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Journal ArticleDOI

Mitteleuropa and the European Heritage

01 May 2008-European Journal of Social Theory (SAGE Publications)-Vol. 11, Iss: 2, pp 203-218
TL;DR: Mitteleuropa is a discourse; it is not just a semantic term or a label to refer to a geopolitical region in which power and culture are interwined as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The political significance of Mitteleuropa has grown in that much of it is now within the EU. Mitteleuropa is a discourse; it is not just a semantic term or a label to refer to a geopolitical region in which power and culture are interwined. Although people may identify with it, it is not primarily a term of identity but a cultural mode of interpretation. It can be called, along with other concepts of Europe, a conflicting field of interpretation. The concept reflects a civilizational context based on imperial models of modernity and cosmopolitan cultural resonances. Europe is an ongoing cultural battleground and the idea of Mitteleuropa is a reminder of a shift to the margins and the emergence of a multiperspectival Europe along with new notions of geopolitical space and historical-time consciousness.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1986
TL;DR: The New York Review ofBooks as mentioned in this paper is now over twenty years old and it has attracted controversy since its inception, but it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history, especially an admittedly impressionistic survey, must give some attention.
Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

2,430 citations

Book
01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: The authors argue that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication.
Abstract: Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.

294 citations

Dissertation
07 Jun 2014
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine party-based Euroscepticism across four different national contexts in the period 2011-3 by bringing into focus right-wing populist parties, focusing on the Europeanization of narratives of national identity, minority rights issues, immigration and citizenship.
Abstract: This thesis examines party-based Euroscepticism across four different national contexts in the period 2011-3 by bringing into focus right-wing populist parties. Understanding Europeanization as a label for the impact of engagement with the EU and its practical and normative influences on statecraft, policy-making, and the wider society, the thesis looks into the Europeanization of narratives of national identity, minority rights issues, immigration and citizenship. It discusses the way in which the impact of engagement with the EU is perceived as well as the nature of the arguments made against the EU’s involvement in associated policy processes. There has been a recent upsurge in Euroscepticism due to a combination of economic and political factors, on both the popular and party level in EU countries, as well as the increased blurring of the boundaries between mainstream and fringe Eurosceptics. Hence, it is important to analyze the precise reasons behind this phenomenon. The discussion focuses on “soft Euroscepticism” – the thesis is generally not interested in pondering the generic arguments against a country’s membership in supranational entities or shedding light on those parties who oppose the underlying values on which the EU project rests. The thesis therefore probes the attitudes of parties that – with the recent and partial exception of the PVV in the Netherlands – tend to emphasize relatively specific issue-areas as sources of concerns. This work is primarily based on qualitative methods - 32 elite interviews with nationalist-populist politicians including key figures such as party leaders (Rolf Schlierer, Gheorghe Funar), European Parliament representatives (Barry Madlener) and members of the National Parliament as well as of the general party councils (Ventsislav Lakov) in addition to detailed analysis of policy documentation and books authored by party representatives – and highlights and deconstructs these parties’ grievances attributable to nationalistically-oriented concerns. It includes a detailed literature review that clarifies the EU’s impacts and country-specific historical and contemporary differences in the four domains affected by “Europeanization” (Chapters 1-3) and then in Chapters 4-6 uses original empirical data to compare the attitudes of the four parties – Ataka, PRM, REP, and PVV – with regard to the issues already introduced. The thesis utilizes theoretical approaches drawn from several disciplines ranging from political science to sociology, though it mostly confines itself to those pertaining to core group or minority/ethno-regionalist nationalist mobilization, ethnic vs. civic nationalisms in Eastern vs. Western Europe, as well as the different role played by EU conditionality in relation to the political landscape on the two sides of the continent. Extrapolating from this body of research, it develops hypotheses and projections regarding the expected disconnect in viewpoints between Eastern and Western parties. The study finds that attitudes towards “Europeanized” issues areas diverge greatly and do not necessarily correlate with the extent to which EU membership as a whole is opposed by the party. In line with previous research findings, the EU’s capacity to create a super-order nationalism that could challenge conventional readings of patriotism is generally not conceptualized as a significant threat. However, the interviews did reveal that pre-existing transcendent identities – like Latin identity in the case of Romania or the Slavic one in Bulgaria - – are perceived as threatened or as being tacitly degraded due to assumed cultural biases within the EU. At the same time, the reduced salience of such identities among the members of the Western populist parties does not make them more sympathetic to Pan-Europeanism. EU effects on immigration are predictably rated as manifestly detrimental by the West European parties, because they distrust the professionalism of EU agencies and networks, dislike the Eastern Europeans’ increasing involvement in making higher-level decisions and perceive the EU as more liberally inclined than the national government in this realm (with the latter two points especially applicable to the PVV). However, it was interesting that the East Europeans also expressed some disquiet due to the EU’s supposed culpability in encouraging emigration of their own citizens and the presumed unwillingness of the EU organs to offer them the necessary financial means for combating immigration into Bulgaria across the Turkish border. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, the study suggests that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the populist party’s proclivity to regard the EU as an ally of “minority lobbies”, with the PVV (the most Eurosceptic party) assessing the relevancy of this aspect as minor, while it is gauged to be of fundamental importance by Ataka (less Eurosceptic than the PVV). Among CEE populists, the thesis shows how “privileged minorities” like Hungarians and Turks are viewed with alarm due to supposedly making use of the EU level in order to advance their secessionist ambitions (Hungarians in Romania) or improve their socio-economic prospects at the expense of the majority (Turks in ethnically mixed regions of Bulgaria). In short, the thesis establishes that there is still a strong dividing line between Eastern and Western populist parties in relation to the assessments made with regard to the impact of the EU on European identity, migration issues and majority-minority dynamics.

27 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the "intercultural dialogue" paradigm to ask whether its conceptualization is flexible enough to encompass the challenges of an increasingly globalised and increasingly diverse world, as conveyed through EU discourses.
Abstract: This paper examines the ‘intercultural dialogue’ paradigm to ask whether, as conveyed through EU discourses, its conceptualization is flexible enough to encompass the challenges of an increasingly ...

21 citations


Cites background from "Mitteleuropa and the European Herit..."

  • ...Thus, in his 1984 essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, Kundera writes that ‘Europe was no longer experienced as a value’ (cited in Vidmar-Horvat and Delanty, 2008: 210)....

    [...]

  • ...…at the collapse of Yugoslavia, when Kundera again made a public appeal to help Slovenia, and argued that ‘This [Slovenia] is a Western country’ (Vidmar-Horvat and Delanty, 2008: 210), (western) Europe stood still, and it would not react later when in Bosnia the founding idea of unification,…...

    [...]

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1986
TL;DR: The New York Review ofBooks as mentioned in this paper is now over twenty years old and it has attracted controversy since its inception, but it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history, especially an admittedly impressionistic survey, must give some attention.
Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

2,430 citations

Book
01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: The authors argues that this conceptual reorientation from the previously accepted "Northern" and "Southern" was a work of cultural construction and intellectual artifice created by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who viewed the continent from the perspective of Paris and deliberately cultivated an idea of the backwardness of "Eastern Europe" the more readily to affirm the importance of "Western Europe".
Abstract: This is a wide-ranging intellectual history of how, in the 18th century, Europe came to be conceived as divided into "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe". The author argues that this conceptual reorientation from the previously accepted "Northern" and "Southern" was a work of cultural construction and intellectual artifice created by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. He shows how the philosophers viewed the continent from the perspective of Paris and deliberately cultivated an idea of the backwardness of "Eastern Europe" the more readily to affirm the importance of "Western Europe".

1,018 citations

Book
04 Aug 2003
TL;DR: The second and third editions of the Second and Third editions of this book as discussed by the authors have been published in the last few years and are available online and in bookstores now, respectively.
Abstract: Preface to the Second and Third Edition Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Globalization: Consensus and Controversies Consensus Controversies Twenty-First-Century Globalization 2. Globalization and Human Integration: We Are All Migrants Globalization as a Deep Historical Process Utopian Visions: Human Unity as a Theme Uneven Globalization We Are All Migrants: Migration and Human Integration 3. Globalization and Culture: Three Paradigms Clash of Civilizations McDonaldization Hybridization: Rhizomes of Culture Futures 4. Globalization as Hybridization Globalizations Plural Globalization and Modernity Structural Hybridization Global Melange Theorizing Hybridity Politics of Hybridity Post-hybridity? Forward Moves 5. Hybridity, So What? The Anti-hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition Varieties of Hybridity The Anti-hybridity Backlash Hybridity and the longue duree Boundary Fetishism and Life and Death Different Cultural Takes on Hybridity Patterns of Hybridity So What? 6. Globalization Is Braided: East-West Osmosis East -West Islam-West Easternization, Westernization, and Back Again 7. Hybrid China Silk Roads New Silk Roads Hybridity with Chinese Characteristics Globalized, Globalizing 8. Global Melange Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

614 citations


"Mitteleuropa and the European Herit..." refers background in this paper

  • ...It was only with the emergence of the nationstate that people became locked within borders and forced to adopt enclosures of the modern imagined communities as their fate (Pieterse, 2004: 34)....

    [...]

Book
01 Jan 1995
TL;DR: Delanty as discussed by the authors argues that the European idea has lent itself to a politics of division and exclusion, which has been disguised by superficial notions of unity, and that what is needed is to be linked to a new politics of collective responsibility based on post-national citizenship.
Abstract: This book is about how every age invented the idea of Europe in the mirror of its own identity: Europe is as much an idea as it is a reality, but it is also a contested idea and it was in adversity that European identity was constructed as a dichotomy of Self and Other. The book analyses the origins and development of the idea of Europe as a social construction from the earliest times to the present. Its challenging thesis is that the European idea has lent itself to a politics of division and exclusion, which has been disguised by superficial notions of unity. The author traces the origins of, what he calls, the discourse of Europeanism to forces lying deep in European history such as the unifying and integrating myths of medieval Christendom, the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century nationalism whose world-views have exerted an enduring hold over the European idea. The idea of Europe, Dr Delanty argues, must be judged by how it treats its minorities and not by reference to ambivalent notions of unity. Above all there is a need for is to be linked to a new politics of collective responsibility based on post-national citizenship.

464 citations


"Mitteleuropa and the European Herit..." refers background in this paper

  • ...The making of the ‘new Europe’ is based on the project of rooting Europe as far back as possible but the historical and geographical maps of the ancestry have been intermeshed with various mythologies and clashing narratives of the descent (Delanty, 1995; Hay, 1957; Mastnak, 2000, 2003)....

    [...]

  • ...If Russia west of the Urals falls within European cultural and geographic space (and many would agree with refreshing the memory of Peter the Great’s Europeanization of the Russian Empire), then the centre lies somewhere in the Ukraine (Delanty, 1995, 1996a, 1996b)....

    [...]

Book
26 Jul 2005
TL;DR: In this paper, Delanty and Rumford argue that we need a theory of society in order to understand Europeanization and make the case that Europeanization should be theorized in terms of globalization.
Abstract: Dominant approaches to the transformation of Europe ignore contemporary social theory interpretations of the nature and dynamics of social change. Here, Delanty and Rumford argue that we need a theory of society in order to understand Europeanization. This book advances the case that Europeanization should be theorized in terms of: -Globalization. -Major social transformations that are not exclusively spear-headed by the EU. -The wider context of the transformation of modernity. This fascinating book broadens the terms of the debate on Europeanization, conventionally limited to the supersession of the nation-state by a supra-national authority and the changes within member states consequent upon EU membership. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory to contemporary issues and with a focus on European transformation rather than simplistic notions of Europe-building, this truly multidisciplinary volume will appeal to readers from a range of social science disciplines, including sociology, geography, political science and European studies.

426 citations