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"Empire and maps are mutually reliant phenomena and traceable to the dawn of civilisation. Furthermore, maps retain a supremely authoritative status as unquestioned reflections of reality. In today's image-saturated world, their influence is more powerful now than at any other time in history. This book argues that in the 21st century we are seeing an imperial renaissance in the European Union (EU), a political organisation which defies categorisation, but whose power and influence grows by the year. It examines the past, present, and future of the EU to demonstrate that empire is not a category of state but rather a collective imagination which reshapes history and appropriates an artificial past to validate the policies of the present and the ambitions of the future. In doing so, this book illuminates the imperial discourse that permeates the mass maps of the modern EU. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of political science, EU Studies, Human Geography, European political history, cartography and visual methodologies and international relations"--

Since the early 1990s a dominant modernist narrative has assumed that European integration and the progressive march of secularism, multiculturalism and increased material prosperity would lead to the fading-away of tribal, national, racial and other parochial identities; identities ostensibly incompatible with a meta-national 'European' identity founded not in ethnosymbolic myth, but in cosmopolitanism. This has informed not only academic theory but has also guided 60 years of EU policy making, with Ernst Haas' doctrine of neofunctionalist spill-over dominating European assumptions that a pan-European identity would replace national affiliations. Brexit contradicts this in four ways. First, Brexit demonstrates the renewed appeal of ethnic nationalism on multiple levels: nationalist (British), sub-nationalist (English), and meta-nationalist (white nationalism). Second, Brexit demonstrates shifts in traditional nationalism in the form of gulfs in a neo-medieval society. Third, Brexit demonstrates the existence of multiple and incompatible 'European' identities. Finally, Brexit demonstrates how a specifically EUropean identity can be just as hostile and exclusionary as ethnic nationalism. This reappearance of social discord, ethnosymbolic identities, and the praxis of ethnic identity exemplified by the British, but seen across the EU, necessitates a fundamental reconsideration of the apparently irreversible trends of an unfalsifiable theory of modernist, neofunctionalist progressivism in the form of European integration. Using the British as a case study, this paper argues that the very processes of European integration have, by accelerating antagonistic national and EU identities, inadvertently constructed the apparatus for EUrope's potential disintegration.

Abstract'Empire' is a pejorative word in contemporary political science, a term which no longer describes a system of government and social organisation but which now serves only as an unflattering term, an accusation levelled against undesirable polities and policies. In the collective minds of academia and the community, moreover, 'empire' is either a concept with many meanings and applications, or simply a catch-all word for the violence and oppression of previous political systems. This paper returns to the roots of the word itself in an effort to distil if not definite, then at least manageable, concepts: imperium and patrocinium. Identifying how patrocinium has begun to emerge in the twenty-first century, the paper argues that ultimately, this form of empire has much to offer, both conceptually and politically, in the modern world.

This article introduces the special issue on populism and technocracy in the integration and governance of the European Union (EU), framing these opposing approaches in the context of polarised debate on the (il)legitimacy of the EU. The special issue was conceived as an interdisciplinary approach to questions of the EU's legitimacy in the aftermath of structural crises (the eurozone, sovereign debt and the election and appointment of governing agents) and spontaneous crises (migration, external state and non-state security challenges, Brexit and Euroscepticism). Since the special issue's conception the unanticipated Covid-19 pandemic, and responses from the EU and its member states (current and former) starkly illuminated debates on how the EU should operate, the limits of its power and the limits of its popular legitimacy. The era of passive consensus has been replaced by claims of legitimacy based on active expert-informed intervention, alongside populist claims of the EU's inherent illegitimacy as an undemocratic technocracy. As such the special issue's objective is to critically analyse manifold ways in which the populist-technocratic divide is narrated and performed in different regions, disciplines, and social and political systems in an era of growing internal and external challenges to the Union. We observe that the EU's institutions remain highly adaptable in responding to challenges, but that member-states have continued and accelerated a tendency to nationalise success and Europeanise failure, with the EU acting as a perennial scapegoat largely due to the ease with which it can be narrated as a site of projection for mistrust, resentment, and social grievances. We argue that the relationship between populism and technocracy is rapidly evolving from an imagined binary into a much more fluid, overlapping, and reversible set of political narratives. We conclude that despite the changing nature of populist-technocratic debates and the resilience and adaptability of the EU, it faces accelerating challenges to its legitimacy in the new era of 'politics of necessity'.