Imagining Europe Myth, Memory, and Identity

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.

Introduction; Part I. Memory and Identity: 1. Europe, identity, and legitimacy; 2. European identity and the politics of remembrance; 3. East and West: divided memories in a united Europe; Part II. Myth and Identity: 4. Myths of Europe; 5. Europe's significant others: the Cold War and beyond; 6. From sickle to crescent: religion and European identity; Conclusion.

Chiara Bottici is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Men and States: Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age (2009). She is co-author (with Benoît Challand) of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010) and co-editor (with Benoît Challand) of The Politics of Imagination (2011).
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).