ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters, in one way or another and from a variety of disciplinary vantage points all engaged in the question of the applicability of the concept of “culture” for the analytical exploration of transnational European identities. Each author has asked whether the category of culture, per se, helps us in our attempts to identify a nascent, or perhaps already developed, sense of transnational European belonging. Finally, each chapter contributed to the creation of a cultural typology of diverse identitive representations based on its performative, fluid and political character, which assert themselves in the process of contemporary European integration. The synthesis provided here intends to provide more easily discernible institutionalist and discursive perspectives as well as to highlight the more subtle provenance of everyday manifestations of transnationalism as categorized in the two parts of this volume. In both arenas of transnational identity performance, the discursive, representational and co-constitutive character of these cultural constructions is highlighted in its interaction with EU integration processes, irrespective of the disciplinary outlook of the chapter contributor. Taken as a whole, this volume shows that individual, empirically based, studies as well as ethnographic or policy-tracing approaches aid in formulating an overarching sense of transnational Europeanness. Furthermore, the contributors asked whether there exists a single, or multiple, cultural manifestations of EU-ness, however contested, that is/are tangible and measurable.
