In the post-Single European Act period, debates around European identity have intensified, particularly in the context of EU enlargement. The EU’s move to being a supranational political entity in the past two decades has caused serious concerns in some sections of the elite and people across the EU member states. While French and Dutch rejections of the constitutional treaty set an important milestone, Turkey’s quest for the EU membership has complicated to a great extent controversies on European identity. The reviewed (...) books here contribute to efforts to understand the extent to which European identity and Turkey’s bid for the EU membership has entangled. It is more likely to witness debates around both European identity and Turkey’s candidacy for the Union for many years to come; therefore, these books will more likely remain relevant for the academic and policy circles. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

Architecture has become an important discourse for new expressions of post-national identity in general and in particular for the emergence of a `spatial' European identity. No longer tied to the state to the same degree as in the period of nation-building, architecture has become a significant cultural expression of post-national identities within and beyond the nation-state. The article looks at four such discourses, first, taking the Millennium Dome in London and the Reichstag in Berlin, we show that architecture can express (...) in a reflexive way contested and ambiguous national identities; second, the case of architecture in post-communist European societies illustrates the dual identity of architecture as a project of building and of re-building; third, the EU's search for a cultural form is discussed with respect to the architectural designs on the Euro banknotes; and finally the question of architecture as a relation to a lived space is considered with regard to cityscapes as yet another expression of a tendentially spatialized European identity. (shrink)

While political economic perspectives of urban globalization tend to generalize the economic pressures upon socio-political transformations of cities, recent European research has stressed the institutional context of urban collective action. However, the structural bias of the European city model merely complements the criticized economization by a culturalist essentialization of urbanity, and thus fails to conceptualize political agency. In order to elaborate the theoretical foundations of a political counterhypothesis to urban globalization, this article clarifies the different historical and normative conceptions of (...) institutional structure and agency in the urban context. Most research of cities implies — more or less implicitly — a common urban ideal which associates centrality with a local integration potential of plural societies. However, distinguishing between a historically embedded empirical category, a normative model of public space, and an analytical ideal-type of political agency helps to overcome the static structural conception of an essentially European urban culture and problematizes the role of knowledge models in reflectively constructing urban realities. Therefore, a dynamic and contextual relation between political economic functions, historic heritage, and normative frames might contribute to an open-ended comparative framework of urban collective action that can be applied to any ordinary city across and beyond Europe. (shrink)

European encounters fostered in the early modern period with West Africa have provided us with interesting frameworks from which to engage in the construction of difference, race within Western European space and with terms for rethinking European identity that transcend the cosmopolitan and colonial pretensions. Drawing on early historical records, especically the Portuguese experience in West Africa, this article seeks to contest standard historical sociological tropes of European identity. First, creolization and hybridity are to challenge the essentialism which has been (...) deployed by Hegel to defend colonial interests. Second, it engages with the critiques levelled at Hegel’s eurocentrism, universalism and teleology. Particular use is made of Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Hegel, Sybelle Fischer’s critique of Buck-Morss’ work. Third, it interrogates the principle of the dialectic with Hegel’s Europe engagement with its Others; using Levinas’ work as a critique of Hegel’s dialectic, which represents alternative, that is less violent and non-dominant. (shrink)