Abstract
World War II created Europe, or better yet, Western Europe: The unspoken assumption that by Europe we refer to Western Europe dates to recent times. By the same stroke, Eastern Europe became the “other Europe,” comprising the satellites of the USSR in Eastern Europe, as well as the USSR itself. The Treaty of Yalta, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain and later the Berlin Wall restructured a Europe ravaged by war according to the principles of a geopolitical bipolarism, splitting the continent in two opposing blocs for decades. On the one side, Western Europe linked itself through consensus to the external hegemony of the United States of America. On the other, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia collapsed inward upon themselves and rapidly turned into a subaltern to the Communist colonizer and the increasingly coercive rule to which it subjected Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the fourteen Soviet Republics.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The quote is reported in Norman Davies, Europe: A History ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 ), 1066.
Paul Hainsworth, “Politics, Culture and Cinema in the new Europe,” in Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, eds. J. Hill, M. McLoone and P. Hainsworth ( Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, University of Ulster and British Film Institute, 1994 ), 8.
Marx Beloff, Europe and the Europeans (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), quoted in Davies, Europe, 1015.
Victoria de Grazia, “European Cinema and the Idea of Europe, 1925–1995,” in Hollywood & Europe, eds. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steve Ricci (London: BFI, 1998 ), 20.
See the antecedent argumentation as to the omission of culture in the EEC Treaty by Thomas H. Guback, “Cultural Identity and Film in the European Economic Community,” Cinema Journal, vol. XIV, no.1 (Fall 1974 ): 2–17.
George Ross, “Confronting the New Europe,” New Left Review 191 (1992): 51.
Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 14. For a clear and helpful look at the workings of micro- and macroregionalism in the new Europe, see specifically chapter 8.
See Michel Foucault Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 142.
See Michael Emerson, Redrawing the Map of Europe ( London: St. Martin’s, 1999 ), 41.
See David Morely and Kevin Robins, “No Place like Heimat: Images of Home (land) in European Culture,” New Formations, 12 (Winter 1990): 3.
Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization,” New Left Review 235 (1999): 46–59.
Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, translated, edited and with an introduction by Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001). The book was first published in Germany in 1998. Habermas analyzes the specific case of the European Union as possible embodiment of a postnational constellation in the chapter “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” 58–113.
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: Nevada University Press, 1991 ), 153, 175.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 ( New York: Penguin Books, 2005 ), 798.
Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 123. While Smith seemed to uphold a common cultural heritage as a binding effect for the new Europe (see his book National Identity [London, University of Nevada Press, 1991]) and the co-existence of levels of allegiance, he later questioned such a commonality and considered “the achievement of European unity… unlikely in the foreseeable future at the cultural and social psychological levels,” on the ground that “there would appear to be little cultural and emotional space for a new Pan-European level of popular super-national identification to develop.” (Nations and Nationalisms in a Global Era, 142, 143 ).
Copyright information
© 2007 Luisa Rivi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rivi, L. (2007). The Political Discourse around the European Union. In: European Cinema after 1989. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609280_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609280_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-99952-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60928-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)