ABOUT THE PROJECT: TRADITIONS OF A NEW EUROPE. A PREHISTORY OF THE EUROPEAN INTEGRATION IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE A project supported by the VolkswagenStiftung (Hannover, Germany) In the countries of South-Eastern Europe, the project of the European reunification, launched by the Western countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain, has been as a rule perceived to be much more than just a political project. For decades, "Europe" had truly been for these countries a utopia of "normalization", a redemptive aspiration, an epitome of hope. European integration - conceived by the Brussels "experts" in rigorously quantifiable terms, according to a table of values and exigencies that are by now in the West common places of development and civilization - was to acquire, for the "candidate" countries, an inevitably pathetic tone, expressed in the extreme rhetoric of the "now or never". As a result, their efforts have constantly suffered from pragmatic deficiency, based as they have been on an image of Europe that had little in common with the real Europe of today. Against the backdrop of expectations of a largely sentimental nature, the Europe of their dreams took the shape of an intangible norm, situated somewhere very high up and very far away, that is, in a quasi-inaccessible space. The way leading there is full of hardships and obstacles, akin to an initiation journey. Little by little, East Europeans positioned themselves in a massive exteriority complex in relation to the object of their aspiration. (One shouldn't wonder that in the 19th century, Romanian intellectuals used to talk about a journey to the West as about one towards the "interior?". On the other hand, the citizens of Western Europe, as well as some of its politicians ended, surprisingly, by being contaminated by the convoluted psychology of their Eastern counterparts. The "candidate" countries gradually acquired in their eyes more or less exotic features. An understandable ignorance (after the forty-five years of drastic separation caused by WW2), and significant differences in mentality made it so that the prejudices of distance and difference became prevalent in the West as well. This may account for a question frequently occurring in Western discourse: "In what sense do you consider yourselves European, and, admitting that sooner or later you will join the Union, what do you have to offer Europe"? As a rule, the question is asked with the utmost benevolence and a genuine acceptance of cultural "homogenization". But it fails to conceal the tacit conviction that Eastern Europe is something else, a something understood not as a valuable supplement in diversity, but as a symptom of disjunction. It is not the aim of this project to give a direct and simple answer to the above-mentioned question, but rather to show to what extent this is an inadequately phrased one. We take as our starting point two complementary considerations: I. European integration is not a historical episode, strictly connected to the second half of the 20th century and expected to reach its completion in a relatively near future. Europe has always had an unmistakably integrative dimension. It has permanently distinguished itself as a cultural model tending towards extensive unification. Whether it resorted, as it did at the beginning of its modern history, to a civilizing expansion, or whether it was in search of lasting forms of political or religious coagulation (through its imperial "exercises", for instance, from Medieval times to the 19th century), Europe was always driven by a passion for irradiation on the one hand, and for convergence on the other. As against this long-lasting tradition, the project of the Common Market appears to be but a last minute "application", with a more pronounced legislative and fiscal character. Along this integration path, which is part of the very definition of Europe, some European countries may have been, for specific periods of time, more "advanced" than others. Italy was, at a certain moment, "more European" than England, while at another moment in time England was "more European" than Italy. Byzantium was, at the height of its flourishing, "more European" than its contemporary West, but the West ended by being "more European" than Byzantium. It seems that we are facing at present a necessary recuperation of the East. However, it is the recuperation of an area in which "Europeanization", that is, a specific impulse towards continental homogenization, started long before such a drive became a "challenge" transmitted from "the center", a standard imposed from the outside. Starting from several case studies, we will attempt, therefore, to recapture a "pre-history" of European integration, as it has been taking shape over the ages in the South-East European territories. We will offer to the communitarian Europe some vestiges of its own past, that is, a less known chapter from its own biography. We are certain that the description of a Europe in statu nascendi may be quite relevant for today's consolidated Europe, all the more as this consolidation is, as recent developments have shown, subject to reevaluations, reformulations and crises. II. Eastern Europe needs to urgently reconsider its relationships with Western Europe. As long as it continues to view the community space as being elsewhere, beyond its borders, as long as it conceives "Euoropeanization" as a dismal progression towards another place than the one where it is located, Eastern Europe will be faltering, drowsing neurotically in a territory peopled by phantasms. We have to stop understanding European integration as meaning getting closer to a far-away model. The right procedure is to draw on a potential model, one already existing in the structure of any European country. In fact, the problem is not "to become European", but to identify without unnecessary delays, without arrogance and without complexes, the latent layer of Europeanization that we already possess, the Europe from home. This is what we shall try to do through this project. We will show what is incipiently European, virtually European, what anticipates Europeanness in the historical and typological configuration of South-East Europe. We may thus contribute to a recovery of the European memory, but also to a redefinition of memory in general, to an enhancement of its spectrum, starting from the historical experience of the East. For the first year of this project we propose to concentrate on an inquiry into some aspects of everyday life. Certain elements in the history of costume, for instance, might prove suggestive for the South-East European trajectory towards "Europeanization": the shedding of oriental outfits in favor of "German" clothes, as they were called (what Alecu Russo, a Romanian writer of the 1848 generation, termed "The Big Trousers Revolution"), the history of the portrait/face (the evolution in the shaping of beards, e.g.), a careful account of the "gastronomic memory" (the grafting of Turkish and Viennese influences, the table customs and traditions, cooking habits and predilections, the relation between such beverages as "spritz", beer and "Schnaps" - a true "clash of civilizations") - a picturesque (but quite rewarding, from a historical and typological viewpoint) accumulation of data for a research on the geopolitical implications of food. Let us mention, in passing, that it is precisely the cooking habits that have been one of the strongest elements of continuity in the otherwise so fragmented and conflict- ridden space of the Balkans. Some suggestions for possible topics: - Dress as identity marker, as codified identity discourse, as indicator of group belonging; - Dress as symbolic covering; beliefs, convictions, habits, superstitions connected to dress; - Dress as a means of social control, as censorship of the body; - Dress as expression of the body; ideals of beauty and behavior imposed by the traditional costume; their evolution, as mirrored by present-day dress; - Ethics of dress; rules and taboos; covered/uncovered, associations and layering; - Dress and prestige; dress as an indicator of social status/compliance and/or of individual values; - The dress market: from "second hand" to luxury products; - The marketing of appearance: fashion, publicity, consumerism; - Dress practices between individualization and mass culture. - Temporal and spiritual dimensions of nourishment: eating calendar, rhythms of the year, - Taste - inherited and acquired, social indications, regional characteristics; celebrations, fasting; - Eating and sociability: practices and rituals at meals; hospitality, commensalism, spaces of sociability at meals; - Preparation and cooking: hand-made and ready-made; the art of gastronomy; agricultural and industrial production of food; - Eating principles and "ways of living"; nourishment and body-building; nourishment and religion, nourishment and social status; - The food market and the food industry; public institutions of food distribution; gastronomic tourism; marketing of culinary traditions; policies and food labels; - Nourishment troubles - cultural aspects; - Globalization and relocation tendencies on the food market.