Transforming identities in Europe: Bulgaria and Macedonia between nationalism and Europeanization

This dissertation offers an investigation of the discursive function of national identity in the project of European integration. Its focus is the discursive dynamics created in the context of European Union Enlargement to the former communist states, and its geographical locus is the Balkan region. Exploring the transformations of national identity narratives in two Balkan states – Bulgaria and Macedonia – the analysis aims to uncover the discursive mechanisms of accommodating national identity in the process of empowering Europeanization. In the theoretical and meta-theoretical frame of poststructuralist discourse theory and within the structure of a small-number comparative case study, the investigation selects six narrative groups. They are centred around key elements in the narration of national identity: nationhood, territory, purpose, statehood, language, minorities. Traditionally interpreted within the hegemony of nationalism, these elements are identifiable in the national identity constructs of both of the studied states. Using qualitative methodology based on discourse analysis, the empirical study traces variations in these narratives in the course of the democratic transition and the preparation for EU membership at the macro level – the state. The purpose of the investigation is to reveal the logic of reading national identity within the empowering discourse of Europeanization. The findings demonstrate that the discursive space of the European project upholds a positive, emancipatory, optimistic vision of national subjectivity. Marginalizing antagonistic interpretations of national identity narrated in the discourse of nationalism, Europeanization reveals the potential to significantly increase the credibility of national identity as a source of collective self-iden tification at the level of the state. This can stabilize the discursive space of European integration and ensure the political relevance of the European project. Where nationalist readings of identity succeed in challenging the hegemony of Europeanization, national identity appears more antagonistic and less compatible with the progress of integration in Europe. In this sense reading national identity emerges as the touchstone of the integration project

‘Everyday bordering’ in England, Sweden and Bulgaria: Social work decision-making processes when working with migrant family members

The global movement of people is a growing feature of contemporary life, and it is essential that professionals providing support services know how to best engage with migrant families. However, despite globalisation and the related processes of de-bordering, borders continue to remain significant and, in contemporary life, the ways in which immigration is controlled and surveilled—bureaucratically and symbolically—are multiple. The paper draws on data gathered in the immediate period following the so called 2015 European ‘migration crisis’ and examines whether and in what ways social workers in three European countries—Bulgaria, Sweden and England—enact bordering in their work with migrant family members. We apply the concept of ‘everyday bordering’ to the data set: whilst borders are traditionally physical and at the boundary between nation states, bordering practices increasingly permeate everyday life in bureaucratic and symbolic forms. Overall, the data show that everyday bordering affects social work practice in three ways: by social workers being required to engage in bordering as an everyday practice; by producing conditions that require social workers to negotiate borders; and in revealing aspects of symbolic everyday bordering. Our analyses shows that ‘everyday bordering’ practices are present in social work decision-making processes in each country, but the forms they take vary across contexts. Analysis also indicates that, in each country, social workers recognise the ways in which immigration control can impact on the families with whom they work but that they can also inadvertently contribute to the ‘othering’ of migrant populations

Reconsidering Central-European Regional Science in the Context of Political and Social Transition

This chapter addresses two phenomena: (1) the complex nature of borders in the context of ‘transition’ as both fixed and dynamic lines of differentiation, and as passive product as well as active descriptor of spaces and territories;, (2) the discursive and programmatic distinction of ‘Central Europe’ within what under the old Cold War divisions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ was usually referred to simplistically as ‘Eastern Europe’. Both phenomena are interconnected – and it is this interconnection that interests here in particular. The distinction of a ‘Central Europe’ involves a purposive de- and re-bordering in discursive and, especially, ‘actual’ political-economic terms. Thus, discourse becomes political reality, something that is also at the heart of ‘borders’ and ‘bordering’, manifested by such geo-political factors as membership of the European Union, or a prevention of such through Moscow’s veto. Political-economic belonging involves drawing and re-drawing borders and notions of bordering as signs of belonging, not at least also in geo-strategic terms, as the current crisis about Crimea’s incorporation into Russia illustrates. This chapter proposes that borders and bordering involve just as much discursive politics – projecting self and other as either separate entities or essentially the same - as do actually existing state-administrative realities, such as trans-border engagement at personal and/or institutional level