The European Assemblage: A Discursive-Material Analysis of European Identity, Europaneity and Europeanisation

Abstract

Different academic disciplines have deployed a diversity of approaches to European identity, Europeanism and Europeanisation, with often a strong emphasis on their material-structural components. This article uses a discursive-material analysis, that acknowledges the importance of the material, but places it in a non-hierarchical relation with the discursive. Grounded in an extensive literature review on European identity, Europeanism and Europeanisation, the article first highlights the discursive nature of these concepts, how they engage in struggles with other place-based identities and discourses, and how the articulations of these concepts themselves are deeply contingent, with a long history of essentialist articulations. In the second part, the material components of these three concepts (and in particular Europeanisation) are analysed, then allowing for a plea to understand Europe as an assemblage, where Europe is seen to be performed in always unique and contingent articulations of the discursive and the material.