Abstract
When Jean Monnet, in 1943, wrote that ‘there will be no peace in Europe if States are reconstructed on the basis of national sovereignty … Prosperity and vital social progress will remain elusive until the nations of Europe form a federation or a “European entity” which will forge them into a single economic unit’ (Monnet, 1988: 20–1), this was basically a pragmatic vision of European unity, as the emphasis on ‘prosperity’ and ‘economics’ indicates.
[…] if the sign does not reveal the thing itself, the process of semiosis produces in the long run a socially shared notion of the thing that the community is engaged to take as if it were in itself true.
(Umberto Eco)1
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hedetoft, U. (1997). The Cultural Semiotics of ‘European Identity’. In: Landau, A., Whitman, R.G. (eds) Rethinking the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25226-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25226-8_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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