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This article argues that the exceptionally complex spatial organisation of integration is shaped by spatial patterns of socio-cultural difference and similarity which emerge over the course of history. I outline two interacting socio-cultural factors that help shape the spatial patterns of integration: the international relations culture of demilitarised relations between neighbouring countries and northern Euroscepticism. I show that these have different historically evolving spatial patterns, which affect how specific regions and countries engage with integration. I propose that Europe's spatially differentiated integration and weak collective identity are increasingly bringing this connection between culture, geography and politics to prominence. This is rarely noticed however, because the centrality of collective identity in defining the geography of nations has made it the main focus of academic study and political speculation. My approach makes Europe's historical geography an ‘actor’ in the spatial patterning of integration. However the complexity of interacting historical factors and continuous historical change differentiate this approach from essentialist and deterministic theories of historical continuities in the EU's geography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the local reception and manipulation of ideas at the edge of an international cultural network. Poorly institutionalised interwar Romanian race anthropology was a weak voice in both the formulation of domestic nationalist discourse and in internationally centralised scientific race classification. The author discusses how its scientific methodologies, models, institutional links and citation practices, and the national identity and origin narratives it proposed, reveal an imaginative, but never entirely satisfactory negotiation between interacting cultural worlds of local nationalist tradition and international science, and powerful competing traditions within both. While nineteenth-century French influence helped entrench ideas of national racial synthesis deeply in Romanian nationalist tradition, fin-de-siecle German influence promoted a hypernationalist concentration on ultra-native Dacian ancestors. Romanian race scientists creatively mixed French-style syntheses, sometimes even importing France's ethnic Celts, with the ethno-racial purity obsession and Nordic supremacism of the new, scientifically prestigious interwar German raciology. The latter was particularly strong in the newly acquired, formerly Hapsburg province of Transylvania, which had stronger traditional German links, including in scientific training. Attempts to synthesise these two traditions were varied and inventive, often proposing racial class differences in which peasants could be a romantic reservoir of prolific national biology, but also a natural underclass to dynamic urban Nordics. However, the major incompatibilities between German and Romanian nationalist traditions, including their different ethnic Others, inhibited the emergence of a single dominant nationalist narrative in raciology. Romanian race scientists instead achieved this in blood-group anthropology, in close alliance with other nationalist scholarly traditions like ethnography. Survey results allowed them to claim, in harmony with Romanian nationalist traditions of Latin descent, that Hungarian and Russian national rivals were inferior Asiatics and that the contested territory of Transylvania was Romania's biodynamic core. Even this narrative remained at odds with Romanian hyper-nationalist traditions of Dacian descent, however. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution locates the current collection of papers by young European historians in the historical context of historical and social scientific study of culture, and especially the historical turn, which reconciles poststructuralist culture scholarship with older concerns of cultural history. The contributors are all influenced by linguistic turn deconstruction of discourse, studying culture and identity as systems of shared meaning, which are highly unstable, heavily gendered and susceptible to renegotiation, reinterpretation and political instrumentalisation. Authors problematise and undermine the essentialist, nationalist, conservative, functionalist model of timeless, separate, coherent territorial cultures. They discuss competing and contested criteria for defining nations or describe cultural communication between ideological or social groups within national societies. Most also engage intensely with power differences, including Foucault's 'microphysics' of subtle and complex power-knowledge interrelationships, examining state cultural policies or how individuals or weaker groups transform, appropriate or reject hegemonic state or intellectual discourses. However eclectic history's theoretical borrowing, focus on contingent, negotiable change and traditional emphasis on empirical complexity over 'rigorous' theory have inspired a broad 'historical turn' in scholarship of chaotic, multifaceted, tenticular and contradictory culture. This significant revision of the linguistic turn anchors deconstructed discourse and identity in a material context of social structures, institutional infrastructures and power relations and uses the concrete practice of individuals to restore agency to historical subjects. Contributors therefore accept sociologically and geographically defined cultures such as classes, ethnic groups and nations as historically important units of cultural commonality and connectivity. Several contributors examine the relationship between sites, negotiations and impositions of local and cosmopolitan identity, transfers of ideas and specific technologies or mechanisms and institutions of connectivity within international scholarly networks. Connectivity anchors symbolic culture in the concrete sociopolitical realm, and reconciles the paradoxical continuity and fluidity of culture by avoiding the distinct bounded cultures implied by commonality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]