Paper short abstract:

The aim of the article is to analyse the metaphor of Europe in Croatian public discourse. There are many different ways of shaping Europe and every one of them has its own history, reflecting social and cultural splits in contemporary Croatia.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of the article is to analyze metaphor of Europe in Croatian public discourse. There are many different ways of shaping Europe and every one of them have its own history dating back at least to sixties and seventies of the last century. They depict and point social and cultural splits in contemporary Croatia and as such talking about Europe is sort of social self-classification and strategy for identity construction. In prospect of such claim it is interesting to see that euro-skeptics, which are mostly positioned at the right political specter, took the same textual and cultural tool to represent Europe as those used by the most rigid communist ideologists before 1990.

But in spite of differences of every representation there is a common ground for all of them embodied in form of secret knowledge of what Europe is and revelation of that secret knowledge to the common people. In such a way all representations struggle for the power over interpretation of the society. Reception of Europe as heterogenic from abroad as likely from the lower European cultures, provincialise Europe more then it is already provincialized through postcolonial theory. Can we then think about Europe as a colonial entity or is its permanent crisis of identity (sometime seen on legislative, economic and political level) sign of search for different identity politics such as continual negotiation and hybridization?