Annual Research Programme - Regions and Regionalism in Europe and Beyond
Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.
E-mail: ias@lancaster.ac.uk
Colloquium 1: What is a Region? Mythical and Historical Constructs of Regional
Identity
Keynote Speakers and Participants
Keynote Paper I - Michael Keating
Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University
Institute
The Region, Past, Present and Future
There is a lot of talk about deterritorialization in the context of globalization. Yet there is also a process of re-territorialization, in the economic, cultural, political and institutional domains. Particularly important is the rise of the new regionalism. For some, this represents a break with a past dominated by the nation state. Yet new historiography is showing that territory has always been contested and that to associate with the consolidated nation-state is an error. New understandings of territory are open-ended rather than fixed. They also help link past, present and future in a single frame of reference.
Contact information
Michael
Keating
Professor and Head of Department
Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute
50016 S. Domenico di Fiesole
ITALY
Keynote Paper II - Michał Buchowski
Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University
Central Europe as the (Imagined) Region
Central Europe and related notions is an 'imagined reality' that as such have undergone various transformations determined by changing political, economic and cultural interests. Therefore, this presentation falls into a domain of 'imagology', i.e. a study of people's images about assumed reality. Discursive reality appears to those involved as a 'real reality'. The history of the idea of Central Europe serves as a case study illustrating such a phenomenon. The notion of Mitteleuropa appeared in 19th century as a political idea that helped to establish German national consciousness and Prussian hegemony in the region that as such was meant to constitute a counterpart to western European (France, Britain) and eastern European (Russia) powers. Since the idea was to unite all German speaking people and dependent 'minor' nations, Habsburg's Austria(-Hungary) was also involved in this project. It was fully expressed in works of Josef Partsch and Friedrich Naumann, both simply entitled Mitteleuropa, and published in1904 and 1915 respectively.
A swan song of the attempts to implement this project was Nazi's Drang nach Osten and search for Lebensraum. Such associations made the idea almost dead after World War II. However, it pops out surprisingly again as a transformed idea of Central Europe among anti-Soviet dissidents in the 'Eastern Bloc'. The idea was launched by such intellectuals as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Czeslaw Milosz, Jenö Szücs and Karl Schlögel in order to disentangle satellite states of the 'Eastern Empire' from the dichotomous division into 'East' and 'West'. This cultural project, however loosely defined, worked, and the region managed to emancipate itself in western consciousness. After 1989 their cultural project with political underpinnings transformed itself quickly into a purely political one. A label of 'Central Europe' has become a part of political correctness among diplomats.
At the same time, countries successful in their liberal and democratic reforms, first in line to join western structures, established themselves as different form other parts of the former Eastern Europe. Reduced in its size 'Central Europe' means in this discourse distant from 'the Balkan keg', Christian-Orthodox, economically 'backward' and politically unstable universe. Therefore, the idea functioned in the 1990s as, in fact, discriminatory towards former 'brothers in disastrous communist fate'. Today, when in fact the 'narrow Central Europe' have joined the European Union, the idea of Central Europe may disappear from public discourses, intellectuals' consciousness and collective identities. However, as any myth, it can surface in any unpredictable today hypothetical social, cultural and political constellation.
Recent Publications and Summary of Interests (Word)
Contact information
Michał Buchowski, Ph.D,
Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology
Adam Mickiewicz University
61-809 Poznan,
POLAND
Invited External Panellists
- Professor Charles Phythian-Adams (Centre for English
Local History, University of Leicester)
English local history, medieval urban history, history of the North West
- Professor Gunlog Fur (History, Vaxjo University)
The Sami people of Scandinavia; Swedish colonisation in America
- Professor Joe Painter (Grography, University of Durham)
Cities and regions; social and economic identities in regional development
- Professor Anssi Paasi (Geography, University of Oulu)
Social construction of regions and territorial identities; theories of region and place; links between territories, boundaries and individual/social consciousness
- Anne O'Mahoney (Lancashire Brussels Office)
Representing Lancashire in EU
Internal Panellists
- Stephen Constantine (History)
Migration and diaspora in the British Comonwealth; Gibraltar and national identity
- Chris Ealham (History)
Catalonian history and identities
- Paul Kerswill (Linguistics)
Regional dialects and vocabulary
- Michael Mullett (History)
Cultural and religious identities in the English North West
- Elizabeth Olson (Geography)
Religion and social development in Peru
- Ramon Ribera Fumaz (IAS)
Mediterranean identities and cultures
- Michael Winstanley (History)
Rural and business history of the English North West
- Angus Winchester (History)
Environmental history of the English North West; regional dialects
- Keith Stringer (History)
State-making, noble power structures, religious reform, cultural exchanges, and the construction of regional, national and supra-national identities
- Gerd Nonneman (Politics and International Relations)
politics of the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula, the political and economic history of Yemen, the foreign policies of Middle Eastern states.
| Annual Research Programme | News & Events Archive |
Save this page:
Del.icio.us
Digg It
Reddit
Facebook
Stumble It!