Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Introduction 3
constituencies as well as sub-national challenges activated by immigration flows
between Eastern and Western Europe in particular.
In the sections that follow we will present the thematic axes around which this
volume is organised and the theoretical debates with which they are associated. We
shall also briefly underline how the contributions included in this volume address
such debates and cast new light on important conceptual and sociological issues.
Regarding the relationships between European and national identities and
boundary constructions, within the reconstruction of Europe and the expansion
of the European integration project to the East, four issues are fundamental: (1) the
historical processes of and current changes in state formation and nation-building
in Western and Eastern Europe; (2) the impact of the European integration process
and its extension to the East on states and nations in Western and Eastern Europe;
(3) within this context the changing relationships between national and European
identities and boundary constructions; and last but not least (4) the ‘multicultural’
impact of growing international migration and immigration on the historicallyformed
nations, national identities and boundary constructions in the context of
European integration.
State formation and nation-building in Western and
Eastern Europe
The implosion of the Soviet communist system has enabled the restoration and
reconstruction of independent nation-states in Central-Eastern Europe. These
processes were accompanied by political transitions to democratic regimes and
social transformations towards capitalist market societies. The ‘great transformation’
in the post-communist societies in Central and Eastern Europe has been predominantly
seen by social and political scientists as a bundle of catching-up processes
of modernisation, emulating the Western European model of a modern, democratic
and capitalist nation-state. To be sure, the processes of political and economic
transformation in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe have displayed
considerable variations (Beyme 1996; Linz and Stepan 1996). The evolution of
political regimes ranges from the consolidation of liberal-constitutional democracies,
to the development of mixed democratic/authoritarian structures or the reversal
of authoritarian political systems. The transformation to capitalist market societies
varies from relatively successful evolution to crisis-prone development and
continuous decline. The processes of state formation and political/legal institutionbuilding
have generally been weak and, inversely, the tendency to create ethnically
homogeneous nations generally strong. But despite these variations, the Western
European capitalist and democratic nation-state has served as a forceful model for
the Eastern European transformations. In this sense the modern nation-state has
been developing, diversifying, not dying (Mann 1993) and, with it, the European
structural pluralism of independent nation-states in Western as well as in postcommunist
Central and Eastern Europe has been reconstituted.
Under the impression of the enormous changes brought about by the implosion
of the Soviet Empire, there emerged in the social and political sciences a renewed