again lead the reader back to the very beginning of Magris’s long-life literary journey “through time and against time.” By evoking the image of the river’s delta and the narrator’s sense of uncertainty when the latter faces the open sea, Magris reaffirms once again the importance of preserving a sense of the beyond through which to discover the complexity and uncertainty of one’s own identity. (shrink)

In recent decades, the prevalence of negative communication has intensified across the world. In this article, we seek to understand the mechanisms that spread negativity about a unified Europe. We study the specific conditions under which negative party communication boosts media visibility, focusing on the role of country-specific party conflicts on European Union integration. Our analysis is based on content analysis data of parties’ press releases and media coverage in the 12 weeks preceding the 2014 European Parliamentary elections in (...) seven countries. We find that EU-negative party communication by and large does not matter for party visibility in the media, though the results provide scant evidence that cross-national differences relate to a country’s party conflict. (shrink)

Penser le réel dans sa globalité afin de mieux le transformer, tel est le projet humaniste d’Edgar Morin. Chez celui-ci, cet engagement est multiple : académique, comme la plupart des scientifiques ; politique, comme nombre de sociologues, mais aussi médiatique, comme certains grands intellectuels et civique, comme trop peu de chercheurs. Un exemple de ce lien intime entre ce qu’il appelle le « bien penser » et le « bien agir » nous est donné par son analyse de la construction (...) européenne et sa présidence de l’association Europe 99, projet de civilisation.Think the real in its entirety in order to better transform, is the humanist project of Edgar Morin. In it, this commitment is multiple academic, like most scientific policy, as many sociologists, but also the media, as some leading intellectuals and civic too few researchers. An example of this intimate connection between what he calls the "think" and "do good" is given by the analysis of European and president of the association Europe 99 , a project of civilization. (shrink)

Is Europe's continuing crisis merely a financial one? Tackling issues ranging from Europe's legal, institutional and cultural identity to its border, citizenship and integration policies, and looking forward to its legacy for the future, the contributors to this volume interrogate the various dimensions and contours of the European crisis. By revisiting Derrida's diagnosis of the crisis of European identity, they simultaneously propose a new direction for Europe, and an alternative response to today's crisis.

This article applies the concept of the boundary of order to examine the multi-faceted and complex relations between the EU and Ukraine. The focus is on geopolitical, institutional/legal and cultural boundaries in order to conceptualize the EU’s reluctant engagement with Ukraine. Yet, notwithstanding the EU’s refusal to offer Ukraine membership, it softened the legal boundary to placate Ukraine’s demand for inclusion. Furthermore, the cultural boundary has become blurred through references to Europe as a discursive benchmark of ‘normality’ in Ukraine, (...) and Ukraine’s Europeanness as evidenced in its support for so-called European values. Overall, it is argued that different boundaries are subject to conflicting dynamics and that Russia has, inadvertently, contributed to a diminution of the boundaries between the EU and Ukraine. (shrink)

Europe Kidnapped: Spanish Voices on Citizenship and Exile Exile and migration are once more central issues in the contemporary European predicament. This short article intends to discuss these questions elaborating on the ideas of two Spanish authors, a novelist, Max Aub, and a philosopher, María Zambrano, both marked by the tragic events of civil war and forced expatriation. Exile and migration in their existential perspective are meant as a prologue to the vindication of citizenship.

This chapter begins by providing some historical background to European integration. It draws attention to the way that history has been used to promote a European identity since the European Union and, with it, European citizenship were created in 1992. The framing of the relationship between globalisation and its socioeconomic challenges has made the need to attend to questions of citizenship, particularly through education, self‐evident. The shift in the mode of governance has not only entailed using education as a means (...) of educating citizens about Europe: in the current context, education, or specifically, learning, has become a central aspect of how citizenship is understood. Examples of recent educational and cultural policy highlight terms that are central to producing a particular mode of governance. These examples illustrate the practices of accountability that have emerged in recent years that require governments, institutions, organisations, and individuals to speak about themselves in particular ways. (shrink)

_Europe’s Indians_ forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that (...) enabled the _thinking_ of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. _Europe’s Indians_ shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body. (shrink)