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This article was downloaded by: [Nipissing University] On: 05 October 2014, At: 03:12 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Contemporary European Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjea20 Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening/European Union History: Themes and Debates Derek Hawes a a University of Bristol , UK Published online: 25 Jul 2011. To cite this article: Derek Hawes (2011) Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening/European Union History: Themes and Debates, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 19:2, 303-305, DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2011.580929 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2011.580929 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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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

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

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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