Introduction

the remaking of Europe

Joe Andrew

Malcolm Crook

Michael Waller

pp. 1-16

in: Joe Andrew, Malcolm Crook, Michael Waller (eds), Why Europe? problems of culture and identity I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

Had it been in today's discussions about Europe that Klemens Metternich, through some time-warp, made his celebrated tongue-in-cheek remark that Asia begins in the Landstrasse district of Vienna he would have been given very bad marks for political correctness, but there are aspects of his remark that still evoke the difficulties of today's discussions on Europe's identity, and above all their open-endedness. For one thing, this Austrian Chancellor had a political axe to grind in the context of the relations between Austria and its subject peoples at the time when he made the remark, and in any case his image of what lay beyond Vienna may have been influenced by his Rhineland origins. Statements about what constitutes Europe clearly have to be evaluated in terms of the social and political position of their author in time and space, which makes generalization hazardous.