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Helge Vidar Holm, Sissel Lægreid & Torgeir Skorgen

A pilgrim on a pilgrimage

Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge

His sneakers torn

In the hour when the homeless move their cardboard blankets

And the new day is born

Folded in his backpack pocket

The questions that he copied from his heart

Who am I in this lonely world?

And where will I make my bed tonight?

When twilight turns to dark

Who believes in angels?

Fools do

Fools and pilgrims all over the world

This song from Paul Simon’s latest album, So Beautiful or So What (2011), may serve as an entrance to our book. Simon’s lyrics illustrate what it is about: the aesthetics and poetics of borders, both interior and exterior, the time-spatiality of border zones and frontiers, the aesthetics of border crossing and the implications of being in transit, the aesthetics and experience of exile and of being excluded as opposed to being included. In short, the focus is on the strategies of identity rooted in the dynamics of identity and alterity (otherness), both related to the idea of Europe based on hegemonic power structures and strategies used throughout history in a continuous quest for the European identity. Today, in the post-national state of cultural and economic globalization with its multiplicities of disappearing old and emerging new identities both on a personal and collective level, this quest has proved increasingly challenging.

Much of this is foreshadowed in the quoted lyrics from Paul Simon, both from a historical perspective and metaphorically speaking. Being on a pilgrimage means being on a journey in search of a place of importance to a person’s beliefs or faith, such as the place of birth or death of founders or saints. In other words, it implies both searching for a place of origin, or in the Christian sense of the word, where life is seen as a journey between birth and death on the way to paradise, searching for the promised land of life after death.

From the perspective of the pilgrim this means being in the time-spatial state of transition, on the move here and now, between what was in the past and what will be in the future, when or if he reaches his place of destination, something that requires moving across both cultural and geographical borders. At the same time the pilgrim, as a stranger, is conceived of as the Other, which implies moving like a migrant and exile through foreign territories after having left his home territory and cradle of origin, being on the way to the unknown and yet promised territory.

The time-spatial dimension of the kind of border-crossing practice described by Paul Simon is also metaphorically indicated by the image of the torn sneakers, which may be read as signs of time passing as well as of the pilgrim’s journey through time and space. In view of the complexity of the aesthetics and poetics of borders, the torn sneakers, with their surface holes and miserable soles, may serve as potential points or spaces of contact and communication both in a concrete and symbolic sense. They are spots where the pilgrim’s feet get in touch with the ground on which he walks, so they may be said to represent a border zone and border-crossing practices on different levels.

Furthermore, in a more concrete sense the torn sneakers may be seen as containing traces and reminders of the places the pilgrim has been. In this sense they are virtual ingredients of his personal memory, and as such they may help him compose the narrative of who he is, of his personal identity. In other words, on the surface they will most likely contain some fragments of the answer to the question “Who am I in this lonely world?”.

The fact that he has copied this question from his heart and carries it with him in his backpack pocket may be read as an indication implying that identity and place of belonging, on many levels, is what the song is about. This reading, supported by the fact that the constitution of identity as a strategy is based on the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, also finds its expression in the image of the homeless, moving their cardboard blankets, in as much as they, as a group living on the outside of society, are conceived of as the social Other, excluded from the collective identity framework of society. And yet the pilgrim moves towards them “in the hour … when the new day is born”. In other words, in the border zone between night and day, on the bridge connecting the two banks of the river, he performs a time-spatial border-crossing act. And as he asks “… where will I make my bed tonight?”, he seems to seek their company, thus both identifying with them and looking upon them as an entity constituting a social outcast group of society.

From a perspective of the aesthetics and poetics of borders and border crossing as outlined above, the bridge, both as a border zone and as a threshold and possible entrance, represents a means of communication. It is both a passage way and a zone possibly bringing two opposites into dialogue. And last but not least, as is the case with the pilgrim, it symbolizes the state of being in transit.

In a more specific and concrete sense of the bridge image, the fact that Brooklyn Bridge crosses East River gives both the song and the image a historical and topographical dimension. Topographically it connects two boroughs of New York: Brooklyn, traditionally a part of the city with the biggest community of Norwegian immigrants, now taken over mostly by other ethnic minorities, and Manhattan, New York’s oldest borough, originally called Mana hatta by the Delaware Indians, who lived there until the Europeans came and established their cultural and territorial hegemony.

Thus the historical dimension and dynamics of cultural hegemonic strategies indicated in the song may be said to be revealed. Furthermore, if we add to this reading some elements from the biography of Paul Simon, the passage back to Europe and to the question of origins, identity and transformation may be retraced. As the son of Hungarian Jews, who in order to survive had to leave Europe and emigrate to America in the 1930s, Paul Simon himself may be said to personify, by his family heritage, the complexity of some of the issues treated in this book.

Towards the end of this introduction, we shall come back to the individual treatment of these issues by the authors of the various chapters in the following three sections. However, first we shall be discussing the notion of Europe in general, its origins and its imaginaries.

Anyone trying to define the notion of Europe geographically will almost automatically be confronted with considerable difficulties. The notion of Europe does not seem to refer to a clearly limited continent, as one might think, but rather to an imagined cultural realm, or simply to an idea with a historically and semantically unstable content. From nature’s hand, Europe is not a readily defined part of the world: it is not defined by oceans in every direction like other continents. When an Englishman says that he wants to go to Europe, he usually refers to the European mainland reaching eastwards to Asia or the Orient. And normally it is the question of the contested Eastern border which causes real challenges. As an example, the debates about Central Europe among exiled writers and intellectuals at the end of the Cold War were largely concerned with the question of whether Russia should be considered a part of Europe or not. And what about Azerbaijan – the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2011? When did we start to think of the Caucasus as a part of Europe?

In his lecture “Vilnius, Lithuania: An Ethnic Agglomerate”, the Polish writer and emigrant Cslaw Milosz tried to launch the notion of Central Europe as an alternative to the division between Eastern and Western Europe. Milosz defined this realm as Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and the current Czechoslovakia. However, Milosz admitted that the existence of such a Central Europe was contested by colleagues like Josif Brodsky, who preferred the notion of Western Asia (cf. Swiderski 1988: 140). According to his Hungarian colleague, the sociologist Georgy Konrad, the border-crossing dissidents and exile writers represented the true Central Europeans, raising their voices against the officially established cultural and political hierarchies and divisions of the East and West. To Conrad, the notion of Central Europe does not refer to any geographical border, but rather to a certain cultural practice; namely border-crossing.

Being a Central European implies a border-crossing attitude or such a state of mind.

In other words, the notion of Central Europe appears to be an imagined historical and cultural realm, i.e. a mental map signified by flexible and permeable borders and a cultural attitude of crossing borders among its inhabitants. On the other hand, the pretension of being Central European implies, although unspokenly, that other Europeans are peripheral. From a French or German perspective, the Baltic peoples are themselves viewed as peripheral, in contrast with inhabitants of Berlin or Paris. This illustrates the perspectivist aspect of the notion of Europe: it tends to change focus and meaning according to the geographical situation of the speaker. To most people on the continent today, “Europe” means the European Union, whereas to most Norwegians it means a geographical area surrounded and divided by national borders.

During the Cold War, the notion of Europe could refer to a humanist and modernist Utopia contrasting with subjugation and oppression experienced by exiled writers like Konrad or Kundera. Later on, the legal actions taken against Orhan Pamuk, who was prosecuted for his political views by the Turkish government in the 1990s, could give rise to similar views. If the homeland authorities appear oppressive, the Europeans are viewed as liberal. And if the homeland regime is reactionary, the Europeans seem progressive. Confronted with the exile experience of the Western European societies, this high esteem could however sometimes be turned into ambivalence and disappointment, as expressed in Pamuk’s novel Ka and in his essayistic encounter with Europe as an exclusionary political and cultural system (cf. Pamuk 2011).

Being raised with the image of Europe as the paradigm of humanism, modernity and progress, Pamuk points to a certain shift in the view of Europe among Turkish intellectuals, who seem rather disappointed with a European Union which seems incapable of accepting a major Islamic nation as part of the union. The EU’s restrictive attitude towards an inclusion of the Turkish nation in the union does not seem to have only economic or constitutional reasons. It also seems like an echo from the Renaissance notion of Europe as a slogan for Christianity. To Pamuk, the restrictive policy of the European countries towards poor immigrants from Africa and Asia seems to contradict the French ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood, which he once embraced as a young student.

Despite the continuing process of secularisation, religion still seems to play an important part in defining Europe and its borders. Hence Europe is not merely a space, nor is it merely a historical or cultural/religious community. It is an imagined region defined by historical memories, narratives and interpretations of cultural, religious, economic and political traits. These narratives and traits are sometimes uniting and sometimes dividing border markers, but they always depend on the way their interpreters are situated in time and space and on whom they relate to as their “Others”. The Norwegian assassin and terrorist who on 22 July 2011 caused the death of 77 innocent people (many of whom were children) was guided by the utopian vision of a culturally homogenous Christian Aryan Europe.

Accordingly, the mass-murderer saw himself in the glorious act of a modern Temple Knight crusader, defending the threatened purity of both national and European culture against jihadism, feminism, multiculturalism and “cultural marxism”. To him the extermination of 69 members of the youth organisation of the Norwegian Labour Party was a painful but necessary response to this imagined historical threat. Further investigation and psychiatric examination will have to reveal the extent to which the terrorist was representing a pathologically paranoid mindset of his own, and the extent to which he was an extreme symptom of a certain exclusionary, in some cases even hateful, European historical imaginary.

We propose to establish some major assertions regarding the epistemological and historico-semantic status of the notion of Europe:

– Semantically speaking, the notion of Europe refers to a field of meanings which is dependent on the situations or the relations in which it is used and interpreted.

– Epistemologically speaking, Europe may be viewed as an imagined spatial realm with flexible, permeable and disputable borders, and as an imagined historical realm, a “time-place” or a chronotope (Bakhtin 2008), to which certain defining cultural, religious and political narratives, memories and practices may be ascribed.

– The notion of Europe is a complex cultural system, integrating several imagined cultural, religious, economic and political communities into a larger and more complex regional community, constituted by different levels of inclusion and exclusion along various border markers, such as those between culturally dominating and dominated, centre and periphery, natives and exiled, settled and nomads.

To the ancient Greeks, “Europe” could refer either to the homelands of the “hyperborean” Barbarians or to the myth of the abduction of princess Europe, the daughter of king Agenor in the land of the Phoenicians. According to the myth, Zeus fell in love with her and seduced her in the shape of a white bull and persuaded her to sit on his back. Carrying her like this, Zeus swam to Crete, where they bred the son Minos. Thereafter Zeus married Europe to Asterion, who adopted her sons, who thus became emperors of the island. Apparently, the ancient Greeks gave this name to parts of the continents both to the South as well as to today’s Central Europe and Northern Africa, “the land of the sunset”, which is one possible meaning of Semitic origin of the word “Europe”, “Maghreb” being another synonym (in Arabic: al-Magrib, or “where the sun goes down”).

In other words, the original “Europe” never was European in our modern meaning of the word, whether as a royal, mythological person or as geographical area defined by the position of the sun (and of the speaker): Phoenicia was situated approximately where we find Lebanon, Syria and Israel today, and the Maghreb countries include Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Originally, “Europe” referred both to a certain realm of the world and to the name of the Phoenician princess who was seduced by Zeus (cf. Stråth 2003).

Much later Europe was launched as political-religious slogan or notion. Hence Europe is a situational notion as well as a relational one. Related to almost every epochal or main political shift, the implications of being European, and the borders of Europeanness, have been questioned in new ways. Since the 18^th century, when the modern notion of Europe came into being by offering a definite replacement of the old parameters like that of Christianity and the Occident, questions regarding its contents, borders and political constitution have been continuously discussed. Following the end of the Cold War, these issues have been especially recurrent in political speeches and academic publications (cf. Eggel & Wehinger 2008).

This modern notion of Europe may be considered to be a construction based on a kind of collective identity. As a consequence of the prevailing concept of national cultural identities, which in the wake of the 19^th century nation-building process linked culture with territory, attempts at deciding on a common foundation of a European cultural identity have proved to be extremely challenging. Two strategies of identification have clearly been at work: that of building European identity on a common history such as the Second World War; and that of a strong, opposing image of the Other, e.g. the Oriental Other. In the first case, Europe is conceived of as a project for peace and reconciliation, whereas the notion in the second case is based on a common consciousness of “Europeanism” involving “a political consciousness of the West”. This idea came into being after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, when Europe was conceived of as an “active community of Christians” (Mastnak 1997: 16-17).

Attempts are still being made to reconstruct a European “essence” with reference to different cultural, historical and political border markers, such as the heritage from Greek Antiquity, Lex Romanum, the Enlightenment or the English and the French revolutions. However, historical experience shows that the borders of this mental map are culturally and politically constructed and hence fluctuating and changeable. It was only in the 18^th century that the notion of Europe commonly replaced the notion of Christianity, and only in the early 19^th century that the Europeans would start to refer to themselves as Europeans.

This was also the age of emerging nationalism, which in accordance with the idea of Europeanism faced the challenge of finding a historical and rhetorical system of interpretation that could integrate past memory with present experience and future expectations. In our days, we ask ourselves if the European Union basically is political and economic, or if it may be conceived of as a cultural entity where borders tend to disappear. As to the few European states that still have not joined the Union, are their frontiers of another kind than those that constitute the member nations? Is Paris more European than Bucharest? To which European nation does a German-speaking, Jewish author like Kafka belong?

In one of his 18^th century epigrams, Goethe wrote: “Germany, but where is it? I cannot seem to find it on the map” (Goethe 1908). At the time most Europeans did not consider themselves as such, nor did they see themselves as a part of a national community. Germany was not yet a national state and could only be anticipated by poets and thinkers. It only existed as a complex of feudal states, conducting state affairs against each other. Its external territorial borders were undefined, its culture in reality complex and contradictory. While Goethe was witnessing the battle of Valmy, the first republican victory over the joint European royal forces by the French army in September 1792, he wrote in his notebook that a new era in world history had started: Celebrating his army’s victory over the Prussians, the French general Kellermann spurred his stallion, lifted his feather-decorated, military helmet up on top of his impressive sword and shouted: “Vive la nation!”. The soldiers copied General Kellermann’s example and started repeating loudly and proudly his cry of victory instead of the usual “Vive le roi!” (Boll-Johansen 1992: 19).

The world had changed its idol, Goethe wrote. People had found a new concept to worship and celebrate, a mutual image in which everybody could participate and feel like part of a new grandeur. The idea of a nation, as an imagined community, including all social layers of citizens, was born.

What used to be the most important identity framework for people in Europe is now generally considered outdated. Does the idea of a nation, as discussed by historians and philosophers from Herder, Kliuchevski and Renan to Narochnitskaia and Anderson, belong to our past? In some cases nation-building movements have regarded themselves as emancipating movements opposing established cultural and political forms of hegemony (e.g. hegemonic interpretations of ancient Greek or Roman culture, Italian Renaissance or French Enlightenment culture). But they could also, in given contexts, define themselves as “modern classic”, in accordance with inherited and nationally adapted myths and topoi like that of the Golden Age.

When the concept of a nation was launched, it was in many ways formed as an “imagined community”. Through media and public education, the grand narratives of the people and its history were presented. In his major work on the origin of nationalism, Imagined communities, Benedict Anderson issues warnings against the confusion between imagination and fabrication or falsity:

In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined (Anderson 1991: 6).

So according to Anderson, the modern nation is signified by three features. Firstly by the fact that it is imagined, in the sense that most of its members do not know each other from face-to-face meetings. Secondly the modern nation is imagined as sovereign, which means that the power of deciding the national state’s internal and external affairs should belong to the people, and no longer to kings or emperors, as expressed by Kellermann’s slogan at Valmy. And thirdly, the modern nation is imagined to be limited by borders, which are sometimes firm, sometimes fluctuating:

The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind (Anderson 1991: 6).

The fluctuating nature of national borders and the need for historical and rhetorical systems of interpretation are features of great relevance to the construction of Europeanness. But while most modern nations have been created on the basis of the political, legal and economic institutions of the national state, a similar development has taken place in Europe through the successive foundations of the forerunners of the EU after World War II, like the ESCS (European Coal and Steel Community) and the EEC (European Economic Community), established by the Treaties of Paris and Rome.

Interestingly enough, Anderson mentions both the dynastic state and the Catholic church as important forerunners of the modern nation. Accordingly, the Catholic church and its community may be viewed as an institutional religious paradigm of Europeanness. During the pilgrimages, travellers were received by Catholic priests in the monitories, who guided the commonly illiterate pilgrims into a correct understanding of the Holy Scripture. But they were also exposed to other Christian pilgrims from various European regions and kingdoms, who could now imagine themselves as part of a larger Christian Europeanness. This sense of belonging could later on be mobilized and turned into a powerful church slogan, as Pope Pius called upon the Christian kings and princes to join forces in the holy battle against the Turks.

Emphasizing the fact that the notion of Europe and of being European refers to an imagined community with historically and semantically unstable border markers does not mean that this notion is sheer fabrication or fiction. The fact that the notion of Europe and Europeanness has turned out to be historically and semantically unstable does not mean that it is useless or “false”. Like the uniting narratives of the modern nation, the competing narratives of Europeanness needed to appeal to some cultural ideas and historical experiences that were recognizable to the audience, encouraging a sense of community and belonging and offering them a trustworthy interpretation of the current historical situation. In this sense, the concept of Europe and Europeanness represents a kind of cultural and linguistic poiesis: a production of religious, historical and political meaning which in turn anticipated some actual European institutions and historically acting collectives. Bearing this in mind, the notion of Europe and being European will thus be used as an operational and reflexive term in this anthology.

Some kind of mental maps had to be constructed for the modern nation as well as Europe, containing not only past memory but also present experience and future hopes. In his essay on the chronotope and the historical and aesthetic development of the novel genre, Mikhail Bakhtin points to the chronotope as a kind of time-place, where time is visualized as space and space is intensified by the movement of time. In this way, flowing time is limited by spatial borders.

Bakhtin’s description of the chronotope has striking parallels with the imaginaries of nationality and Europeanness. In both cases, the national borders not only define geographical realms, they also give meaning and direction to historical memory and experience. Hence modern patriot and nationalist movements were challenged to find a system of interpretation capable of integrating their experience of present decay, their conceptions of “imagined antiquity” (Hobsbawm) and their utopian hopes of future prosperity in a recognizable fashion.

Such temporary processes of cultural change and self-interpretation were partly reflected by the emerging philosophy of history, allowing the nation-building elites to ask for the inner necessity of cultural change and national traditions, which now might be conceived of as the nation’s history.

A major precondition for the emergence of this new philosophical discipline, and along with it the rise of modern nationalism, was a fundamental shift of the European time conception, which Walter Benjamin has described as a turn from the Messianic time conception of the Middle Ages to the modern conception of time as “empty” and “homogenous” (cf. Benjamin 1997: 700-703). According to the Messianic time conception, time was inseparably linked to the place and to the expectation that Messiah would return at any point of time. It was therefore unnecessary to conceive of time in more extensive historical lines. To the medieval mind, there was a “now” that was inseparably linked to a “here”. Time only existed if it “took place” and was conceived of as an expandable moment which was inseparably tied to the locality in which it was experienced. Places far away were accordingly projected far back in time.

In the wake of new 18^th century discoveries and technical inventions, such as the invention of the chronometer and the synchronization of the homogenous global time by the division of time meridians, time could be gradually separated from space, and a new conception of time as empty and homogenous emerged (cf. Anderson 1996: 22-36). To the medieval mind, time had been filled with mythological and religious meaning and stories, serving as moral examples. In the new homogenous time conception, these stories were replaced by history, which in turn was filled with new meanings and narratives, such as the concept of progress.

The European experiences with non-European civilisations had confirmed a certain feeling of accelerating progress among the Europeans, allowing them to think of history in a linear or helical scheme of technical, scientific and political progress, for instance in terms of Enlightenment, freedom and human rights. Within this new historical scheme of self-interpretation, some cultures could be thought of as modern and progressive, while others were conceived of as backward. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has also referred to this period as Sattelzeit (saddle time) or Schwellenzeit (threshold time); that is a time in which the Europeans experienced a growing gap between the current realm of experience and their horizon of future expectation, allowing new political ideologies and utopian narratives such as those of the national community and its future prosperity to emerge. Accordingly, Voltaire and Kant launched competing utopian drafts of a future European League of Nations, ruled by democratically elected governments, thereby securing the welfare of their citizens and striving towards the regulative ideal of the perpetual peace and happiness of mankind by mutual agreements and obligations. Kant’s liberal Utopia of a democratic League of Nations would later on be disputed by the German poet Novalis, or Fredrich von Hardenberg, who in his essay “Christianity or Europe” idolized the Christian medieval culture as a state of religious-aesthetic harmony, hoping that the alienating process of modernization would eventually dissolve itself and make room for a new religious spirituality in a future Europe.

In our time, the definition of Europe as being synonymous with medieval Catholic Christianity has been relaunched and radicalized in a rather dangerous and martial manner inside the anti-jihad movement, which brought fuel to the fire that exploded so tragically in Norway on 22 July 2011.

These modern historical interpretation systems could also integrate inherited religious myths and traditions and popular stereotypes and self-images of the people as a “collective subject” (Koselleck) and climate theories (e.g. the patriot myth of the Norwegians as descendants of bold Giants, or Hermann the Cherusc as the founding father of the modern German cultural nation, etc.) In both cases, the national myths of origin eventually had to be confronted or sometimes harmonized with civic ideas of European Bildung (educational culture), emerging along with nationalism in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

This transnational, educational ideology was oriented towards both ancient Greek and Roman culture and aesthetics and a utopian Christian humanism as dividing lines excluding from the aesthetic, religious and utopian realm of Europe not only the uneducated “Barbarians” from within but also the “Orientals” from the outside. Thus the concepts of Europe and Europeanness were launched by romanticist poets like Novalis and Chateaubriand in the early 19^th century, drawing on the 15^th century application of the notion of Europe as a Christian Church slogan directed against the Muslim Ottomans on the one hand. On the other hand, the conception of Europe was temporalized and virtualized through their romanticist philosophy of history, projecting Europe into a future spiritual and aesthetic state of harmony, unity and dissolved alienation.

In the age of Enlightenment and early colonialism, Europe was conceived of as a chronotope of progress (Bakhtin), i.e. as a symbolic spatialization of a historically temporalized and individualized project (Koselleck). On the outskirts of this chronotope of progress, the Orient was imagined as the chronotope of stasis and invariability (Saïd). In this way, emerging colonialism and capitalism provided the Europeans with an outside view on themselves, affirming their experience of accelerating technical, financial and political progress and scientific enlightenment.

This outside perspective or exotopi (Bakhtin) generated a certain critical self-reflection (Diderot, Herder, Forster), and sometimes even cultural pessimism (Rousseau). From an outside point of view, European civilisation appeared to be rational and progressive, but also fragmented and alienated.

Within such aesthetic, cultural and ideological frameworks, the notion of Europe was nourished by romanticist aesthetics, making new transcendental division lines between nature and freedom, the limited and the unlimited, instrumental and “pure” art as self-purpose, and between original and imitating culture. The romantic concept of originality, launched by Herder, contained a certain ambiguity, drawing on both a linguistic conception of the individuality of the “people” and its popular traditions (poetry, music, dance etc.) on the one hand. On the other hand, the concept of originality could refer to the cultural achievements of the artist’s genius, both expressing the individuality of his “people’s voice” and exhausting the human possibilities.

The Herderian concept of national and cultural individuality was clearly a reaction against the cultural hegemony of both ancient Greek and Roman, French Enlightenment culture and European colonialism. Herder was underlining the necessity of evaluating each nation, people and culture by its inherent standards. The Herderian differential conception of culture, which was opposed to Rousseau’s and Kant’s universalistic conceptions, has been a major inspiration to modern conceptions of multiculturalist politics and minority rights (Taylor). However, the Herderian relativistic concept of national individuality was also embedded in a universalistic conception of a common humanity, stressing each nation’s and culture’s ability to contribute by making the best of its given conditions and by learning from other cultures.

In his major historico-philosophical work Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Johann Gottfried Herder depicts the progress of historical epochs as a relay between hegemonic civilisations, with the torch of culture being handed over from one nation to another. Starting with the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, the “mother torch” was handed over to the Babylonians, Persians and Greeks, who in turn handed it over to the Romans and so on (cf. Herder 1967: 227ff.).

What does this torch of civilisation illuminate, and what does it leave in darkness? First of all it sheds light on a certain historical and cultural concept of hegemony and hegemonic heritage: the idea that certain ethnic groups and civilisations throughout history have been politically dominant and given more significant contributions to civilisation and Europeanness than others. It also means that some cultures lost their hegemonic status once they had handed over the torch of civilisation and thereby left their age of glory behind.

The Herderian concept of cultural didactics and hybridization by intercultural and historical learning processes drew on the classical humanist conception of translatio studii, (i.e. the transfer of knowledge or learning from one geographical place and time to another), by way of translating the inheritance of hegemonic classical traditions. Herder wanted to emancipate young nations and cultures from the restraining weight of hegemonic traditions, thereby establishing a dialectics between national cultural self-maintenance and a common humanity.

Hence romanticist aesthetics, nationalist ideology and the philosophy of history were responding to certain early modernity “threshold experiences” (Koselleck) like the growing gap between the realm of experience and the horizon of expectation (cf. Koselleck 1989a). In this realm the notions of nation and Europeanness were temporalized and received political, historical, ideological and utopian meaning and tension. According to Reinhart Koselleck, this semantic change was also significant to the structural development of collective identities through asymmetric counter-conceptions like the division between citizens and barbarians, Christians and pagans, Europeans and Non-Europeans, Occidentals and Orientals (cf. Koselleck 1989b).

In the early 19^th century, when the Europeans first really started referring to themselves as Europeans, the national idea regarding political and cultural hegemony and colonization reached its peak. In this situation, culturally constructed conceptions of “race” could in some cases further a sense of European unity (the Aryan myth), and in other cases affirm linguistic and cultural division lines (Slavonic vs. Germanic vs. Gallic vs. Semite vs. Celtic etc.) The aesthetic and anthropological division lines would sometimes affirm, sometimes question the religious dividing lines between European Christianity, and the Islamic or Jewish Orient.

Some European artists and intellectuals (including Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Nerval, Flaubert, Renan, Loti and Strindberg) also sought vitalizing cultural impulses from Arab, Turkish, Jewish or Indian culture, opposing the sublime Orient to the decadent Occident.

Through travel descriptions and other literature, the impression of cultural hegemonic centres associated with old and new hegemonic capitals (London, Paris, Rome) or powers like England, France and Italy was confirmed. At the same time, travelling writers and intellectuals like Wolstonecraft, Loti and Renan took interest in the outskirts of Europe. In Russian literature, the image of the progressive and rational Russia was cultivated on the one hand, while the Caucasus region was regarded as wild, untamed but vital on the other. Accordingly, the Balkans were often regarded as an unruly, chaotic conflict region (“Balkanism”).

Scandinavia, Scotland and Switzerland could also be subjects of utopian projections and exoticism. Artists and writers from these regions, like Ibsen and Hamsun, could act as travelling and writing Orientalists, thereby referring to themselves as Europeans through the asymmetric division line towards the Oriental Other. Barents, Shetland, Greenland and Scotland could be conceived of in exotic terms as part of the Ultima Thule myth of the endless landscapes of the European outskirts and their freedom-loving inhabitants (cf. Sagmo 1998). In some cases, like Wolstonecraft’s travel description from Norway, the inhabitants could be described as rude or simply as the negation of urban European Bildung culture (cf. Wolstonecraft 1796). In other cases, like the travel description of the German professor Theodor Mügge or the novels of Pierre Loti, Norway and Iceland were conceived of as a zone in which ancient Germanic virtues had wintered and survived. Bearing such liberating and revitalizing potentials, these countries were more closely associated with the “universal history” (Kant, Hegel) of colonialism. At the same time, the European periphery could represent a kind of outside perspective with regard to the inherited colonial conception of European culture as progressive and historically rational.

During the 18^th century, the topographical realistic travel description was disparaged in favour of subjective, fictional travel literature, as in the cases of Wolstonecraft, Loti and Hamsun. In our days, travel literature is experiencing a cultural reappraisal, whereby the romanticist division between “higher” literary fiction and “lower” non-fiction is challenged and partly overcome. In this situation aesthetics is challenged to redefine and extend its realm to include wider parts of our sensual world and culture, allowing new discourses on Europeanness to develop. In contrast with the inherited “continental” Bildung culture and its exclusionary attitude towards “low”, “provincial” culture, imitating culture, popular culture, carnevalesque culture etc., the new discourses of Europeanness tend to embrace border crossings between artistic genres and media, between “high” and “low” culture and assumed national traditions.

In modernist aesthetics, responding to new historical ruptures and threshold experiences, the transcendental division lines of romanticist aesthetics have gradually been replaced by more concrete borders, thresholds and division lines. Elaborating the experience of war, crisis and rupture, modernist aesthetics from Baudelaire to Benjamin emphasizes modern urban experience and architecture, borders and transgressions between dream and consciousness, language and experience, launching new discourses of Europeanness. Historical and aesthetic manifestations of borders and thresholds contribute to the configuration of a modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. This configuration has also foregrounded a metropolitan trend in lifestyle and architecture, which has called attention to the borders between dream and reality, language and experience, synaesthesia and synecdoche. A new aesthetic framework is now emerging for the reinterpretation of the distinctively European in art, literature and philosophy.

This book is divided into three sections which have been subdivided into thematically related chapters. As individual contributions they are in some cases placed in dialogue with each other working in pairs on similar geographical or thematic contexts.

Thus, following this introduction, the first section treats the aesthetics of hegemony and conceptions of centre and periphery in Europe. The second section presents and discusses various conceptions and constructions of national, regional and artistic identity in European literature and art, whereas the third section contains discussions of the aesthetics and poetics of borders and border crossing in contemporary art and fiction.

Opening the first section, Siri Skjold Lexau gives in her chapter, “Hegemonic Ideals – Turkish Architecture of the 20^th Century”, a thorough description of modernism and the use of historicist Ottoman styles in its political and cultural context, especially in the period following the proclamation of the Turkish republic in 1923. She argues that the architectural styles discussed are dictated by political-cultural hegemonies formed in order to modernize Turkey by instilling specific values in the population, and that modern architecture, urban planning and design had central roles in this project. Lexau details the involvement of German and French architects in various periods, along with German-trained Turkish architects, and argues that Ottoman style influences, reread as a Turkish style of architecture, mainly appear on building exteriors, with the use of interior space formed more in line with Western modernist ideals.

In the second chapter, Steven Ellis provides a detailed historical presentation of the creation of the English Pale in Ireland in the late Middle Ages, the process of bordering the Pale on discursive and material levels, and the gradual institionalisation of internal zones of “marches” (a border zone) and “maghery” (an internal zone of peace) within the Pale. The chapter refers to an ongoing debate involving different theories of historical Irish and English identity in Ireland. It also addresses the relevance of agricultural, political and legal changes affecting the border zone, taking as its focus historical bordering practices connected to a dominant nation in Europe. It both provides a historiographical contribution to the book as a whole and contextualizes this within contemporary concerns as expressed within Irish historiography.

In the third chapter of this section, Kåre Johan Mjør gives a narrative and historical analysis of Vasilii O. Kliuchevskii’s history of Russia, with particular emphasis on his notion of Russia as both unique (“individual”) and European. In addition, Mjør examines Kliuchevskii’s historical thinking in the contexts of European nineteenth-century historicism and Russian historiography in general. Mjør argues that the liberal Kliuchevskii belonged neither to the “westerner” nor to the “slavophile” schools of Russian thought, but rather was seeing Russia as unique and not belatedly following Western European models of development, thus he was clearly placing it between Europe and Asia.

The chapter’s main involvement in the theme of the borders of Europe is its focus on how Kliuchevskii (and by extension different Russian historians and thinkers) set the borders of Europe and of Russia, and thus it points to the following chapter on Narochnitskaia, where Jardar Østbø succinct discussion arguing that the “romantic realism” (Morozov) of Nataliia Narochnitskaia’s idealist portrayal of Russian/European geopolitics is deeply based on a cultural essentialization of religion, which in turn forms the basis for the idea of Russia being the true Europe. According to this chapter, this world-view is both nationalist and universalist, the latter countering any desires for dialogue expressed in Narochnitskaia’s cultural initiatives in Western Europe. The “Borders of Europe” theme is retained in the implications of cultural definitions of Narochnitskaia’s type, both in their play on simultaneous inclusion and exclusion and their focus on the geopolitical dimensions of the Baltic-to-Black-Sea border zone (“The Eastern Question”).

In chapter five, Per Olav Folgerø examines details in the frescoes in early Sanctuary of S. Maria Antiqua in Rome. He argues that they show evidence of not only Byzantine culture but also Palestinian theology and iconography in 7^th-8^th century Rome. Folgerø continues to discuss various possible places and ways in which this cultural cross-over may have happened, concluding that at the very least, Rome was in this period a cultural melting pot.

In chapter six, Knut Ove Arntzen suggests an image of the border as a dialogic space based on the network of triangulation points which envelope Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve’s pioneering mapping of a geodetic arc (1816-1855) from the Black Sea to North Norway: i.e. along and within the border zone often imagined as dividing Western Europe from Russia. This suggestion is followed by a combined philosophical meditation and appraisal of current tendencies in art, especially theatre. The chapter gives a tour of contemporary theatre projects located roughly along the line of Struve’s arc.

Chapter seven, “Multiple dimension and multiple borderlines – cultural work and borderline experience”, describes several examples of crossing borders in performing arts practice. Artists who boldly open up different territories, independently of whether their borders are of an aesthetic, geographical or political nature, enrich their experience by diverse cultural influences and innovate artistic forms on many levels as is shown by particular projects created in the European periphery with a special focus on Eastern Europe. In this chapter, Gordana Vruk gives an overview and an analysis of the tendency to cross formal and geographical borders in art in the new Europe, as seen from a “periphery” perspective.

Lillian Jorunn Helle opens the second section with a chapter on the orientalized Caucasus as an alter and alternative ego in Russian classical literature. Her chapter focuses upon the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as depicted in the so-called Caucasus texts of Russian literature. It aims to show the flexibility and the shifting constellations of this relationship, ranging from rigid binary oppositions to complex forms of cultural interaction. The chapter gives an account of different forms of Orientalist and colonialist imaging of the Caucasus in Russian literature of the 19^th century, showing how the imagined Caucasus relates to Russian self-imaging both as an Eastern other and as a border-destabilizing inner and alternative self. The chapter is related to the borders of Europe theme through its focus on the nature of the cultural bordering going on in these literary texts, and also relates to the discussion of Russia’s place in relationship to European borders in the chapters on Kliuchevskii and Narochnitskaia.

In this section’s second chapter, Helge Vidar Holm uses theories from Koselleck and Bakhtin to discuss Edward Saïd’s readings of two novels by Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô and Bouvard et Pécuchet. While recognizing Flaubert’s critique of Orientalism, Saïd still emphasizes the orientalizing effect of the novels. But he also recognizes the contrasts between Flaubert’s handlings of time and a hegemonic historiography of time, a mainly orientalist historiography, exemplified by that of the French historian Jules Michelet. Like most of the other chapters in this section, Holm’s chapter addresses aesthetic versions of cultural East-West borderings. Like the previous chapter, it has a specific focus on us/them-relationships, bringing in the German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s writings on historical concepts in a rather unusual combination of theoretical references. The chapter’s use of Bakhtin focuses on his late work on “creative chronotopes”.

In the third chapter, Torgeir Skorgen reads Mozart’s opera “The Abduction from the Seraglio” especially for its implications in its national political context, for its use of the adventure chronotope and for its carnivalesque aspects, thus implying several Bakhtinian concepts. Skorgen makes observations on Mozart’s opinion that the text should be subservient to the music in opera, and uses the Catelanian Calixtio Bieito’s production of the opera to develop his discussion of orientalist borderings. The chapter suggests that looking at the borders of Europe in a narrative makes it possible to scale down the perspective and look at individual border crossings in the work (religious conversion, infiltration of the harem, and abduction).

The fourth chapter, by Sigrun Åsebø, examines the work of two contemporary Norwegian woman artists, A K Dolven and Mari Slaatelid, against the background of theories of landscape art and a Norwegian history of art. It argues that the focus on the body in the work of these women artists (e.g. placing naked female bodies in a landscape) disrupts the disembodied gaze of the male Romantic landscape and thus standard national histories of art, deeply connected as they are to the power of landscape art to create national imaginaries. This argument involves the border theme of the book at various points: among them the connection between the borders of the landscape (or the composite landscape of a canon of landscape art), national identification among viewers, and the actual borders of the nation; and the foregrounding of bodily borders as a way of disrupting the gaze. The European dimension is left implied by the subject matter, art traditions in a European nation on the edge of Europe, and the gendering of European identities.

The book’s third and last section, dedicated to border aesthetics and poetics, opens by a chapter on the borders between different media. Jørgen Bruhn’s “On the Borders of Poetry and Art: The Destructive Search for Media Purity from Lessing to Post Modernity” addresses the way in which medial borders have been conceived within different traditions of aesthetics and (inter)media theory. The chapter begins with a brief sketch of the history of aesthetic borders, leading to an important question in contemporary cultural theory: What is a medium, and what is exactly a border of a medium? The chapter’s attempt to define a medium, and its borders, leads to a terminological suggestion that may prompt new ways of thinking about media and media borders.

In the second chapter of this section, Øyunn Hestetun aims to show how Eva Hoffman’s memoir of exile from Poland to Canada Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989) is a work of self-definition and “finding at-homeness”. Eva Hoffman writes as an exile, and of exile from her lost home in post-war Europe. By foregrounding the way in which the crossing of geographical borders is paralleled by cultural transplantation and linguistic transposition, Hoffman’s tale contributes to our understanding of the experience of border crossing. The discussion focuses on structures, tropes and the representation of the liminal position of border crossing, and how the memoir – in “writing exile, writing home” – presents a meditation on language, self-knowledge and identity.

Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s writing on identity and exile, Sissel Lægreid argues in the section’s third chapter that three central poets of German-Jewish exile, Paul Celan, Rose Ausländer and Nelly Sachs, address in their poetry the “fragile boundaries and temporal equilibrums” of their exile situation. Their poetry is caught in Ernst Bloch’s simultaneous-non-simultaneous (“Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”) and in an aesthetics of the transitory. The chapter aims thus to examine the aesthetic effects of exile and estrangement, not unlike the chapter on Eva Hoffman’s exile experience, and reaches a similar conclusion: these experiences prove productive to writing. The chapter analyses poetry connected to a central border experience in European historical memory, and makes a good argument for the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to the aesthetic effects.

In the book’s last chapter, Jørgen Lund investigates the concept of the threshold as formulated by Walter Benjamin for its potential “thingly” resistance to a posited border discipline based on a disembodied view of space. In doing so, it develops new perspectives for a border aesthetics which go beyond clichéed avantgardist aesthetics of transgression.

Lund shows that Benjamin’s aesthetically informed reflections on borders come together in a certain concept of the threshold. Marking a transition from a way of thinking in mathematically accountable localities and significances to a certain materiality or “thingness”, the threshold offers an alternative to present conceptions of border aesthetics. Although itself a kind of border, it represents a sort of bodily event, a sensibility or animation coming about precisely as a departure from “border discipline”.

Let us now summarise the complex aim of this book in a complex question: In what ways has the configuration of new aesthetic motif clusters along with the thematization of threshold experiences, crisis, and fragmentation influenced the concept and discursive formulations of the distinctively European? In order to describe the processes indicated in this question, the answers suggested in this book draw on a differentiated conception of borders. Important references are the works of modernist thinkers such as Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin, who have developed theories of the border as a threshold (“Schwelle”). Their theorizing, when brought together with concepts borrowed from thinkers who have developed theories of modernity in the age of globalization, provide important aesthetic, hermeneutic and cultural-poetic tools of analysis for studies aiming to establish a better understanding of why European borders are conceived not only as borders of territorial demarcation, but also, increasingly, as membranes for dialogue and exchange.