Europe Cultural Construction and Reality

At the beginning of a new millennium a new Europe is emerging, but behind this imagination we have to face old problems and unsolved conflicts of our historical past. The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe led to decline and fall of the conceptual geography which was based on East vs. West and has shown political, social and cultural implications for both parts of the continent. Political borders and blocks have disappeared, but national ethnic, cultural and social differences are all still at work. In this book a number of leading European ethnologist investigates the complex process of the social, cultural and symbolic constructions of Europe's new geography, and shows how old lines of demarcation are revitalised, how different cultural imaginations of Europe are politically instrumentalised, and how political conflicts are being culturalised.