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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
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.
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.
2 See esp. the following works by Williams, Raymond: Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London, 1958)Google Scholar, The Long Revolution (London, 1961)Google Scholar, and The Country and the City (London, 1973)Google Scholar. See also LeMahieu, D. L., A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar.
3 Williams, Raymond, “Culture Is Ordinary,” in his Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London, 1989), p. 4Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., p. 5.
5 Erd, Rainer, “Musikalische Praxis und sozialer Protest: Überlegungen zur Funktion von Rock and Roll, Jazz und Oper,” Neue Gesellschaft/Frankfurter Hefte 37, no. 3 (March 1990): 253Google Scholar.
6 See esp. Hobsbawm, Ericet al., The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981)Google Scholar; André, Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Ebbighausen, Rolf and Tiemann, Friedrich, eds., Das Ende der Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland? (Opladen, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See Ingelhart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J., 1977)Google Scholar, and Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, N.J., 1989)Google Scholar; Melucci, Alberto, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia, 1989)Google Scholar; Brand, Karl-Werner, ed., Neue soz.iale Bewegungen in Westeuropa und den USA: Ein internationaler Vergleich (Frankfurt, 1985)Google Scholar.
8 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), translated in Illuminations (New York, 1968), pp. 219–53Google Scholar.
9 Willett, John, The New Sobriety, 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (London, 1976), p. 103Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., p. 137.
11 See esp. Williamson, Judith, Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Gamman, Lorraine and Marshment, Margaret, eds., The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Modleski, Tania, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Kaplan, E. Ann, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York and London, 1987)Google Scholar.
12 See esp. Edgar, David, “Culture Vulture,” Marxism Today (May 1989), pp. 18–21Google Scholar; Hall, Stuart, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in The Hard Road to Renewal (n. 1 above), pp. 39–56Google Scholar.
13 Another source of vitality, and of insistent pressure so far less adequately engaged, has come from minority culture and the cultural politics of “race.” See Gilroy, Paul, “One Nation under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of ‘Race’ and Racism in Britain,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. Goldberg, David Theo (Minneapolis, 1990), pp. 263–82Google Scholar, and the same author's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London, 1987)Google Scholar. See also the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed., The Empire Strikes Back (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Brennan, Timothy, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (New York, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for a fascinating document of one deliberate intervention, Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe, with screenplay by Hallam, Paul and McClintock, Derrick Saldan, Diary of a Young Soul Rebel (London, 1991)Google Scholar.
14 Robins, Kevin, “Global Times.” Marxism Today (December 1989). p. 23Google Scholar.
15 Ibid.
16 Roberts, John, review of Jean Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, in City Limits 108 (1983): 25Google Scholar, cited by Dunn, Tony, “The Evolution of Cultural Studies,” in Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed. Punter, David (London, 1986), p. 83Google Scholar.
17 New Left Review has obviously not been the sole force working for this, but its program of translation and commentary—both within the heterodox repertoire of Continental Marxisms and, more generally, across the landscape of European social, political, and cultural thought, through the journal itself and the publishing house Verso/ New Left Books—has been a remarkable achievement.
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.
19 The English-speaking conduit for this discussion has been the writings of Timothy Garton Ash. See. e.g., his The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York. 1990)Google Scholar. More generally, see Graubard, Stephen R., ed., Eastern Europe … Central Europe … Europe (Boulder. Colo., 1991)Google Scholar.
20 Noël, Emile. “The New Architecture of Europe,” Political Science and European Unification (newsletter of the International Political Science Association Research Committee on European Unification), no. 3 (Summer 1991), p. 1Google Scholar.
21 Wallace (n. 1 above), pp. 106–7.
22 ERASMUS is the European Community Action Scheme for Mobility of University Students. Details are from ibid., p. 27; and from T&E (American Express monthly newsletter), vol. 7. no. 2 (February 1990).
23 These two paragraphs are based on Mulgan, Geoff, “A Thousand Beams of Light,” Marxism Today (April 1989), pp. 34–35Google Scholar. See also Jörg, Becker and Szecsko, Tamás, eds., Europe Speaks to Europe: International Information Flows between Eastern and Western Europe (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar.
24 Held, David, “The Decline of the Nation State,” in Hall, and Jacques, , eds. (n. I above), p. 196Google Scholar.
25 The Stuart Hall reference is to his lecture on “Power” delivered at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. April 3, 1990. For current discussions of patriotism in Britain, see the three volumes edited by Samuel, Raphael, Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London, 1989)Google Scholar. For access to similar discussions in Germany in the later 1980s, see Eley, Geoff, “Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit, 1986–1987,” Past and Present, no. 121 (November 1988), pp. 171–208Google Scholar. For an interesting reflection on regionalism in the EC, see Williams, Gwyn A., “Europe and Nation: Little and Large,” Marxism Today (April 1989), pp. 49–51Google Scholar.
26 Hall, Stuart, “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference,” Radical America 23. no. 4 (1991): 16Google Scholar.