Suchergebnisse

Globalization and successive waves of economic crisis are eroding nation state sovereignty and shaking the social pact upon which modern states base their legitimacy. At the same time, nationalism is naturalized in today's society, being a powerful symbolic tool whereby people can be emotionally mobilized whenever the nation is perceived to be at risk. Nationalism may cast away its banal appearance and take up xenophobic tones, advocating for ethnos (cultural imagined community) to be the basis legitimizing polis (state) at the expense of cives (citizens' rights and duties). But, can the realm of affectivity be dissociated from the rational realm of rights and duties? Can civic and political participation be decoupled from cultural and territorial dimensions of citizenship? This chapter discusses this in light of the crisis of nation states, and reflects on the notions of social pact, imagined community, banal nationalism and demos in relation to the Catalan crisis.

Concerned about a lack of legitimacy, European Union (EU) institutions have increasingly engaged in memory politics to enhance European identity. Yet, memory of the EU is still closely connected to the collective identity formation of nation-states, especially in the field of education, the focus of this study. Inspired by this dilemma, the present paper examines the representations of European unification in textbooks of six countries: Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Hungary, and Estonia. By focusing on countries on the margins of Europe, the present study explores shared and diverse narratives of the European unification process and asks whether or not a shared historical charter of European unification exists. All together 86 history textbooks used in upper secondary school were analysed by adopting a three-step multi-method approach. The results suggest that the representation of European unification is more diverse than it is homogenous. It can be narrated as a political value community or as a community based on utilitarian interests, or it can be represented from a unified European or from a more national perspective. Exploring representations of European unification is crucial to understanding how they can be used as legitimizing charters to navigate through the European challenges of the 21st century.