Research project | Updated 09/02/2010 

'Rekindle the ideal, breathe life and soul into it, that is a vital necessity if we intend to give shape to the Europe that we so dearly wish for': Jacques Delors' words can now, more so than ever, inspire those who wish to build a common future for Europeans. Accordingly, Notre Europe has undertaken an in-depth reflection meant to look beyond institutions and their functioning, in order to broaden our understanding of how Europeans live, what experiences they share, what hopes drive them.

Fully aware of the looseness of the very notion of 'identity', and of the intellectual dead ends it can lead to, we nevertheless resolved to espouse this common sense category as a thread running through our research. For we think it is as urgent to deprive the champions of State nationalism and sundry xenophobic cohorts from this theme as it is to increase awareness of what is shared by Europeans.

In order to take a fresh look at the way people view and speak of Europe, we set up an open (and somewhat experimental) method combining ethnographic studies, interviews with intellectuals from a wide range of backgrounds and – in 2008 – photography reportages.

Current research

Following the enlargements of 2004 and 2007, hundreds of thousands of Europeans have uprooted themselves from the familiar, in order to go live, work, and study elsewhere. Within the new frames posed by the unification of Europe, they outline new spaces, they experiment with novel senses of identity. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these transformations have acquired dimensions the full extent of which we haven’t yet been able to measure.

It is by traipsing across six emblematic cities – Belgrade, Dublin, Łódź, Malmö, Timişoara et Turin – that we have sought to capture what is at stake in these upheavals. Several case studies available on this page give an account of our ethnographic findings.

In 2010, we focus our research on the Western Balkans - a region which constitutes a "new wall" (but also a new horizon) of the European project.

The European Works book

In October 2008, Notre Europe published European Works, a book realized in collaboration with six Agence VU’ photographers. The photographs and words gathered in it bring home to us how Europe is being made, day by day, at the scale of people’s hopes and everyday lives.
EXTRACTS TO DOWNLOAD (Foreword by Jacques Delors)
This book is available in the bookshops.

Interviews to download

The book European Works contains short extracts of long interviews with personalities from the six countries where we conducted our fieldwork research: Ireland, Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Sweden. From one story to another, from East to West, North to South, come together fragments of a new European discourse: one made of analogies, contrasts, unexpected affinities - but also from discordances.

A selection of these interviews is available hereafter:

• Interview with Carlo OSSOLA, philologist and Professor at the Collège de France:"The roots are above the trees. We still have the idea that our origins are below, firmly entrenched in the grounds, whereas in the current age our origins will be at the crest of the tens we're buiilding together"
• Interview with Krzysztof PIESIEWICZ, screenwriter and Member of the Polish Senate: "The Polish liberation went together with the giant of telecommunications revolution of the 1990s. There was a need to get both these elements right, that's to say to build a new country while at the same time entering this civilisation of mass communication"
• Interview with Elizabeta ZEMLJIĆ, film-maker and theatre director: "The most beautiful moment was when it was coming together, just before the two parts met. That was really poetical. Now it’s “only” a bridge. Fifty years from now, people will think it has always existed"
• Interview with Hugo HAMILTON, Irish writer: "The Irish are bored with their own stories. We need the new stories that the immigrants can bring"
• Interview with Ana BLANDIANA, Romanian poet: "Our place in Europe is the geometric point between the obstinacy of our secular dream of integration and the reality of the truism which says history above all geograpy"
• Interview of Bronislaw GEREMEK, Polish historian and a member of the European Parliament: "It is far easier to
  integrate economies and administrations than to unite
  memories. The new Member States have a different view of the past"
• Interview of Peter SUTHERLAND, former EU Commissionner and DG of WTO:"To be truly Irish we have to be European
  first’ ‘We need the European Union to bind us to other
  people"
• Interview of Bogdan BOGDANOVIC, architect, former mayor of Belgrade: "Urbanity is one of the highest abstractions of the human spirit. To me, to be an urban man means to be neither a Serb nor a Croat, and instead to behave as though these distinctions no longer matter, as if they stopped at the gates of the city"
• Interview with Andrei PLESU, philosopher, former Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs: “We are going to bring you a certain historical lassitude. But this weariness can also become a virtue, for Europe has forgotten how to look tired: she is forever talking of the future, making plans. And yet, Europe is also a past – and the East might be able to bring her some perspective distance, a measure of calm, of analytical silence”
• Interview with Adam GLOBUS, Belarusian writer: "Thinking Europe is like drawing a map: you start with the outline. It is at the margins of Europe that you find tensions. That's where the hand trembles, where corrections need to be made all the time"