Randall Halle, ‘Revising EU History: Culture as Key to the European Project’

At the moment a consensus exists on the history of the European project, according to which the process of European unionization in the post-WWII era developed via an innocuous commitment to simple economic considerations. The Coal and Steel Community (1951) is held up as an exemplar of pragmatism that led slowly to political cooperation leading to the formation of the EU. Culture is treated as playing little to no role. The consensus on this history is wrong.

A return to the Hague in 1948 and the Congress of Europe reveals that the post-War European project was initiated with a focus on culture. Starting from the dynamic at this congress, attended by all the ‘founding fathers’ of the European Union, this paper provides a more complex understanding of both Europe’s cultural and institutional history.

Randall Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. At Pitt he is the founding Director of the Critical European Culture Studies Program as well as Director of the Film and Media Studies Program. He is founding Co-Chair of the European Culture Research Network of the Council for European Studies. His books include The Europeanization of Cinema, Toward a Transnational Aesthetic: German Film after Germany, Queer Readings in Social Philosophy, among others. His essays have appeared in journals such as New German Critique, Screen, Camera Obscura, German Quarterly, and Film-Philosophy. He is currently finishing European Cultural Dis/Union and Interzone Europe: Nation-State Turkey.