ABSTRACT
The mode of European cultural consciousness explored by Hastrup is integral to dominant discourses of cultural identity in Europe, whether they be European, national, or ethnic. Typically group identities are represented as unified, monolithic wholes, with linear and continuous histories which in turn are used in the legitimation of claims to political autonomy and territory within the prevailing ideological climate of ethnic nationalism (see Chapman et al. 1989; Just 1989; Danforth 1993; Shore 1993). Thus while competing interpretations of the past arise in the context of political disputes, they tend to share a common mode of representation; a mode which is not restricted to ethnic and national groups, but also extends to supranational entities. For instance despite the emphasis on the coexistence of supranational, national, and regional cultural identities, the symbolic terrain on which the New Europe is being actively produced, ‘is precisely that upon which the nation-state has traditionally been constructed’ (Shore 1993: 791). That is the ‘New Europe’ is being constructed as a unified entity with a unilinear continuous history.
