The mapping of Europe and ideas of integration: in the new member countries, national meanings of European culture determine debates about the desired European Union's mission

Abstract

With EU enlargement, peculiar Central European ideas and traditions of integration emerged in European politics. In the discussions on a European constitution, the representatives of the new member states surprised the “old” Europe with meanings of Europe that were situated far beyond the canonised Western concepts of pragmatic political integration. Central European politicians and political essayists discussed a canon of cultural and religious European values and the role of the nations in the European Union. Research on the contemporary history of Central Europe brings light into the traditions and the development of Central European meanings of Europe. Before 1989 and East of the “Iron curtain”, Europe rather served as a place of desire than as a concrete concept, a mechanism of integration or an institutional framework. The cases of Poland and the Czech Republic (respectively the former Czechoslovakia) show that the salient feature of their meanings of Europe in history is the high significance of the nation. In the Eastern bloc, Europe was construed along terms of culture and civilisation. Party officials, dissidents and journalists framed Europe nationally. Regarding ideas of integration, 1989 stands for continuity in Central European meanings of Europe. The historical East-West difference in the „thinking of Europe“ and former mappings of Europe in the new member countries re-shape the present new European Union. Exclusive meanings of Europe in Central Europe challenge policies of integration, migration, citizenship and governance. There is a drift towards demarcating a European self and towards defining a collective in cultural terms. This trend strengthens the paradigm of neighbourhood vis-à-vis transnationalisation and unification in the E.U. In the debates on the foreign relations of the Union, exponents of a cultural European identity address questions of self-demarcation and self-delimitation.