Description: In Imagining Europe, Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand explore the formation of modern European identity. Europe has not always been there, although we have been imagining it for quite some time. Even after the birth of a polity called the European Union, the meaning of Europe remained a very much contested topic. What is Europe? What are its boundaries? Is there a specific European identity or is the EU just the name for a group of institutions? This book answers these questions, showing that in Europe's formation, myth and memory, although distinct, are often merged in a common attempt to construct an identity for its present and its future. In a time when Europe is facing an existential crisis, when its meaning is being questioned, Imagining Europe explores a vital and often unacknowledged aspect of the European project.
Brief description: Benoît Challand is Assistant Professor in the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He is the author of Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (2009). He is co-author (with Chiara Bottici) of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010) and co-editor (with Chiara Bottici) of The Politics of Imagination (2011).
Review Quotes: 'The book reveals how identity and legitimacy are interconnected: identity conditioning legitimacy and memory constructing European identity. Imagining Europe acknowledges that Europe is often divided into north-south or east-west perspectives.' Emilia Palonen, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology