Discourses and Counter-Discourses on Europe ─ From the Enlightenment to the EU

The European Union plays an increasingly central role in global relations from migration to trade to institutional financial solvency. How we understand the formation and continuation of these relations – their narratives and discourses - are rooted in social, political, and economic historical relations emerging at the founding of European states and then substantially augmented in the Post-WWII era. Any rethinking of our European narratives requires a contextualized analysis of the formation of hegemonic discourses.

The book contributes to the ongoing process of "rethinking" the European project, identity, and institutions, brought about by the end of the Cold war and the current economic and political crisis. Starting from the principle that the present European crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis of its hegemonic discourse, the aim of the volume is to rescue the complexity, the richness, the ambiguity of the discourses on Europe as opposed to the present simplification. The multidisciplinary approach and the long-term perspective permits illuminating scope over multiple discourses, historical periods, and different "languages", including that of the European institutions.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European integration, European History, and more broadly international relations.

Barbara Curli is professor of Contemporary History and Global History at the University of Turin. She was Jean Monnet Chair in History of European Integration at the University of Calabria and Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Italian History at Georgetown University. Editor in chief of Il Mestiere di storico and member of the international board of Histoire economie societe. Publications on nuclear history and European integration include:Il progetto nucleare italiano, 1952-1964, Rubbettino 2000; Italian privatization and the European Commission in the 1990s, ?The Journal of European Integration History?, 18, 2, 2012;L'Italie et l'Euratom: l'attitude des hauts fonctionnaires et des experts, in: E.du Reau (ed), Europe des elites, Europe des peuples. La construction de l'espace europeen, 1945-1960, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1998.

Manuela Ceretta is Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Turin. She has researched on Eighteenth Century Irish political Thought and she collaborated toThe Irish Act of Union: Bicentennial Essays, Irish Academic Press (2002) and to theDictionary of Irish Biography, Cambridge University Press (2009). Recently her research interests focus on French-Irish political relations. She is the author ofIl Momento irlandese. L’Irlanda nella cultura politica francese fra Restaurazione e Secondo Impero, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura (2013) and she published on the "Tocqueville Review". She is a member of the Scientific Board of "Studi Irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies" and of the Editorial Board of "Storia del Pensiero politico".