Abstract
Europeanization has turned into a ‘growth industry’. Now a catchword in political as well as academic realms, the term has enjoyed rapidly increasing usage, driven principally by the growing importance of the European Union. Its predominant connotation stems from the process of Europe’s contemporary political integration: since the early 1990s, Europeanization has been most often associated with new forms of European governance and the adaptation of nation-state legal and administrative procedures to the pressures associated with EU membership. Consequently, the term has been used primarily in the fields of law and political science.1 In recent years, however, a few anthropologists have weighed into the debate and begun to analyse the reconstruction of collective and personal identities brought about by processes of European integration.2 In these ways, Europeanization has become one of the central concepts by which social scientists conceptualize the accelerating processes of change that have transformed Europe’s recent past and present, and that will define its near future. However, all of these variations of literature share the same point of reference: the organizational structure and spatial dimension of the European Union. For historians concerned specifically with the EU’s history, this approach might be fruitful - even if few such historians of European integration have so far chosen to enter into this cross-disciplinary debate.3 At the same time, this whole strand of research restricts and scales down ‘Europeanization’ to a process closely linked to recent political and institutional developments.
Apart from the other contributors to this volume, we would like to thank Johan Schot and Cornelius Torp for their helpful remarks on earlier versions of this text. Martin Conway deserves special thanks. Only the two of us know how much we owe to his comments and suggestions on matters large and small.
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Notes
E.g. see Paolo Graziano and Maarten Peter Vink (eds), Europeanization: New Research Agendas (New York, 2007); Gunnar Folke Schuppert (ed.), The Europeanisation of Governance (Baden-Baden, 2006); Robert Harmsen and Thomas Wilson, ‘Introduction: Approaches to Europeanization’, Yearbook of European Studies xiv (2004), 132–6.
E.g. see Irène Bellier and Thomas M. Wilson (eds), An Anthropology of the European Union (Oxford, 2000); Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London/New York, 2000); Marc Abélès, ‘La communauté européenne: une perspective anthropologique’, Social Anthropology iv (1996), 334–5.
Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt/Main, 1987); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998); Ian Kershaw, ‘War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe’, Contemporary European History XIV (2005), 1072–3. See also Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State 2 vols (London, 2005).
See e.g. Charles S. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, in American Historical Review cv (2000), 807–31; Kiran Klaus Patel, Nach der Nationalfixiertheit: Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichte (Berlin, 2004).
As attempts to overcome this divide, see e.g.: Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford, 2007); Mazower, Continent; Davies, Europe; also see Stuart Woolf, ‘Europe and its Historians’, Contemporary European History xii (2003), 323–38.
Michael Geyer, ‘Historical Fiction of Anatomy and the Europeanization of National History’, Central European History xxii (1989), 316–42, quote 334.
See e.g. Wolfgang Schmale, Geschichte Europas (Vienna, 2001); some of the contributions in Bo Stråth (ed.), Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels, 2000); on memory and Europeanization Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger (eds), Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York, 2007); from the perspective of anthropology Wolfgang Kaschuba, ‘Europäisierung als kulturalistisches Projekt? Ethnologische Betrachtungen’, in Hans Joas and Friedrich Jaeger (eds), Europa im Spiegel der Kulturwissenschaften (Baden-Baden, 2008), pp. 204–25; e.g. on music, Philipp Ther, ‘Das Europa der Nationalkulturen. Die Nationalisierung und Europäisierung der Oper im “langen” 19. Jahrhundert’, Journal of Modern European History V (2007), 39–66.
See e.g. Reinhard Johler, ‘“Europa in Zahlen”. Statistik- Vergleich - Volkskunde - EU’, in Zeitschrift für Volkskunde xcv (1999), 246–63.
Maryon McDonald, ‘“Unity in Diversity”. Some Tensions in the Construction of Europe’, Social Anthropology iii (1996), 47–60.
See Johan Schot and Thomas J. Misa, “Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe”, History and Technology xxi (2005), 1–19, quotes 8, 9.
e.g. also see: Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk, ‘Internationalism in the Interwar Years. Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity’, in: Journal of Modern European History vi (2008), 196–217. Schot and Misa use the term ‘European integration’ but by this they mean basically the same as when we talk about Europeanization.
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© 2010 U. v. Hirschhausen and K. K. Patel
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Hirschhausen, U.v., Patel, K.K. (2010). Europeanization in History: An Introduction. In: Conway, M., Patel, K.K. (eds) Europeanization in the Twentieth Century. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230293120_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230293120_1
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