Bøker i Europe plurielle/Multiple Europes-serien

It is always the future that makes the past; the future as it is wished for, as it should be or as it is expected to be. Claims on time, which become claims on normative order, are looked at through varieties of regional and thematic cases and taken as a methodological route through which this book contributes to the writing of global history.

After successive waves of «enlargement», the European Union has been struggling with political integration. The project of the «constitutionalisation» of the EU was therefore launched to cater to a growing need of institutional reform, but it also intensified debates about the underlying conceptions, norms and values of the European polity as well as the meanings and identities of entire Europe. This book approaches the ongoing legal and political re-construction of the EU through a focus on the Convention on the Future of Europe (2002-2003) which produced a draft of the EU¿s first constitution. The Convention is studied from a multidisciplinary perspective integrating approaches from ethnography of institutions, political sociology and linguistically-based discourse-analysis. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and multiple textual data, the book offers an inside perspective on the multitude of ways in which politics in supranational environments works in practice. The book also contributes to the ongoing research on the discursive (re-)negotiations of meanings of Europe and European integration in the institutions of the European Union.

In the 19century, the metropolis became the soothsayer of societies. Here, probabilities of progress could be perceived, felt and smelt; here was the showcase of each nation¿s prime productions and representations. Travellers took to the metropolis in order to unravel the foreign society, in order to understand and learn about social characteristics and future developments, about cultural distinctions and commonalities, about banalities and extraordinary events. Travel writers mapped the development of Europe¿s metropolises and wrote for a large market using the form of a highly popular and established genre. In travel writing, popular sentiments, market-driven imaginations of the audience¿s interests, and on-the-spot analysis of cultural and political conditions are bound together in one account. This book surveys the history of cultural perception in Western Europe from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the National Socialists¿ party rallies in the Berlin of the 1930s. Travel writings are used as source material to enter the intricate discourses on national stereotypes, the metropolis and on the usage as well as the perception of authenticity.ÿ