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This article was downloaded by: [Nipissing University]On: 05 October 2014, At: 03:12Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Contemporary EuropeanStudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjea20
Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe:From Dream to Awakening/EuropeanUnion History: Themes and DebatesDerek Hawes aa University of Bristol , UKPublished online: 25 Jul 2011.
To cite this article: Derek Hawes (2011) Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream toAwakening/European Union History: Themes and Debates, Journal of Contemporary EuropeanStudies, 19:2, 303-305, DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2011.580929
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2011.580929
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The section on political laughter is the only one in which English-language essays are in the
majority. Iain Lauchlan writes informatively and authoritatively about humour under Stalin, although a
Germanist might object again: this time to the claim that anti-Nazi jokes are more limited in scope. The
answer to the question about the attributes of the ideal German ‘blond like Hitler, slim like Goering and
tall like Goebbels’ surely contains the same mockery of ridiculous pretensions as those found in jokes
about the gap between appearance and reality in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Another excellent essay in this
section is by the Danish scholar Henning Eichberg, who wistfully contrasts the fun of traditional folk
games to the grim world of modern competitive sport. Yet, here too, a slight objection is possible, this
time from an English (though possibly not from a Scottish!) perspective. Unlike less frenetic sports,
cricket, at least in its traditional forms, does allow space for humour both on the field and off it,
particularly for radio commentators during quiet periods of play.
The final two sections are entitled ‘Europe–Africa (and back)’ and ‘From European laughter to
universal laughter’. The former refreshingly deals, as the title suggests, not just with European
caricatures but with African laughter about Europe and Europeans. Particularly noteworthy, however,
is the proposition put forward by David Murphy and Aedı́n nı́ Loinsigh. They see, in some post-
colonial writing and film-making, attempts to move away from stereotypes and the opening up of a
‘space in which both Africans and Europeans might learn to laugh at each other and at themselves in
ways that do not claim any form of “superiority”’ (p. 363). The last section has an Italian flavour with
essays on Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini, someone who doubted his comic talents but seen as
combining in some of his films elements of a wide comic tradition including Cervantes and the
comedies of Corneille and Shakespeare.
Eichberg suggests in his essay that the original colloquium did not clearly discover a European
laughter. If this remains partly true of this successor volume, at the very least this does show that
there are common reference points for discussing laughter, notably Bergson, Freud and Bakhtin’s
idea of the ‘carnevalesque’. Moreover, academic readers of the volume, in addition to the high
quality of the contributions, should enjoy the suggestion by Jean-Louis Olive that there is a place for
humour in academic life. What is more, he is not referring to Figaro’s promotion of laughter as an
antidote to tears, incidentally quoted in the Introduction, but laughter as an ‘excellent means of
escaping . . . the domino-centrism of the academic environment’ (p. 61). Is it also possible to apply
this idea to the world of book reviews?
Stuart Parkes
Mougins, France
q 2011, Stuart Parkes
Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening
Barbara EINHORN
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, ISBN 978-0-23027-3337
£19.99 (pbk), 254 pp.
European Union History: Themes and Debates
Wolfram KAISER & Antonio VARSORI (Eds)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, ISBN 978-0-23022-2709
£19.99 (pbk), 268 pp.
The notion of citizenship is a complex, multi-faceted one that for many is tested to breaking-point when it
is considered in the context of the European Union and its persistent integrational zeal (see Karolewski,
2010). We have to ask first whether citizenship beyond the nation-state is possible at all: some argue that
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if it is, it can only be of a weaker, second-order kind, while others highlight the constructive potential of
‘Eurocitizenship’ for the future.
However, in the first of these two volumes, the author is concerned with the meaning of
citizenship in what she posits as a ‘post-national era’ specifically in the context of EU enlargement,
concentrating on the newest member states from Central and Eastern Europe. Her key theme is
‘gender equitable citizenship’ and most crucially she is concerned to argue for recognition of the
gendered complexities inherent in the very notion.
It is a feminist treatise utilizing a comparative study of what has happened to women in Eastern
Europe in the last decade. The work uses gender as the lens through which to examine the processes
of democratization, markets, and newly emergent nationalisms. What then, does she conclude? She
says that ‘in practice the gendered inequalities produced by ostensibly state socialist ideology are
matched by those induced by the individualist neo-liberal meta-narrative’ (p. 188). She says too that
‘no amount of discursive deconstruction can alter the fact that the neo-liberal agenda of
democratisation within market-driven policies of economic restructuring has a major impact on the
potential for gender justice in East and West, North and South’ (p. 188). What is needed, says
Einhorn is to ‘regard democratic polities as facilitating the negotiation of difference in a common
space, as opposed to being the site of competition over space’ (pp. 189–190).
Apart from making the obvious point that academic polemicists really must find a means of
writing English prose which is less dense, less full of jargon and more concerned with clarity of
thought, in order to get over their key points, it has to be said that (to quote the book’s subtitle), these
conclusions represent a somewhat vague and idealistic dream—and hardly an awakening. On the
positive side the book is a masterly review of the current literature and the state of the debate about
the role of women in the new Europe.
The second of these two volumes however, demonstrates that the debate is essentially confined to
academic and feminist authors and has hardly surfaced at all in the political and policy forums of the
European Union. Edited by Kaiser and Varsori, utilizing a team of twelve other authors, European
Union History starts from the premise that the drive towards integration both within the EU and
beyond its borders continues to have an enormous impact on the state of Europe, transforming
nation-states, creating new supra-national institutions and forms of joint policy-making. By
implication European citizenship should be central to the argument but as one contributor says, ‘a
cultural identity does not automatically result in a meaningful political identity or, for that matter, in
the formation of a European society’ (p. 155).
The editors argue that one cannot hope to make sense of contemporary Europe without
understanding the history of European integration forces that, until now, they believe, have been
treated in a superficial and cursory way instead of as the creative force it has actually been. This
volume therefore, seeks to provide a comprehensive introduction to research trends, themes and
debates in the historiography.
It is aimed at advanced undergraduates and post-graduate researchers and is divided into three
sections, the first of which contains papers on the context in which historical research has
developed over recent decades. The second group of papers are devoted to particular conceptual
approaches to understanding the history of European integration and the evolution of federalist
historiography. In the final sequence differing thematic dimensions with particular reference to
the development of the EU and its external relations includes a discussion on the way the
United States has influenced these processes and provides a particularly worthy conclusion to the
volume.
Throughout this wide-ranging discussion it is not surprising that notions of European citizenship
and political identity and attempts by the EU’s institutions to encourage a sense of belonging by the
use of symbols and cultural policies, appear to have been singularly unsuccessful for the most part,
leading one author to demand the over-coming of ‘the symbolic deficit’ (p. 154) and to stress the
importance of choosing symbolic moments of a united Europe in order to undermine the shifting
alliances of national governments.
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However there is nothing in this review of the history of European integration that would support
a sense of integrational success moving from the ‘dream to the awakening’ that Professor Einhorn so
fervently seeks in the enlarging Europe to which she devotes her research.
The other fact for which European Union History is notable is that the editors have managed to
reference no less than forty-four of their own previous books and papers; surely a record – leaving
one to wonder whether this volume was necessary at all!
Reference
Karolewski, I. P. (2010) Citizenship and Collective Identity in Europe (London: Routledge).
Derek Hawes
University of Bristol, UK
q 2011, Derek Hawes
Political Science in Central-East Europe: Diversity and Convergence
Rainer EISFELD & Leslie A. PAL (Eds)
Barbara Budrich, 2010, ISBN 978-3-86649-2936
e59.90 (hbk), 317 pp.
Political science, as the editors of this volume remind us, has sometimes been portrayed as an
inherently ‘moral’ discipline, imbued with democratic ideals, contributing to the emergence and
stabilization of democracy. However, as history records, political science has also been practised by
autocratic regimes, suitably adapted to their authoritarian purposes and in the process distinctions
between scholars and ideologues have become somewhat blurred.
Such then is the context for this volume, the first attempt to review the development and state of
political science in nineteen post-communist countries of Central East Europe, some of them within
the EU and some not. It is a remarkable achievement in which the editors have assembled a team of
twenty-eight authors, all of them senior academic experts in the countries under review, ranging
from Russia, Poland and Hungary to Lithuania, Albania and Moldova.
The progress of political science, its researches, teaching and publishing, in both public
universities and private institutes, is analysed for achievements and deficits, with statistical analyses
for all the states in the frame. We learn that the ‘march of democracy’ in these parts of Europe has not
been as triumphant as had been forecast at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Autocratic elements have persisted in some cases, prejudicing progress and negatively
affecting scholarship, demonstrating that the initial wave of post-Cold War democratization was
partial, producing what the authors term ‘an even larger wave of hybridisation’ (p. 10).
The book identifies western interventions, not the least of which have come from the European
Union with its Bologna Declaration, pushing these nascent political science cultures towards
convergence but inevitably too, depicting the less helpful ‘authoritarian temptations’ (p. 9) of
President Putin in Russia with his rubber-stamp Parliament, harassment of journalists and severely
regulated civil society.
Divergences in democratic performance have thus become a distinct feature of the region’s post-
communist states. Twenty years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes no universal era of
democracy has been ushered in throughout Eastern and Central Europe. The variety of transitions
from communism, different in both ideological and institutional consequences, has clearly affected
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