Europe's Europes: mapping the conflicts of European memory

Debates about 'European memory' are frequent in public and political discourse. With the fundamental challenges the European project now faces, such debates exemplify changes in what Europe means and implies politically. Drawing on a large corpus of press articles from six EU member states...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of political ideologies Vol. 25; no. 1; pp. 51 - 77
Main Authors Trimçev, Rieke, Feindt, Gregor, Krawatzek, Félix, Pestel, Friedemann
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 02.01.2020
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Cognitive mapping
Competition
Conflict
Cosmopolitanism
Discourse analysis
Mapping
Meaning
Memory
National identity
Particularism
Political discourse
Public sphere
Quantitative analysis
Europe
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Summary:Debates about 'European memory' are frequent in public and political discourse. With the fundamental challenges the European project now faces, such debates exemplify changes in what Europe means and implies politically. Drawing on a large corpus of press articles from six EU member states and employing qualitative and quantitative methods of discourse analysis, the article examines the fields and logics of conflict about the meaning of Europe between 2004 and 2016. Intimately linked to national and post-national senses of identity, these conflicts take four different forms across different national public spheres: (1) perspectives from which 'European memory' underpins seemingly consensual conceptions of Europe; (2) conflictive conceptions of Europe along an East-West divide that present different attempts of setting rules; (3) memory conflicts establishing peripheries and boundaries of Europe; (4) a global framing of 'Europe' that understands Europe as a space of competition that mobilizes triadic patterns of conflict. The fits and misfits, and the degrees of entanglement on conflicts about 'European memory' help to understand the persistent and continuous struggles over the mental maps of Europe beyond the simplistic opposition of particularism and cosmopolitanism.
ISSN:1356-9317
1469-9613
DOI:10.1080/13569317.2019.1696925