Wednesday, June 26, 2013
5.59 (PC Hoofthuis)
The period between 1914 and 1945 saw an unprecedented level of violence and accordingly is often labelled as a ‘Second Thirty Years War’. Consequently, as has been noted by the traditional historiography on the European idea, the ‘European thinking’ of the contemporaries was largely dominated by perceptions of crisis and the Spenglerian notion of ‘Untergang des Abendlandes’. However, different images of ‘Europe’ can be detected in public discourse, that arose for example in connection with the development of infrastructure networks, the progress of radio broadcasting and the dawn of the ‘air age’, all of which led to changing European ‘mental maps’. I argue that many of the consequences of the technological revolution beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, such as urbanization, the height of the industrialization, the modernization of the travel and transport system, the incipient mechanization or the emergence of mass communication mainly due to the invention of the high-speed printing and the mass circulation press, spreading almost contemporaneously over large parts of the continent, induced the diminution of distance and space, and thus caused Europe to coalesce both physically and mentally. Not surprisingly these developments were reflected in public discourse and increasingly shaped the debates about ‘Europe’.
The paper draws on the findings of a PhD project that will be finished by the time of the conference. Within the dissertation a discourse analysis of German, British and US American newspapers was conducted by utilizing digitalized archives which allowed for a comprehensive examination of the ‘European images’ of the print media between 1914 and 1945. However, I will additionally include sources reflecting the history of ideas. In fact, several advocates of European integration during the interwar epoch, such as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, were concerned with questions of modernity and their influence on the ‘European idea’.
