REPRESENTATIONS OF EUROPE AND THE NATION IN CURRENT AND PROSPECTIVE MEMBER-STATES:
MEDIA, ELITES AND CIVIL SOCIETY
European Framework Project coordinated by Bo Stråth and Anna Triandafyllidou, EUI
The EURONAT project studied the relationship (intertwined or mutually exclusive)
between national identity and representations of Europe and the EU in nine countries:
Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain and the
United Kingdom.
Its main objectives were to revise and increase existing knowledge of representations of
the nation, Europe and the European Union in current member states and associated
countries; to study the extent to which national loyalty and identification with Europe
and/or the EU are mutually exclusive or compatible and intertwined with one another;
to highlight similarities and differences between the media, the elite and laypeople
understandings and representations of the EU and the nation and study the role of the
media and the elites in creating a discursive universe; to analyse comparatively
findings from the different countries concerning the above three and study similarities
and differences among countries along the East-West and North-South axes; and to
inform media policies on European integration and Eastern enlargement.
The framework guiding the comparative analysis of the nine countries started from the
the theoretical premise that national identity formation is related both to the historical
heritage of state formation and nation-building in each country as well as the geopolitical position of that country and its links with the European integration process.
Under the assumption that domestic and European components constitute national identities, the aim of
the project was to analyse and compare the combination of national-cum-European
components in national identities and representations of Europe and the EU with a
special reference to the role of the media in their (trans)formation.
