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Feuds Of A Thousand Years: Explaining Europe Via The World System, Hans Hubbard

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

This paper argues for a more comprehensive study of the European Union that includes consideration, not only of socio-economic and political processes, but also of changing conceptualisations of identity, governance and democratic legitimacy. It argues for a re-examination of traditional narratives that frame the European Union as a response to the cruelties of the Second World War. Several key paradoxes in European history cannot be satisfactorily accounted for through purely intra-European processes: the European idea’s pre-dating the Second World War; the lack of a strong impulse for unified defence; the UK’s late membership and euroscepticism; the desire for a closed-off …