Urban Social Processes

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Europe as a Social Process and Discourse
Considerations of Place, Boundaries and Identity
Anssi Paasi
University of Oulu, Finland

During the 1990s competing images emerged of what constitutes European identity, who belongs to it, and what are its internal and external boundaries. This has forced reflection on the links between state territoriality, and territorialities occurring on and between other spatial scales. This paper analyses images of Europe, narratives on European identity, and how these images have implied different forms and conceptualizations of spatiality. Europe is understood as an experience, a structural body and an institution. Structural interpretations have traditionally been dominant, but now an institutional-bureaucratic view has taken a dominant position in defining what Europe is. Growing flows of refugees and immigrants call into question the state-centred identities and narratives of nationally bounded cultures. In the current situation a more cosmopolitan view is needed instead of the established, exclusive concept of place. The paper suggests that this can be done by understanding place as a cumulative archive of personal experience that is not bound with some specific location. Regions, for their part, may be understood as collective institutional structures. A challenge for research is to reflect how regions and places come together and what kind of spatial imaginaries and ideologies are involved in this process.