Download e-book for kindle: Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait (Heritage, by John Western

The previous hundred years of Europe are distilled within the reviews of the electorate of Strasbourg. From the flip of the 20th century until eventually 1945, Europe's ruling concept of nationalism rendered Strasbourg/Straßburg the prize in a tug-of-war among the 2 maximum continental powers, France and Germany. Then, within the speedy post-war interval, beliefs for eu solidarity manage numerous eu associations, a few situated in Strasbourg, that have progressively created supranational Europe. on the finish of the Fifties, a 3rd subject arises: the large-scale settling in Strasbourg and different such richer, western ecu towns of people from poorer lands, usually ex-colonial territories, whose visual appeal and cultural practices render them primarily "different" to neighborhood eyes: expressions of racism thereby jostle with professions of multiculturalism. Now within the globalisation period, the difficulty of "immigration" has broadened but extra into transnationalism: the event of folks who're embedded in various demeanour in either Strasbourg and of their land of foundation. in line with in-depth, energetic interviews with eighty males and eighty girls starting from one hundred and one to twenty years, and from around the globe (France, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, Portugal, Italy, ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Cameroon, and Afghanistan among different countries), the writer attracts out of those compelling stories every kind of compelling insights into problems with id, race, nationality, tradition, politics, history and illustration, giving a distinct and useful view of what it skill (and has intended over the last century) to be a European.