The EU diaspora in the UK cannot be ignored

While formally Brexit may be behind us, the EU diaspora in the UK is becoming a political actor Brexiters could not foresee, write Zana Vathi and Ruxandra Trandafoiu (Edge Hill University). They argue that a ‘civic’ Europeanness was activated by Brexit and has started to create bridges among Europeans in the UK who are emerging as a dynamic diaspora collective of political significance

A Europe of Rights and Values? Public Debates on Sarkozy's Roma Affair in France, Bulgaria and Romania

This article analyses press coverage between July and October 2010 in three different European Union (EU) member states (France, Romania and Bulgaria) of the French government’s expulsion of Roma in 2010. It asks what the international reaction to France’s actions tells us about the way in which Europe is deployed in debates over discrimination, minority rights and freedom of movement in national media. The article finds evidence in national public debates of a Europeanisation of normative discussions, thanks to a willingness by a range of actors to use the EU in an instrumental way for political gain. However, the representation of issues and actors by the press also demonstrates the ways in which the prominence of supposedly European norms, and the framing of the EU’s role, can be associated with national political dynamics, both in relation to the political environment and contemporary narratives regarding national identity

Electronic Dance Music Festivals in Romania:A Case of Reversed Balkanism

Processes of ‘self-exoticization’ or ‘self-orientalization’ have been widely studied in contexts such as postsocialist Balkan film (Iordanova 2001: 61), Romani folk music (Szeman 2009: 103) and the repackaging of folklore into performance at the Eurovision Song Contest (Baker 2008). This chapter argues, however, that they have been particularly successful in the as-yet understud- ied case of electronic dance music festivals, which since the turn of the millennium have managed to profitably resolve the tension between EDM’s pleasure-seeking ethos and the Balkans’ intan- gible qualities. It explores this through the case of two Romanian electronic dance music (EDM) festivals, Untold and Neversea, which take place annually in the Transylvanian city of Cluj and the Black Sea port of Constanța, respectively. These festivals have resolved that tension through favourable cultural policies, hybridization and internationalization, as well as promotional strate- gies that mediated successfully between mythology and experience, darkness and lightness, centre and periphery, traditionalism and modernization. Since 2015, Untold’s contribution to rebranding, place-making and local development through the association between the city of Cluj and the festival thus became a blueprint for managing the post-socialist legacy of cultural control (Jucu 2020), while paving the way for the festivalization, urban gentrification and entrepreneurialization (Braniște 2021) that we can now witness in Romania and other parts of the Balkan region. Dance music has therefore managed to reverse, rewrite and repurpose regional typecasting as part of a larger process that this chapter terms ‘reversed balkanism’