Abstract
Discussion of the identity, development and outlook of, or for, modern Europe depends heavily on the character of the disciplinary background of the scholar involved. Kockel is Professor of Ethnology at the University of Ulster and a scholar from the German tradition. To a historian his work appears very weak in its historiography, dangerously faddish, self-consciously theoretical, and flawed in its failure to engage with the extensive work on identity and, more particularly European identity, produced by scholars in other disciplines. In Kockel’s defence, there is so much ‘out there’ that it is possibly natural to focus on work in one’s own discipline and only to deal with others in part. After all, you could spend a lifetime reading historians’ work and still have only covered a fraction of it.
The book is certainly very self-centred. Kockel writes of his ethnographic meanderings around Europe’ (p. 12) and asks the reader to ‘bear with’ him as ‘I ramble and roam some rather nebulous fields and debatable lands, pausing here and there to listen for the heart of Europe beating through the mists of discourse’ (p. 13). Well, the last are certainly present.
In the first substantive chapter, Northern Ireland bulks large, and Kockel has some interesting points, although he is inclined to downplay the sectarianism of Sinn Féin. The next chapter considers mobile Europeans, notably the role of immigrant communities. Ironically, he asks whether students of culture and society are becoming overly concerned with migrants and their mobility when the vast majority of people still die within miles of their place of birth. Kockel presses on to address the paradox that nation states in pursuit of integration are becoming key players in a process that actually undermines the nation state. European ethnology then moves to the fore in what becomes increasingly a self-absorbed series of theoretical reflections. I would have preferred more on Europe itself.