Chapter Five. The ‘Centrifugal’ Discursive Strategy: De/Renationalising The Territory

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specific, increasingly bounded territories were discursively, performatively and emotionally constructed as fatherland of certain people, whilst others were defined as ethnic minorities or of immigrant origins. The first section of this chapter will present the institutional make-up of the Great Region, deemed necessary to understand the representations of that protean territory and of Luxembourgs role within in. The second section deals with early-modern maps and their usage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to convey a sense of historical continuity to Luxembourg as a name and as a territorial entity. Finally,this chapter examines how the image of Luxembourg as borderland culture has been extrapolated to stand for the entire Great Region and how the latter has been constructed as community of destiny, based on (alleged) historical continuity, shared values and common future outlook.Keywords: borderland culture; Great Region; Luxembourg