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Culture, Britain, and Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
Extract
We are in the midst of a remarkable moment of historical change, in which the very meaning of “Europe” — as economic region, political entity, cultural construct, object of study—is being called dramatically into question, and with it the meanings of the national cultures that provide its parts. While perceptions have been overwhelmed by the political transformations in the east since the autumn of 1989, profound changes have also been afoot in the west, with the legislation aimed at producing a single European market in 1992. Moreover, these dramatic events — the democratic revolutions against Stalinism in Eastern Europe, the expansion and strengthening of the European Community (EC) — have presupposed a larger context of accumulating change. The breakthrough to reform under Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Solidarity crisis in Poland, and the stealthful reorientations in Hungary have been matched by longer-run processes of change in Western Europe, resulting from the crisis of social democracy in its postwar Keynesian welfare-statist forms, capitalist restructuring, and the general trend toward transnational Western European economic integration.
Taken as a whole, these developments in east and west make the years 1989-92 one of those few times when fundamental political and constitutional changes, in complex articulation with social and economic transformations, are occurring on a genuinely European-wide scale, making this one of the several great constitution-making periods of modern European history.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Journal of British Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 4: Britishness and Europeanness: Who Are the British Anyway? , October 1992 , pp. 390 - 414
- Copyright
- Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1992
References
1 There is little literature taking this grand-historical perspective. Two authors who do, whose thinking strongly influences my own, are Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall. Most recently see Hobsbawm, , Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar, and his various interventions in Marxism Today, many of which are collected in Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988 (London, 1989)Google Scholar. For Hall, see his similar body of writing collected in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London, 1988)Google Scholar. I have also learned much from reading and listening to Michael Geyer, especially a paper called “After the Revolution of 1989” (presented to a symposium “Neither East Nor West? Undergraduate European Studies and the Transformation of Europe,” Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Mich., May 4–5, 1990), and “Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanization of National History,” Central European History 22 (1989): 316–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this essay I have tried to keep citations to a minimum, but two further works have been useful in pulling these thoughts together: Hall, Stuart and Jacques, Martin, eds., New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London, 1989)Google Scholar; and Wallace, William, The Transformation of Western Europe (London, 1990)Google Scholar.
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18 Note that here I am speaking more of broad rhetorical figures and ideological conceptions as they might function in the pages of a quality Sunday newspaper's color supplement, the currency of a serious radio or television discussion program, or the speeches of a backbench M.P. — that is. not of the technical histories of particular artistic traditions or forms.
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