Twenty years after the Wall: geographical imaginaries of ‘Europe’ during European Union enlargement

Cultural geography is increasingly intersecting with critical and popular geopolitics to analyse how sociocultural constructions of space and place arise within, and play a role in shaping, geopolitical processes (e.g., Mitchell 2000; Dodds 2005; Dittmer and Spears 2009). The current round of the reshaping of Europe as an economic, political, social, institutional and imagined entity provides a dynamic context in which to further explore these links. As Delanty (1995, pp. 3–4) suggested, ‘Europe’ has been constituted as a “cultural frame of reference for the formation of identities and new geo-political realities”, but while it is deployed as a “universalising idea” it is also “under the perpetual threat of fragmentation from forces within European society.” Similarly, European borders and identities and the very idea of ‘Europe’ itself are perpetually under renegotiation and contestation (e.g., Derrida 1994; Wolff 1996; Todorova 1997; Passi 2001; Kuus 2004; Kuss 2006; Habermas 2006). As Paasi (2001, p. 7) suggests, the challenge for geography is “to reflect how regions and places come together and what kind of spatial imaginaries are involved in this process.” Spatial or geographical ‘imaginaries’ are representations of place and space that play a role in structuring people's understanding of the world and which, in complex ways, influence people's actions. As an extensive literature in cultural geography has demonstrated, these representations or constructions of the world are also closely intertwined with the material world and play a role in the ordering and bordering of space and the construction of normative visions of how space ‘should be.’ Thus the papers in this theme issue focus on ‘Europe’ as a collectively imagined and contested representation which has important implications for how Europe is constructed, regulated and re-defined as a material entity.

Similar topics have been the focus of other thematic issues in human geography journals. See, for example, Area 2005, 37(4); Geopolitics 2005, 10(3); Eurasian Geography and Economics 2006, 47(6). All of these thematic issues were concerned, more or less directly, with “unpacking the terms of reference for a geography of Europe” (McNeil 2004, p. 353). However, the enlargement of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 to incorporate 10 formerly state-socialist countries from ‘Eastern Europe’ has introduced a whole new set of geographies. The papers in this thematic issue emphasize the sociocultural dimensions of these new geographies through the lenses of culture and political economy. Specifically, the EU enlargement has produced new sets of political, economic and institutional arrangements which have been much discussed. However, intertwined with these are new geographical imaginaries of ‘Europe’ which have an important role to play in shaping the ‘New Europe’ (the term adopted by the popular as well as academic press to identify the dynamic economic, cultural and social changes that are affecting the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe). Political elites attempt to legitimize the institutional and economic changes brought by the European integration through the shaping of a political community with a collective identity with which citizens can identify. However, these elite projects are always contested, and are particularly challenged during the ‘eastward’ expansion of the EU.

Other powerful processes and events are also at play here, including the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The context of “twenty years after” provides an opportunity for reflection on two decades of actually existing transition (Altvater 1993). Further, attempts to establish a European Constitution were rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, and the Lisbon Treaty by Irish voters in 2008, throwing into question the nature of the EU and ‘Europe’. The European integration process has been further challenged by the good results obtained by Eurosceptic political parties at the 2009 European Parliament elections, fuelled by a global economic crisis that evidences the weaknesses of the neoliberal project at the heart of the EU. ‘Europe’ – let alone the ‘New Europe’ – continues to be contentious.

Work at the intersection of cultural geography, geopolitics and related disciplines has helped to focus attention on how socioculturally constructed notions of ‘Europe’ are playing an important role in these processes. Various geographical imaginaries and metaphors are deployed and/or contested by a variety of actors in their visions of ‘Europe’ (Bruter 2003; Murphy 2005; Hülsse 2006; Balibar 2009). The process of EU enlargement to the ‘East,’ both as a geographical and an imaginary location, is making this situation even more dynamic. Enlargement is considered to be producing ‘multiple Europes’ (Simonsen 2004; Kuus 2005) while the resulting geopolitical and security context is producing new ‘bundlings’ of culture and geopolitics (e.g., Kuus 2007). Smith (2002) argues that new geo-economic discourses have been central in the reconfiguration of ‘Europe’ at the start of the twenty-first century, while Drulák and Königová (2007) note the importance of metaphors in the ways civil servants think about Europe.

The use of the term ‘the New Europe’ itself highlights the willingness of former Eastern European governments and their publics to embrace a new, ‘European’ and capitalist identity to overcome the Cold War era distinction between ‘East’ and ‘West’ Europe. This gives rise to new cultural geographies emerging alongside the institutional and economic changes brought by EU enlargement. The process of imagining the ‘New Europe’ is an important rhetorical tool which is being used to sanction a new equilibrium and new power relations within Europe.

All of these processes raise important questions about the idea of ‘Europe’ and about who has the right to speak “about what Europe is and should be” (Feakins and Białasiewicz 2006, p. 658; Murphy 2005). This collection of papers is thus a series of critical geographical engagements with this re-imagining of ‘Europe’ within the context of ‘eastern enlargement.’ The papers engage with both the socio-cultural re-imagining of ‘Europe’, and with the institutional/economic restructuring of the continent. In doing so, these papers examine the interaction between different visions of Europe, seeking to include examples of the representational and non-representational.

This theme issue explores the following questions. What is ‘Europe’ when its original historico-geographical origins in the oppositions between East and West, between Capitalist and Communist, between Catholic/Protestant and Orthodox have been largely if not completely erased? Some cultural theorists argue that ‘Europe’ has always been founded on a denigration of its ‘Other’ eastern extremities (Wolff 1996; Todorova 1997; Neumann 1999), but is this still plausible with expansion into the ‘East’? On the other hand, imaginings of ‘Eastern Europe’ as some kind of ‘Other’ persist and inform geopolitical relations (Dománski 2004; Kuus 2004, 2007; Jeffrey 2008), highlighting the relevance of the socialist experience in generating the phenomena analyzed and framing the terms of the various debates discussed. What role is played by the EU's new borderlands in such imaginings of Europe? What role is played by the increasing presence of migrant labor and transnational networks and flows and how these processes are imagined (for example, in media representations)? And how is this re-imagining of Europe affecting, and being affected by, tangible changes in institutions and the economy? Importantly, what theoretical frameworks might cultural geographers deploy to understand these new devel opments that are more appropriate to this context?

In the first paper, Jennifer Cash provides an example of how the re-imagining of ‘Europe’ outside of the EU is influencing the nature of the EU and what is ‘Europe’. The accession of Romania to the EU in 2007 influenced a transformation of the political discourse in neighboring Moldova. The traditional contraposition between the Communist Party – democratically elected to power in 2001 – and the ‘pro-Europe’ and ‘pro-democracy’ opposition was fundamentally changed in 2005. Only one year after the EU signed an accession agreement with Romania the Moldovan Communist Party changed its official position to support Moldova's candidacy to the EU. ‘Europe’ became a tool used by Moldovan citizens to renegotiate their social identity and political allegiances in the context of a closer and more powerful EU. While most of the literature focuses on the Western definition of ‘Europe’ as a symbol to distinguish the self from marginal others (Wolff 1996; Todorova 1997), Cash's paper considers the appropriation of Europe from the standpoint of the ‘East’ and the ‘margins.’

The media is an important arena in which notions of ‘Europe’ are constructed and contested. In their paper, Duncan Light and Craig Young discuss media representations of post-accession migration from Romania to the UK in the UK and Romanian newspaper press. Their paper moves analysis beyond other theoretical frameworks, such as Orientalism and the notion of moral panics, by deploying Todorova's (1997) notion of Balkanism to interpret these media representations. The paper explores, first, how the dominant discourses in the UK press construct Balkanist discourses about Romanian migrants. It then provides a highly original analysis by deploying Balkanism to understand how the Romanian press has contested these discourses in the UK media, revealing counter-discourses which challenge visions of ‘Europe’ constructed in the UK. This international comparison is unusual and it highlights how imaginings of the ‘East’ remain important in constructions of ‘Europe’ but also the possibility of powerful discourses contesting definitions of ‘who is European’ produced within the ‘Old’ EU.

The remaining two papers by Virginie Mamadouh and Christian Sellar discuss the re-imagining ‘Europe’ from the standpoint of political institutions, citizens, and businesses. Mamadouh looks at the 2005 rejection of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe by French and Dutch citizens. In doing so, the author explores the gap between political elites and the public in these two countries to disclose how Europe is imagined and re-imagined in a period of rapid territorial and institutional change encompassing both the widening and the deepening of the EU. Sellar examines the constructions of Europe by key economic actors by following one specific group of foreign investors – Italian textile and clothing manufacturers – as they outsourced production into the New Europe and further East. He finds that the opposition between ‘Europe’ (as Western, efficient, and advanced) and the ‘East’ or ‘Eastern Europe’ (as less advanced, violent, but also in the process of becoming like the West) persisted in the mindset of Italian investors. However, this imagining of the ‘East’ was also subject to change. Specifically, during the 1990s ‘New Europe’ became more familiar, more ‘European,’ and more ‘like home,’ and business partners in the ‘New Europe’ challenged the view of Italian investors as more advanced. Later, in the 2000s, Italian firms began a new wave of investments, reproducing old stereotypes of the ‘East’ in their new locations – represented by Western Ukraine in this paper.

The papers in this special collection thus continue the task of analyzing the importance of the geographical imaginary in the future of ‘Europe’. However, they point in new directions, theoretically and geographically. We need to understand more about how ‘Europe’ is conceptualized within the EU and beyond, and what the implications are for wider geopolitical relations, including with the Global South. We need also to explore further how other theoretical frameworks can extend and advance studies of the cultural geographies arising from the further integration of Europe1, or indeed the failure of that integration, in the future.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Sellar

Christian Sellar is Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Policy Leadership, University of Mississippi, Mississippi, USA

Notes

1. The three authors contributed equally to the editorial and to the special issue; therefore, their names are listed in alphabetical order and not in order of importance.