The project consortium which consists of researchers from an ‘old’ EU member country (Austria), a ‘new’ member (Slovenia), a candidate country (Croatia), and a country with aspiration to become EU member (Serbia) will assess the situation in the countries with structurally different positions as far as EU membership is concerned. Our research interests are directed towards analysis of different social and cultural domains and apparatuses affecting re-construction of cultural identities in the process of “EU-ropeanization” of SEE countries, such as: national cultural policies; possible paradigms of cultural practices; media representations (specificities of discourse, selection of topics, ways of presentation etc.); civil sphere (i.e. autonomous groups, networks, NGOs); dominant political forces and values, political standpoints, cultural identifications promoted by them. Consensus of local inhabitants regarding entering of a candidate country to EU cannot be achieved in a spontaneous or automatic manner due to the fact that accession process requires enforcement of not only widely accepted democratic standards but also certain rather unpopular social and economic measures. Furthermore, it seems that EU-integration of SEE / WB countries can be hardly achieved without soft ideological instruments influencing collective consciousness, including re-construction of cultural identities in the region. Critical analysis of re-definition and re-construction of cultural identities in SEE, through different social and cultural apparatuses and in the context of “EU-ropeanization”, regionalization and globalization processes, opens an important research question: do these processes (significantly) influence possible re-definition and re-construction of cultural identities in the direction of ethnically and nationally non-exclusivist cultures?

Institute for International Relations (Zagreb, Croatia)
Faculty of Historical Cultural Sciences – Department for Social and Economic History (Vienna, Austria)
University of Arts (Belgrade, Serbia)

ASO – Austrian Science and Research Liason Office Ljubljana / Centre for Social Innovation (Vienna, Austria)