Journal of European Studies

This article presents a comparative study of romantic anti-Americanism focusing on Britain, Germany and France. On the basis of the hypothesis that romanticism invented what might be called the basic vocabulary of anti-American discourse, the article presents a taxonomy of this vocabulary and points to the determining factors underlying the romantic disaffection for America and Americans. Five motifs are singled out as fundamental to romantic anti-Americanism: the lack of history and culture in the US, the crass materialism of its inhabitants, their vulgarity, their religious excesses, and the flaws of the American political system. The article closes with an interpretation of romantic anti-Americanism as a strongly self-affirming, Eurocentric discourse, which accustomed Europeans to think of Europe and America as antithetical entities, thereby paving the way for cultural constructions not only of the American ‘other’, but also of a common European identity.

The representation of modern Greeks by a number of nineteenth-century French travellers raises questions about the factors that influenced them in their accounts. If we accept that travel literature is a distinct kind of literary genre characterized by a range of forms and themes, we should also not ignore the influence of the travellers' social and cultural background on the images they produce. Their social status, gender, cultural and professional backgrounds, together with their personal motives for travel, determine the approach they adopt while observing 'others'. The accounts they produced of numerous aspects of modern Greek life and culture were almost inevitably subjective, often controversial, and reflected intellectual currents and Western preconceptions of that period.

This article examines the prospect of Turkey’s EU membership as presented in two influential British newspapers and their Sunday editions (The Guardian/Observer and The Times/Sunday Times) during the eventful period of 2002—5, when Turkey’s expectations of setting a date for the start of accession talks overlapped with the establishment in Turkey of a single party government with roots in political Islam, the preparatory phase of the EU constitution, and the terrorist attacks on British targets in Istanbul. The particular aim is to find out how the enthusiastic support of the British government for Turkey’s EU membership was reflected and evaluated in the press, and what particular arguments (pragmatic, moral and ethical—political) were put forward either for or against. A discourse analysis of the papers’ regular columnists and news correspondents suggests that although The Guardian/Observer and The Times/Sunday Times do not hold radically different views on the issue, and are close to the British government’s pro-Turkish stance, they differ in their degree of support for Turkey’s EU membership and the rationale they deploy to support their respective positions.