JCMS Annual Review / CES European Integration Research Network Lecture: Imagining Europe: The Cultural Foundations of EU Governance

The European Union has recently been buffeted by some of its deepest and most challenging crises.  Situating the EU in terms of the long historical evolution of governance forms points out the ways in which Europe's recent contestation and political upheavals have much in common with earlier episodes of state and nation building--but with important differences. Paying particular attention to the social and cultural foundations of political development, McNamara lays out the ways in which symbols and practices of everyday life legitimate the EU, but in ways that makes EU authority inherently fragile in the face of the current crises.