‘Family’, ‘homecoming’, ‘growing together’—in trying to reconstruct how European identity was discursively imagined in Germany’s EU enlargement discourse during the 1990s, Hulsse (2006) argues that metaphors like these primordialise Europe and establish a binary opposition between insiders and outsiders.
‘In this way, European identity looks very similar to German identity. Obviously, there is nothing postmodern about it—it is very much in line with modern, nationalist ways of constructing identity’ (Hulsse 2006, 415).
What this finding is missing, however, is how the EU differs from nations as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). As opposed to the EU, nations’ construction of identity often relies on the existence of myths (Langewiesche 2014, 14). These myths in the sense of founding stories are expressions of a primary ethnocentrism and serve the self-representation and identity of societies. As such they are an important part of both the communicative as well as the cultural memory of groups and societies (Beer 2014, 9). Myths in this sense areS. Münch (B)
Centre for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: sybille.muench@leuphana.de
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 47
B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in
International Politics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53752-2_3 like a society’s autobiography, as they only stress what is positive about it. Langewiesche (2014, 18) maintains that the limited amount of acceptance of the European Union cannot be traced back only to its lack of democratic legitimacy; the limited acceptance was attributable most of all to a lack of shared myths that could justify political decisions in a pre-political way. Myths can create a common ground that does not need to be backed up politically. ‘Unlike most nation-states, the EU faces the challenge of actively creating and sustaining myths about its polity’ (Lenschow and Sprungk 2010, 133). The underlying assumption is that a political system that cannot shape its own myths is going to have great difficulties in generating support for its rule (Della Sala 2010, 3). This is not limited to myths as origin-stories but holds true for other concepts of myths as well.
How metaphors, myths, and arguments construct not only identity but also reality itself and thereby shape policymaking has been the main focus for authors working in the tradition of interpretive policy analysis (IPA).
This chapter takes stock of the contributions of IPA to the study of myth and discusses how they could be compatible with questions of International Relations (IR). The chapter does not pretend to do justice to the general concept of cosmologic myths often studied by social anthropologists or to myths in literary studies. Neither is it limited to those political myths that focus on the birth and development of a nation (Segesten 2011, 76). Instead, it argues that the application of IPA’s sophisticated conceptualisations of discourse and myths and how they relate to political action offer a rich conceptual and analytical toolset whose usefulness is not limited to local or domestic policymaking [see, for instance, Lynch (2014), on how interpretivism can inform IR].The following section introduces the reader to interpretive policy analysis and its different framings of agency in discourse. It then turns to IPA’s different conceptualisations of myth, which are discussed with regard to three dimensions of myth analysis. The first concerns the question whether myths should be treated as social constructions, as consciously deployed strategies, or as expressions of a wider power/knowledge system. The second dimension is guided by the question of what particular forms myths—understood by the majority of IPA authors as a specific form of narrative—can take on. The third dimension, finally, differentiates myths by their aims or functions. The chapter suggests that a coherent mythographical study into any politics-related question needs to start with mythographers’ conceptual and methodological decisions regarding these three dimensions of myth analysis.
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