The revolutions in Eastern Europe and the redefinition of Europe: A new social contract?
Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: This paper is an exploration of the socio-cultural cohesion of Europe in the context of the end of the cold war. The eastern European revolutions of 1989/90 undermined the cold war consensus of east and west both in the global and in the European contexts. Since the Second World War western Europe had been shaped in the image of the United States just as eastern Europe was shaped in the image of the USSR, The question now is whether there is a new European cultural identity given the obsolescence of the old dichotomy. Is it really meaningful to speak of the socio-cultural cohesion of Europe at all in the sense of an underlying European political culture, which provides legitimating norms capable of embracing west and east, and which is not reducible to the ethos of capitalism? I should like to formulate this in terms of the possibility of European identity itself being a significant cultural identity sui generis. I am emphasizing, then, the eastern European revolutions as European revolutions and asking the question: exactly what was European about them?
Source: Contemporary Politics
Author: Gerard Delanty
Institution: University College Cork
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1978028735