Europe and World Society offers a distinctive critical approach to understanding European transformations, exploring both the progress and limitations of integration on various key policy areas such as agricultural policy, education reform, migration, and external relations, as well as the relationship between European regionalism and globalization. Due to its innovative theoretical framework, based on macro perspectives including ‘World Polity Theory’, developed by Stanford sociologist John W. Meyer, this collection contributes to both the recent ‘sociological turn’ in European studies, and to the constructivist critiques of rational choice accounts of modern Europe. At a time when the European integration project has been severely challenged by multiple economic, political, and social crises, this book offers a timely, global perspective that sheds light on the dynamism and multiplicity of the actors, discourses, and processes which underlie contemporary Europe. The book’s distinctive global approach allows it to move the debate beyond state- and EU-centrism, and establish the ‘missing link’ between Europe and its global context. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

This book provides an unconventional account of post-1989 education reform in Romania. By drawing on policy documentation, interviews with key players, qualitative data from everyday school contexts, and extensive textbook analysis, this groundbreaking study explores change within the Romanian education system as a process that institutionalises world culture through symbolic mediation of the concept ‘Europe’. The book argues that the education system’s structural and organisational evolution through time is decoupled from its self-depiction by ultimately serving a nation-building agenda. It does so despite notable changes in the discourse reflecting increasingly transnational definitions of the mission of the school in the post-1989 era. The book also suggests that the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ institutionalised by the school are gradually being redefined as cosmopolitan, matching post-war patterns of post-national affiliations on a worldwide level.

This edited volume examines manele (sing. manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. But manele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even “alien” to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the “manea phenomenon” as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.