European Studies: Always Already There and Still in Formation
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European Studies: Always Already There and Still in Formation Craig Calhoun Social Science Research Council, 810 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10012, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Comparative European Politics (2003) 1, 5–20. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110004
European Studies is perhaps the most basic model behind all area studies programs (at least in America) and yet at the same time an odd fit with the others. It is the model because the idea of Europe as a multiplicity of nations and states united by ‘civilization’, history, geography, religion, and politics informed the very idea that regions should be units of academic and indeed public interest. It is an odd fit because the others are all joined by a consistent issue of cultural distance, figuring more as America’s others than as its ancestors, and because it is very differently integrated into the organization of academic work. European Studies is an odd fit first of all because studies of Europe so deeply shaped most of the social science and humanities disciplines, providing them at least tacitly with their conceptions of the unmarked ‘normal’ and the seeming universal. European Studies is thus much less than other area studies fields an implicit challenge to disciplinary scholarship (although making explicit the specificity of European history, politics, and culture within the world’s range of variations requires at least as much critical effort as presenting the postcolonial or Third World other). European studies is an odd fit too because it cannot reasonably be conceived as ‘remedial’. I have heard some Europeanists complain of the ‘shocking neglect’ of Europe in American social science. However, while American ethnocentrism and the convenience of studying what is close at hand make Europe a little under-represented by comparison to the US, this is hardly true by comparison to the rest of the world. Finally, European Studies is in four senses self-regarding rather than otherregarding. (1) In European history, the conceptualization of Europe was shaped by the use of others — both the ‘‘high’’ cultures of Orientalism and the ‘primitives’ of Africa, America, and the Pacific — as mirrors for reflecting on Europe as the West. (2) In America this continued, but was overlaid also with the image of the Old World compared to the new, a view of heritage and (sometimes discarded) history constitutive for both the project of national identity and claims to high culture by elites within it. (3) In Cold War terms,
Craig Calhoun European Studies
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European Studies was part of the construction of the West rather than the communist East. (4) And in terms of modernization it was as basic to the ‘developed’ world and the idea of modernity itself as America and not part of the underdeveloped other. In short, European Studies has never been simply the study of a region, but always complexly interwoven with ideas about modernity, the West, Christendom, democracy, and civilization itself. This adds both to the importance and to the challenges of the study o
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