Pregledni znanstveni članek	UDK 323.1(4-672EU)"20"
Slaviša Rakovic
EUROPEAN POLITICS OF SURVIVANCE: EUROPEANIZATION AS A RITE OF PASSAGE
ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to examine Europeanization as a politics that inaugurates an imagined common sociality among imagined Europeans. It is argued that Europeanization may be viewed as a rite ofpassage that comes out of a social drama staged for the purpose of surpassing the flaws of the European existence, andfor the sake of survivance (risk reduction). The notion of Europeanization is examined against a body of empirical (secondary) data as well as against theoretical concepts stemming from different areas of humanistic knowledge. The conclusion is that Europeanization is staged as a process of bringing about qualitative changes in politics, the economy and the social order with the aim to create and maintain the desired image of an imagined progressive Europe.
KEY WORDS: Europeanization, performative, survivance, rite of passage, social drama
Evropske politike obstanka: evropeizacija kot obred prehoda
IZVLEČEK: Članek proučuje evropeizacijo kot politiko, ki vpeljuje namišljeno družbenost med tako imenovane namišljene Evropejce. Avtor zagovarja trditev, da lahko na evropeizacijo gledamo kot na obred prehoda, ki izhaja iz socialne drame, uprizarjane z namenom preseganja 'napake' evropskega obstoja v prid njegovemu preživetju. Pojem evropeizacije avtor proučuje tako na podlagi empiričnih (sekundarnih) podatkov kot teoretskih konceptov z različnih področij humanističnih ved in ugotavlja, da je evropeizacija uprizarjana kot proces vzpostavljanja kvalitativnih sprememb v politiki, ekonomiji in družbenem redu, s ciljem, da se ustvari in ohranja želena podoba namišljene napredne Evrope.
KLJUČNE BESEDE: evropeizacija, uprizarjanje, preživetje, obred prehoda, socialna drama
1 Introduction1
"The dangers threatening us are great but great too is our strength, and there is no reason why we should not succeed in achieving our aims and establishing the structure of this united Europe whose moral concepts will be able to win the respect and recognition of mankind, and whose physical strength will be such that no one will dare to hold up its peaceful journey towards the future " (Churchill, 1949 speech in Strasbourg)
French anthropologist Marc Abeles claims that the nation state as we know it is not able to provide stability in the context of global challenges to human security (economic, ecological etc.). In Abeles's view, the nation state has been the universe of convivance, which means that it has provided a stable setting for common memory and destiny, but it is no longer able to maintain a desired level of stability (Abeles 2006: 94-105). Instead of the politics of convivance, an alternative form of politics called survivance took the lead in reducing risks and securing futures. Drawing on Anderson's key ideas about imagined communities (Anderson 2006), Abeles's account on survivance, Van Gennep's and Vicor Turner's ideas on rite of passage (Van Gennep 2004; Turner 1974), and Turner's notion of social drama (Turner 1974, 1987), this paper presents a view of Europeanization as a ritualistic politics of reducing risks and securing the future for the purpose of maintaining the symbolic political and economic order in a globalized post-colonial world in which Europe has become just one of the actors within the global public arena. In this paper Europeanization is seen as a perpetual, multilayered and multifaceted rite of passage, which comes out of a European social drama, and which is performed for the sake of creating and maintaining a desired image of a unified, strong, and allegedly progressive Europe.
The mode of inquiry here is interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary, intertextual and trans-textual, shifting back and forth between academic and political discourses, blurring the imagined border between the factual and the normative. The main 'research method' employed in this paper is textual ethnography, which consists of a process of exploring the contents, inter-textual conjunctions, and resonances of academic and political discourses that come out of a number of mono-linear texts, be they proper texts or speeches that are communicated to the outer sphere (to the public) as mono-linear texts (i.e. top-down discourses). Textual ethnography implies that texts not only served as sources of information, but were also the subjects of scrutiny, as if they were 'living voices' and objects with resonance (Greenblatt 1991:41). Primary methodological concepts in this paper (Abeles's politics of survivance, Van Gennep's and Victor Turner's ideas on rite of passage, and Turner's notion of social drama) are tentatively 'implanted' in a trans-disciplinary conceptual framework through which the dynamism and the consequences of the politics of Europeanization are explored against the body of empirical (secondary) data.
The notion of rite of passage here serves to explain the logic of performative discourses that establish (perform) Europe as an alleged space of lived experience of
1. I thank to my colleagues Adrienne Landry and Lacy Cope for proof-reading this paper. 106	Družboslovne razprave, XXIX (2013), 72: 105-117
diversity in a stable unity.2 Social drama here is understood as a "unit of harmonic and disharmonic social processes, arising in conflict situations" (Turner 1974: 37), through which certain values and ends are converted into a system of shared and consensual meanings (Turner 1987: 33). Throughout the paper it is argued that Europeanization, as a perpetual ritual, is being given birth by a social drama, coming out of the crisis of convivance, and staged for the purpose of transcending the real rifts in the European project, i.e. for the purpose of overcoming the flaws and foibles of the European existence (survivance).
2. Europeanization: a stream of performatives
"For centuries Europe has been an idea, holding out hope of peace and understanding. That hope has been fulfilled. European unification has made peace and prosperity possible. It has brought about a sense of community and overcome differences^Thanks to the yearning for freedom of the peoples of central and eastern Europe the unnatural division of Europe is now consigned to the past. European integration shows that we have learnt the painful lessons of a history marked by bloody conflict. Today we live together as was never possible before.
In much of academic literature, Europeanization is understood as an incarnation of a Zeitgeist that, colloquially speaking, is meant to prompt Europeans to grow and develop within a transnational, yet territorially circumscribed arena (Delanty and Rumford 2005; Olsen 2002; Van Ham 2001 et. al). Depending on the background of different scholars who undertake research on Europeanization, definitions of Europeanization are either moving closer to the processes of political and social integration (strict political science and international relations disciplines) or they depart from so called institutional approach and go towards an arena of cultural and societal issues (social theory/socio/anthropological approach). For example, back in the nineties, Ladrech (1994: 69), an international relations scholar, claimed that Europeanization was a process through which EU policies had become part of the organizational politics and policy making within individual states' political lives. This 'narrowed' approach still has a dominant say in certain areas of social science.
A glimpse into the more recent International Relations perspective on European integrations reveals a body of new literature related to the Europeanization of national foreign, social, environmental etc. polices, financial services and other aspects of political and economic life of the EU member states, as well as of those states aspiring to become part of the EU (for example: Knill 2001; Snyder 2011 et. al). Walter and Haar (2005: 139) call EU prompted convergence of policies 'governmentalization of
2.	Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep devised the term 'rite ofpassage' to describe significant transitions in the lives of individuals in the community. In the view of Grimes, rite of passage is a set of symbol laden actions which are stylized and condensed, and are intended to acknowledge the transformation, "which is not just any sort of change but a metamorphosis" (Grimes 2004: 6-7).
3.	Declaration on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the signature of the Treaty of Rome. Available from: <europa.eu> (Accessed July 10, 2010)
Europe', and argue that such policies and integration processes should not be confused with Europeanization, claiming that governmentalization does include dissemination of certain norms and procedures, but that Europeanization implies that there is a substance of Europe, incarnated through "a relatively coherent set of values, norms, and perhaps institutions". On the other hand, Featherstone (2003: 3) argues that Europeanization as a process of structural change - affecting actors and institutions, ideas and interests - does include European regional integrations, and also goes beyond the convergence of policies.
The cultural aspect of this circumscription is 'up in the air' every time the borders of Europe are discussed (Pfister 2007). Furthermore, common sociality of Europeans (Europeanness), i.e. sameness of European national cultures, which have given birth to a transnational identification with Europe as a whole, is often emphasized when certain political or economic changes are to be implemented, either within the EU, or in the EU's vicinity (Checkel and Katzenstein 2009).4 Discourses on common sociality of Europeans are usually created with caution, with a reference to the distinctness of European cultures and cultural expressions.5 Diversity of Europe has become an indispensable 'footnote' whenever the sameness of Europeans is under discussion. This 'footnote' provides a rationale for the elaboration of political, economic, and social activities on a supranational level, as well as it serves the actual process of building up of an image of a united Europe, often without a clear definition where Europe starts, and where it ends.6
A Communication issued by the European Commission at the time when the EU had 25 states, says that "in shaping the international response to globalization the impact of individual Member States acting alone is minimal. But Europe - 25 countries with shared values and strong institutions acting together - has a real chance to shape globalization, in areas like trade, international labor rules or tackling global health
4.	Europeanness in this paper stands for ambiguous imaginations of sociality among Europeans based on an imagined common historical experience, political, economic, and cultural interests.
5.	"The Union shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore"; "Action by the Union shall be aimed at encouraging cooperation between Member States and, if necessary, supporting and supplementing their action in the following areas: improvement of the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples, conservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage of European significance, non-commercial cultural exchanges, artistic and literary creation, including in the audiovisual sector", article 167 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
6.	"The term European has not been officially defined. It combines geographical, historical and cultural elements which all contribute to the European identity. The shared experience of proximity, ideas, values and historical interaction cannot be condensed into a simple formula, and it is subject to review by each succeeding generation. The Commission believes that it is neither possible nor opportune to establish new frontiers of the European Union, whose contours will be shaped over many years to come", Bulletin of the European Communities Supplement 3/92, 1992
or security threats".7 The message is that Europeans are stronger when they act/are together, and that together they have more leverage to shape the world. The pretext of such a discourse, I would argue, is the belief in European universalism, which is, according to Wallerstein (2006: 52), an attempt to achieve certainty in a globalized world or, as Abeles (2006: 94) claimed, to reduce risks through the employment of the politics of survivance8
The attempts to achieve common sociality (even though it is often not clear of what this common sociality consists) disclose an ambivalent standing of Europe in the eyes of Europeans. Van Ham (2001:14) writes that 'Europe' is drenched in ambiguity since there is no apocalyptic objectivity of Europe. So many meanings of Europe have emerged precisely because there has never been such a thing as 'Europe', in an essentialist sense; in other words, it has only existed through imaginations (Malmborg and Strath 2002: 3). Empirical surveys and research, for instance, suggest that a significant number of those living in the European Union, which is often understood to be a metonymy for the idea of Europe, do not perceive a common European culture. For example, Eurobarometer field research conducted in 2007 revealed that 53% of surveyed citizens from 27 EU countries thought that there was not a European culture because European countries were too different from one another. On the other hand, 67% of the interviewees responded that compared to other continents European countries culturally have a great deal in common; and 67% also thought that "Europe is clearly the continent of culture".9 A look at the Europe's outside, we see, does produce a kind of common sociality among those who, at least contextually, believe that they are Europeans, that they do have something in common.10 This situation on the ground affirms Pagden's (2002: 33) view that "the identity of 'Europe' has always been uncertain and imprecise. It is a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective me-
7.	"European values in the globalised world: Contribution of the Commission to the October Meeting of Heads of State and Government" (2005). Available from: <europa.eu> (Accessed May 24, 2010)
8.	Sayyid (1997: 128) defines such a process as Eurocentrism i.e. as a discourse that emerges in "the context of the decentring the West; that is, a context in which the relationship between western enterprise and universalism is open to disarticulation and re-articulation. Eurocentrism is a project to recentre the West, a project that is only possible when the West and the centre are no longer considered to be synonymous".
9.	European Cultural Values. Special Eurobarometer 278. European Commission. Brussels. 2007. 61-65 (research sample: 26466 citizens from 27 EU states)
10. Dutch historian Reitbergen (2005: 432) writes that for many Europeans who belong to diverse groups the question whether they share values with other Europeans is not a problematic issue as much as the need to define themselves against others. The others here are those who are the outsiders, i.e. those who have a different skin color, who live different life styles, those whose image does not conform to what Europeans think is normal. Others play an important role in the construction of collective imageries, and they are also a constitutive of the policy making processes. Others can be individual humans or groups, but ideologies, religious practices, economic solutions, and technologies of power, such as bolshevism, fascism, clericalism, sexual conservatism (etc.) can represent Others to a lived community that incarnates the Us.
mories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions". The identity building is a work in progress incarnated through performatives of Europeaness11 that have to do with the enactments of universality of the myth about Europe. Its purpose is to minimize the difference 'within', which at the same time, as Pfister (2007: 30) claims, emphasizes the 'difference between' Europe and the rest of the world.12
Evocation of the past, supra-European employment of hurtful memories for the sake of political gains and the establishment of order are part of a stream of myth building (that brings about the European). For the purpose of getting an insight into the dynamism of the process of creating Europeanness both as a political discourse that produces meanings as well as a desired behavioral pattern I propose the concept of social drama that European policy makers, when trying to legitimize the European project, symbolically stage for the purpose of surpassing the flaws and foibles of the European existence and for the sake of survivance, i.e. for the sake of creating and maintaining a desired image of a unified, strong, and allegedly progressive Europe.
In Turner's view, social drama has four phases: breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. Breach is signalized by the public, overt breach or deliberate non-fulfillment of some crucial norm regulating the intercourse of the parties. The following phase is a phase of mounting crisis; this phase is a threshold between more or less stable phases of the social process. In the third phase (redressive action) certain adjustive and redressive mechanisms are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system, whereas the fourth phase is reintegration phase in which the conflict is resolved (Turner 1974: 39).
When we apply Turner's notion of social drama to Europeanization, the following synopsis of the European drama might come up: for the enactment of the contemporary European social drama, the period of de-colonization may be taken as an onset of the breach phase. Together with WWII, which shook and provincialized Europe, decolonization made it just one out of many factors in the post-colonial world. The crisis phase to a certain extent overlaps and simultaneously flows out of the breach phase and flows into the redressive action phase. These three phases are to be located within back and forth movements of all the policies and cultural and diplomatic endeavors that feature the struggles of European powers to respectively reestablish their integrity after decolonization, including also their efforts to heal the wounds of the world
11.	Performative here refers to the social performance of the Self, which is "interactional in nature and involving symbolic forms and live bodies, provides a way to constitute meaning and to affirm individual and cultural values" (Stern and Henderson 1993: 3).
12.	Europeanization itself involves a 'pile' of contested notions (neo-liberalism or social democracy, ambiguous understanding of the roots of 'European civilization') that compete each other in the quest for the best possible solution for the process of alleged moving forward. Europe has become a lived community thanks to discourses and material practices which make Europeanization a multidirectional and open process of intra-European entanglement that neither has fixed boundaries nor is related to Europe only (Hirschhausen and Patel 2010: 4-8). Despite the ambivalence that the notion of Europeanness entails, globalization and the presence of Others have made Europe become a reference point in the transnational narratives.
wars. Reintegration phase is achieved through Europeanization (which corresponds to certain features of redressive action too), by re-metropolitanizing provincialized Europe through the construction and invention of shared economy and politics, norms and beliefs.
Political and symbolic strategies come across as an indispensable need of Europe, since "society must always create symbolic forms beyond the purely functional" (Stevenson 2003: 5). Europe has seen a number of efforts to create such symbolic forms that will hold it together. For example, in 1993 a group of experts chaired by Willy de Clercq, then a member of the European Parliament, drafted a report Reflection on Information and Communication Policy of the European Community that gave a deeper insight into what 'unity in diversity' should stand for in Europe:
"We are Europeans, and are proud of it. What is happening is that we are realizing our identity. In asserting our position in the world, we assert the richness of our culture, which is diverse and deep, a rich mosaic rather than the artificial 'ism'. European Union has deep, diverse and powerful roots. We are many in one: In Uno Plures, and we want to keep and nurture our diverse cultures that together make us the envied focus of culture, civilization."
Such social and political (and media) inaugurations of Europeanness aim at the attainment of 'communal' harmony through the process of imagining the roots of Europeanness1'3, through colonial narratives about the appropriation of non-European lands and populations14, as well as through the speeches and documents that sustain the notion of Europeanness that would serve the political, social, economic, and cultural legitimation of the European Union.15 Thus Europeanization as a politically narrativi-zed activity, inter alia, serves the purpose of inaugurating a common sociality among Europeans.16 It 'creates' a desired, yet ambiguous united Europe, and is often set in
13.	"Greece is the cradle of our European civilization. Rome left its indelible mark on it, Christianity gave it a soul and modernity guarantees its future. We are, whether we like it or not, the heirs of that magnificent legacy" (Couloubaritsis 1993: 180).
14.	"Only Europeans have persistently described themselves, usually when faced with cultures they found indescribably alien, to be not merely British or German or Spanish but also European,^'we Europeans' (nos Europai), as the English philosopher Francis Bacon said in 1623" (Pagden 2002: 33)
15.	For example, the Lisbon Treaty, which is known as a Reform Treaty of the EU, in its preamble recalls „the historic importance of the ending of the division of the European continent and the need to create firm bases for the construction of the future Europe". The treaty also says that it draws inspiration „from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law", and that the EU is resolute "to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe".
16.	For example, Internationaler Karlspreis zu Aachen, International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen, awarded once a year to people who contributed to the people „the service of West European understanding and common endeavour, and in the service of humanity and world peace. The contribution can be made in the literary, scientific-scholarly, economic, and
a mode that provokes the emergence of a rhizomic ensemble of acts that all, I would argue, incarnate into a ritual which aims at the legitimating of European diversities in their attempt to come closer together.
3. Europeanization as a ritualistic inauguration of Europe
Texts on Europe contribute, intentionally or unintentionally, to the ritualistic performatives of what is perceived to be specific European ways of being and ways of belonging.17 Ritual performances here stand for symbolic demarcations of a territory in space and time by complex ritual acts and techniques affecting the experience of identity of the participants away from individuality (Koster 2003).
For the sake of examination of the quality of this constant past-present-future representation and discursive structuration of performatives of Europeanness, Europeanization may be seen as a perpetual rite of passage towards (desired, wanted, wished) certainty. Hence, Europeanization comes across in a form of a ritual of passing from one stage of communal development to another, for the sake of surmounting European ambiguities and for the purpose of legitimation of actions on a communal European level. Therefore, the notion of rite ofpassage here only serves to explain the logic of performative discourses that establish Europe as a space of lived experience of diversity in stable unity.18 The following examination of Europeanization is a sort of mental experiment, an exercise that does not aim at looking to anthropomorphize the European states, but aims at shedding light on dynamism of the performative establishment of Europeannes, as a desired, yet undefined, common sociality among Europeans (a feeling of being European, a common overarching identity).
In Van Gennep's understanding, all rites of passage share a common separation--transition-reincorporation structure: preliminary phase, liminal, and postliminal phase. Within the European rite of passage, the separation phase takes place in a climate of political, economic, and social uncertainty and weakness within a growing
political sectors" (the words of Kurt Pfeiffer, who proposed the establishmnet of the prize). The Prize comemmorates Charlemagne, Frankish ruler, who is believed to had started delienation what is perceived as Western Europe.
17.	Ways of being designate "various quotidian acts through which people live their lives..", whereas ways of belonging are about "the realm of cultural representation, ideology, and identity through which people reach out to distant lands or persons through memory, nostalgia, and imagination" (Schiller 2007: 480).
18.	Rite of passage is a ceremonial event, a ritual, existing in all historically known societies. Being a ritual, it marks a passage from one social or religious status to another, with an aim of securing social order. Debrix employs the notion of mediation as a method that makes social meaning possible, and which empowers rituals that "give societies leaders and followers, rulers and ruled, states and citizens" (Debrix 2004: xxiii). Through mediation empowered rituals such as rites of passage guarantee that social hierarchies are preserved or that new ones are created. Rites of passage resolve life crises, they provide the community with "a mechanism to deal with the tension experienced by both individuals and social groups during ambiguous occasions" (Freeman and Fleising 2003: 1337).
globalized arena, in which national solutions prove to be insufficient to maintain the desired order. After WWII, the quest to heal from the atrocities of the war amplified the efforts to define symbols and the meaning of Europe, which is the reason why Europeans experienced a number of performatives incarnated in speeches, ceremonies, political events that are intrinsically ritualistic, in the sense that they represent technologies of power, which are the tools for imposing hierarchy and order, and for managing populations.
Upon the end of the separation stage, multilayered liminal phase begins. This stage is marked by ambiguity and indeterminacy because it involves negotiations and qualitative changes that the subject of the rite needs to go through. The liminal stage in the case of imagined Europe as a whole is perpetual, and is marked by efforts to come up with a joint solution to achieve communal certainty in the times of crisis. Nowadays, national states struggle to create modes of existence that would reconcile living up to the conditionality of the supranational community and retaining their own specificity within that same community. The liminal phase is de-structive and con-structive at the same time since it involves 'de-composition' of the previous state of affairs (the crisis of convivance), but it also establishes a novel (desired) order of meanings and symbols. The liminal phase in Europeanization is a zone of proximal development which is, in Vigotsky's terms, "the distance between the actual developmental levels as determined by independent problem solving and the level ofpotential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vigotsky 1978: 86). In the zone of proximal development, negotiations and instructions (either imposed or adopted) lead towards incorporation of the desired 'skills' and 'tools' which bring about transformations in the very quality of the rite of passage subject. The instructions (based on the conditionality criteria or lately on economic interventions directed towards economically weaker EU states) are meant to prompt such a development that would lead to a smooth reincorporation into the community. Europeanization in the time of crisis reveals itself in those policies that are being created to heal up the cracks, the shortcomings in the independent problem solving through the involvement of "more capable peers", i.e. through interventionism of those who have the power and who set the rules of survivance game in European integrations. The latest 'adult guidance' policies enforced by 'more capable peers' for the sake of survivance have been employed in the case of Greece, Spain, and Cyprus because of their struggles to overcome economic crisis and political rifts.
Postliminal or re-incorporation stage is a state of accomplished legitimation, a post-therapy condition in which the community invigorates itself. In such a condition, common sociality is cherished and celebrated through public ceremonies such as European Capital of Culture, European Heritage Days, Charlemagne Awards (etc.). These distinctions aim at normalizing the idea of Europe through the politics of remembering through forgetting. British scholar Cram (2009) claims that the notion of a joint Europe is being normalized and thus rendered banal in the lives of ordinary people through two intertwined elements: collective forgetting and so called enahbitation. Cram relates the process of enhabitation to the normalization of rules and practices
of Europeanization, which have become the habits of 'ordinary' people in Europe. To Cram, collective forgetting aims at generating long-term collaboration between once belligerent nations. In the united Europe, the continent's harsh past is being forgotten, argues Cram, just like nations used to forget some parts of their respective histories, for example a nation which celebrates its antiquity but forgets its historical recency (Billig 1995). In a similar vein, Asad (2002) argues that "'the myth of Europe' does not simply suppress the collective memories of violence within Europe; the resurrection of those memories strengthens that myth". Judt (2005) writes that "Europe was able to rebuild itself politically and economically only by forgetting the past, but it was able to define itself morally and culturally only by remembering it". Hence if Cram, Asad, and Judt are right, what we come across in Europeanization is a ritualistic simultaneous and intertwined remembering and forgetting of the past, but also of the present (the economic crisis, political ruptures, inequalities, power struggles) for the sake of maintaining the symbolic order, i.e. survivance.
4. Conclusion
Europeanization as a strategy of self-representation and as a device of power aims at reorganizing territoriality and peoplehood: two principles that have shaped modern European order (Borneman and Fowler 1998: 487). Discourses on territoriality and peoplehood help sustain the myth about imagined Europe as an intentional community which, as other communities of this kind, has chosen to eliminate conflict and attain communal harmony through careful planning and social self-regulation (Myerhoff and Moore 1977: 27). Held argues that "a European community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond," claiming that "it would be building upon sand" (Held 2002). The process of bringing Europeans together is often seen not only as implementation of measures that aim at the improvement of life of Europeans, but also as a diffusion of shared beliefs and certain ways of doing things (Bulmer and Radaelli 2004: 4). We have seen that both academic and political discourses on Europe, seen as a circumscribed group of states and societies that share a great deal in common, reveal that there is a subtext that discloses a belief that the European habitus is indispensable for Europe to live as a symbolic entity. The institutionalization of Europeanizing policies leads towards a desired European polity provoking thereby an unpredicted cultural dynamics and contestations over meaning and identity (Rumford 2008: 23).
Through the application of a textual ethnography method, thereby looking at texts as living voices with resonance that set the agenda of the European project, and through a trans-disciplinary, inter-textual, and trans-textual mode of examination on Europeanness, I have explored the dynamism of the politics of Europeanization as a ritualized myth building process employed for the sake of European unity, and for the purpose of overcoming the flaws and foibles of the European existence, and aiming at survivance. In this paper, it has been argued that European social drama prompts a set of policies and actions called Europeanization, which facilitates convergence of Euro-
pe through ritualistic modes of negotiation between different interests and practices. Europeanization has been presented as a never-ending multifaceted process composed of a number of events that may be thought of as a series of rites of passage that lead to metamorphosis of individual societies and of an imagined Europe. Europeanization has been revealing itself through processes of bringing qualitative changes to specific areas of politics, economy, and social order through a perpetual, multilayered and multifaceted rituals performed for the sake of legitimation of the politics of survivance, which aims at creating and maintaining the desired image of a supranational progressive Europe.
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Author's data: dr. Slaviša Rakovic
Centre for Applied European Studies (Centar za primenjene evropske studije) Belgrade Kneginje Ljubice 14, Beograd e-mail: slavisa. rakovic@gmail. com