Governing Europe's spaces: European Union re-imagined

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU – of its development, its policies and its working processes – shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? The book constructs a case for re-imagining Europe – not as an entity in Brussels or a series of fixed relations - but as a simultaneously real and imagined space of action which exists to the extent that Europeans and others act in and on it. This Europe is constantly being made in particular spaces, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill-defined. We ask how do those concerned with building Europe, with extending and elaborating the EU, think of where they are and what they are doing? The book captures Europeans in the process of making Europe: of performing, interpreting, modelling, referencing, consulting, measuring and de-politicising Europe. Referencing Europe: Usages of Europe in National Identity Projects. For many policy makers across European countries, Europe itself remains principally a discursive device, a signifier to be deployed in various forms of rhetorical work (chapter five - Shaik and Ozga). Interviews with policy makers in the SNP government in Scotland, for example, reveal a complex mix of inward and outward referencing in their concern to make education policy both more ‘Scottish’ and more ‘European’, playing both to the exigencies of the global knowledge economy and to local civic tradition. Meanwhile, non-members as well as members of the EU must manage the consequences of EU integration: this seventh chapter also shows how, in Switzerland, Zurich's cantonal administration has used schooling in order to manage migration issues in a particular way. In both cases, the work of policy is the work of imagination, of a projection and reconciling of domestic interests in relation to Europe.