Behind The Myth Of European Union

The vision of the original arhitects of the European Community was to create a Europe of economic prosperity and social harmony. Economic integration has come ever closer, but sustained growth and a reduction in social disparities seen as far away as ever. This book examines the prospects for the real cohesion in Europe and find that, far from promroting it, many of the Community's current policies are divisive. The neo-liberal philosophy at the moment is producing policies which favour relatively wealthy regions and major corporations at the expense of less favoured regions and peoples.

Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand explore the formative process of a European identity situated between myth and memory.

Myths of Europe focuses on the identity of Europe, seeking to re-assess its cultural, literary and political traditions in the context of the 21st century. Over 20 authors - historians, political scientists, literary scholars, art and cultural historians - from five countries here enter into a debate. How far are the myths by which Europe has defined itself for centuries relevant to its role in global politics after 9/11? Can 'Old Europe' maintain its traditional identity now that the European Union includes countries previously supposed to be on its periphery? How has Europe handled relations with the non-European Other in the past and how is it reacting now to an influx of immigrants and asylum seekers? It becomes clear that founding myths such as Hamlet and St Nicholas have helped construct the European consciousness but also that these and other European myths have disturbing Eurocentric implications. Are these myths still viable today and, if so, to what extent and for what purpose? This volume sits on the interface between culture and politics and is important reading for all those interested in the transmission of myth and in both the past and the future of Europe.

The history of the European Community/European Union's (EC/EU) development is a narrative of crises generated and resolved. To date, the resolution of crises in community affairs has furthered European integration. The characteristic pattern of integration is dialectical-two steps forward and one step back-with crises both accounting for the steps backward and forward. This book examines why the crises were constructively resolved, rather than the often explored how of the resolutions. This work contends that European myths, which emerged from Europe's cataclysmic experiences in World War I and II, cement the member states within the EC/EU, and lead to greater social, economic, and political integration with the EC/EU. During the periodic crises, the European myths have eliminated every choice except the choice to move European integration forward. Professor Sam-Sang Jo's analysis argues that once the European myths weaken, the tensions among EU member states are likely to escalate.

The recent announcement that Google would digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long - dreamed - of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infrin...

This book is concerned with the two-pronged question of how the relationship between citizens, the state and EU institutions has changed, and how direct democratic participation can be improved in a multi-layered Union.

Modern-day Europeans by the millions proudly trace back their national identities to the Celts, Franks, Gauls, Goths, Huns, or Serbs--or some combination of the various peoples who inhabited, traversed, or pillaged their continent more than a thousand years ago. According to Patrick Geary, this is historical nonsense. The idea that national character is fixed for all time in a simpler, distant past is groundless, he argues in this unflinching reconsideration of European nationhood. Few of the peoples that many Europeans honor as sharing their sense of ''nation'' had comparably homogeneous identities even the Huns, he points out, were firmly united only under Attila's ten-year reign. Geary dismantles the nationalist myths about how the nations of Europe were born. He contrasts the myths with the actual history of Europe's transformation between the fourth and ninth centuries--the period of grand migrations that nationalists hold dear. The nationalist sentiments today increasingly taken for granted in Europe emerged, he argues, only in the nineteenth century. Ironically, this phenomenon was kept alive not just by responsive populations--but by complicit scholars. Ultimately, Geary concludes, the actual formation of European peoples must be seen as an extended process that began in antiquity and continues in the present. The resulting image is a challenge to those who anchor contemporary antagonisms in ancient myths--to those who claim that immigration and tolerance toward minorities despoil ''nationhood.'' As Geary shows, such ideologues--whether Le Pens who champion ''the French people born with the baptism of Clovis in 496'' or Milosevics who cite early Serbian history to claim rebellious regions--know their myths but not their history.