Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae and/or non-US-ASCII text omitted; see image)
Varia
It's like you're making a theater play and you have no prima donna, you don't have a lead actor. You are building everything with the actors and none of them speaks the same language.
Head Designer, House of European History
How does consensus emerge in politically and morally fragmented environments? Sociological writings investigating this question have traditionally drawn on trade-off models that explain cooperation through choice-models derived from economics [Axelrod 1984]. If cultural mechanisms are introduced, they typically direct attention to the persistence of conflict rather than consensus [Lamont and Volnár 2002]. The question of cultural elements of social consensus has received less theoretical attention ever since social theory departed from Talcott Parsons. Because of its focus on values, Parsons' model of consensus seems both static and conservative to today's thinkers. Yet in order to understand contemporary modes of creating cultural coordinates for social cohesion--telling stories that bind and stick--we need to bring this question back into perspective. To do so means to engage with the salient sociological topics of conflict and fragmentation; not to equate culture with consensus, but to show how culture can be mobilized in a way that builds consensus.
Social memory is an excellent field for the study of this set of problems. Past experiences, whether imagined, socially transmitted, or autobiographical, are sources of orientation in the present. The collective weight of references to the past goes beyond the individual and the "collected", i.e. the aggregate level [Halbwachs 1994; Olick 1999]. Groups, nations and corporations stitch their cultural quilt with powerful providential narratives. They do so in order to define how they wish to be seen, but also to convey who they are not. Social memory therefore entails both a unifying and a fragmenting potential.
In this paper, I examine the framework of the European Union (EU), because it is a truly fragmented arena in which the puzzle of cultural unity is politically decisive. European institutions suffer from a lack of legitimacy, as indicated by the low voter turnout in the elections to the European Parliament, which has steadily decreased ever since the first elections in 1979, or the popular rejection of the draft for a common European constitution in...