Panel 1. Ideas, Symbols and Identities

The CEPSA Conference welcomes proposals on a wide range of topics related to the effects of Europeanization with regard to history of political ideas, ideologies, development of supranational, national, regional or local identities, nationalism, symbolic politics, ethnic conflicts, state-building and citizenship in Central Europe. The Conference also features a section devoted to theoretical approaches to nationalism within any of the fields listed above.

We are interested in comparative and case-studies of the politics of identity and symbols related to the transition and the EU accession process of Central European states and nations. We are tending to focus our research towards the further questions: How the transition from dictatorship towards democracy reflected on the politics of symbols? Which politics of national identity stimulates and which constipates the Euro-integration processes? What is the relationship between the supranational, national and subnational identities? How the politics of symbols and national identity reflects on the classical division of political parties on the right and on the left? How process of Europeanization affects the relation between national and religious identity?

A special problem is related to Europeanization and the contemporary concept of democracy. Does Europeanization advances or ruins the concept of representative democracy as developed by national democratic polities? Does European Union needs a radically different concept of citizenship and what is the relationship between new demands and the existing concept of citizenship? How Europeanization already changed democratic citizenship and the principles of representative democracy?

In the field of national identities and the politics of symbols, we are also interested in new trends in media representations, the role of media in (re)creating collective memories and identities, extreme political rhetoric in post-communist societies, as well as in the retrospective look on the collapse of communism; the Glasnost and the revitalization of the public sphere as contributing factors to the collapse of communist regimes; media censorship and prosecution of free speech in communist and post-communist societies; dissident media channels and practices in former communist countries.

The papers in this section do not need to be grounded in the area of CEPSA, provided that the issues examined are relevant to a truly comparative understanding of nationalism-related issues. In this vein, we are welcoming theory-focused and comparative proposals, as well as specific case studies from Central and Eastern Europe. A dozen of panels are expected to be featured in the panel.