Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

1 Introduction
Anna Triandafyllidou and Willfried Spohn
Introduction
The decade following the European revolution of 1989–91 has witnessed a
progressive, although in many ways difficult, reconnection of the divided Europe.
With this development, the basic structural and cultural pluralism of a common
‘European civilisation’ (Eisenstadt 1987) – damaged by the Second World War and
torn apart by the Cold War system – is in the process of restoration. This overall
process includes particularly the restoration and re-organisation of the European
system of nation-states and with them the redefinition and often intensification
of national identities and reciprocal boundary constructions. The contemporary
reconstruction and restructuration of nation-states in Europe, however, does not
simply continue the thread of the pre-Second World War and pre-Cold War era
of the modern nation-state. Rather, two major social forces are at work in contemporary
Europe: the dynamics of European integration and the growing consequences
of international migration and with them the transformation of national identities.
The European integration process, on the one hand, has developed in deepening
and widening movements in Western Europe since 1945, pooling and mediating
the sovereignty of the participating member states. The imminent Eastern
enlargement of the European Union will have similar impacts on the postcommunist
nation-states of Central and Eastern Europe. As a consequence, the
classical model of the nation-state as a sovereign entity of political-territorial centreformation
is to an increasing degree in the process of modification. International
migration, on the other hand, has for several decades had an impact on the most
developed nation-states in Western Europe, yet in the last decade it has not only
been intensifying, but its impact has also been increasingly felt in Southern and
Central Eastern Europe (see the chapters by Romaniszyn and Morawska in this
volume). With it, the notion of cultural homogeneity as the basis of the politicallycentralised
nation-state is to a growing measure modified by ethnic minorities
and immigrant communities. Both of these processes of transnational modification
of states and nations in Europe also manifest themselves – at least as a tendency –
in a stronger weight of European and multicultural elements in collective identities.
The contributions assembled in this volume address these two major social forces
of transnational modifications of nation-states and collective identities in
contemporary Europe in a Western and Eastern comparative perspective. Most