Euroscapes: Negotiating National and European identities through imagined boundaries

This chapter investigates the interplay between national and European identities through the lens of “Euroscapes,” a concept understood here to encompass economic, linguistic, political, and cultural flows and imaginaries that symbolically (re)construct collective identities and power dynamics in Europe. Drawing on qualitative data from 95 in-depth interviews conducted in six languages and several local dialects amongst a maximum variation sample in Estonia, Italy, and the Netherlands, the study explores how individuals imagine and construct the geographic spaces of and within Europe. Semi-structured interviews were conducted by employing multi-modal interviewing and elicitation techniques that included images and photography, tangible objects, in-depth interviewing, and having interviewees draw intuitively on topographic maps. The topographic maps are the main focus of this chapter and allow for a discussion on how the interviewees in this study imagine the cultural spaces within Europe, what they mean to them, and how they use them to navigate contemporary power dynamics, politics, history, identity, and teleology. As an analytical taxonomy, the chapter distinguishes between four such Euroscapes, specifically, North, West, South, and East, and explores the significance of these in shaping notions of Europeanness, centre-periphery relations, power dynamics, and historical narratives. By examining the construction of these imagined geographies and boundaries, this research aims to illuminate how these processes shape and influence how individuals negotiate their (often intertwined) national and European identities.