Bulletin n. 3/2006
December 2006
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Hülsse Rainer
    Imagine the EU: the metaphorical construction of a supra-nationalist identity
    in Journal of International Relations and Development , Volume 9, Number 4, December ,  2006 ,  396-421
    The European Union (EU) is a novel political entity in many respects. For example, instead of the monolithic political structure of nation-states, it features a layered structure and a 'variable geometry'. This institutional complexity has been interpreted as an indicator of the EU being a post-modern political system. This article inquires whether the EU's institutional post-modernness is accompanied by a post-modern identity. I argue that an investigation of collective identity requires a reconstruction of how a community is imagined. As metaphors are the principal linguistic means of our imagination, I reconstruct the imaginations of the European community by analyzing its metaphorizations. How do the metaphors of EU enlargement construct European identity? It can be shown that in the German EU-enlargement discourse of the 1990s, European identity was hardly constructed in a post-national/post-modern way. Rather, European identity was imagined much like a modern national identity.
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