Exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures were central to representations of human-animal relations in the eighteenth century. When in 1713 Alexander Pope published an essay against cruelty to animals, he observed how “Everyone knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind.” This chapter explains how feeling for fellow creatures was coupled in English minds with Eastern – Ottoman and Arab as well as Persian and Indian – compassion for them. Derived from mercantile, scholarly, and scientific exchanges; travelers’ tales; and widely circulating translations of Eastern beast fables, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Enlightenment Orientalism” is examined in relation to a contemporary Ottoman representation of animals, the natural history and storytelling of Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1687). It also considers such texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Essay on Man, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. These texts present different versions of multiple species of animal kind as “peoples” in the sense of the Qur’anic verse, explicated by Sarra Tlili, that ‘”there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you.”

Solidarity is a contested and elusive concept. Nevertheless, it has made a considerable contribution to the shape and character of European Union (EU) integration from pre-European Economic Community (EEC) days to ongoing debates in the Conference on the Future of Europe. Indeed, solidarity has been characterised as ‘both the raison d’être and the objective of the European project’.1 Yet that impact has been achieved despite a less than obvious ‘fit’ between classical notions of solidarity and the complex system that constitutes the EU. Without adopting any essentialist approach to the meaning of solidarity, orthodox expositions emphasise close ties between individuals that involve sharing or redistributing resources, usually carrying connotations of political action and often situated in the social sphere. Put another way, solidarity is frequently understood as an affective condition defending particular values and usually most effective at local levels.

Blacks living in North America fought on both sides of the American Revolutionary War, though Loyalism proved very appealing to enslaved Blacks who found themselves in a position to choose sides freely. The American Revolution brought abolition to northern states in the new United States, but strengthened slavery in the southern states. The years of the American Revolution brought great material hardship to enslaved people in the British West Indian colonies. The French and Haitian Revolutions produced more than a decade of upheaval in the Caribbean, and their legacies helped change the balance of power between slaves and masters in the three decades that followed Haitian independence. On balance, the Age of Atlantic Revolutions strengthened the hand of Black slaves in the British Caribbean, inspiring the closing of the Atlantic slave trade, the passage of “ameliorative” legislation, and Parliament’s decision to abolish slavery in British America. The American Revolution created a nation split between states that recognized slavery and those that did not, but it also produced an expansive plantation economy that continued to grow and enslave increasing numbers of people until the Civil War ended slavery in the United States.

Coinciding with radical regional and global changes, the period 1986–93 is a fascinating time in the history of European integration. The fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989) opened the prospect of ending the division of the European continent and the bipolar world order, raising fundamental questions for both international and intra-European relations.

The momentous events coincided with a renewed dynamism in European integration.1 In June 1985, the member states of the European Communities (EC) had adopted a Commission White Paper with almost 300 measures required to complete the internal market of goods, services, persons and capital by the end of 1992.2 The Single European Act (SEA), a series of treaty amendments aimed at more democratic and effective policy-making, laid the constitutional groundwork for the realisation of this ambitious plan.

Ever since the era of Romanticism, it has been a commonplace to link language and literature to ideas of nationhood. The ideal “nation” is understood to be one that unites all people speaking the same language within a common territory, effectively constituting a nation-state. This principle undergirds most nineteenth- and twentieth-century processes of nation formation in Europe. In some cases, this has led to the breakup of larger territorial units organized along earlier and different principles into smaller units. In other cases, it has led to the unification of territories previously divided. Notwithstanding the principle cited, many of the countries thus constituted have within their borders linguistic minorities. Some European countries have no language of their own, using one or more languages that are claimed, and usually also perceived, as the “national” language of other, bigger countries. In all instances, literature, as the most visible and enduring embodiment of a people’s language, serves as a binding element.

How democratic were the European Communities, and later the European Union (EU), how democratic did they need to be, and what would this mean in the first place? Throughout the course of European integration, none of the answers was self-evident, and all were the stuff of continuous discursive construction, reconstruction and contestation. In this chapter I trace shifts and clashes in collective imaginations of EU democracy since 1950, exploring how what it made sense to say about EU democracy changed over time. I analyse discourses, or ensembles of ideas, concepts, narratives or categories, through which meaning was given to ‘democracy’, for the case of the EU and its institutional predecessors (for the sake of better readability, I sometimes use the label ‘EU’ to refer both to the EU as such and to its institutional predecessors in this chapter).

Founded by the Constitution of the year III, and with the executive power divided between five Directors, and the legislative power divided into two houses, the Directory sought political middle ground. It defied at the same time the “Jacobins” of Babeuf’s conspiracy and the constitutional circles, and the royalists of the Philanthropic Institute, who were ready to seize power by means of elections or force. In the name of this double danger, real or supposed, the Directors set up coups d’état to nullify election results by associating themselves with generals haloed by their expeditions and their victories abroad (in Egypt or the “sister-republics”). The Directory tried to muzzle the press, supervise the theater, multiply the official celebrations, and reform primary and secondary education. It tried in vain to spread a national religion (theophilanthropy) to control public opinion, to favor a republican elite, to tie scholars to the regime. In charge of a society marked by strong contrasts between the new rich who benefited from the development of the arts, and those left behind (the downgraded, unemployed, deserters, emigrants), it was confronted with corruption and brigandage.

What is known as the American Revolution or the American Independence War, was much more than what its name suggests. What started in April 1775 as a revolt turned into a revolution within a year. With the intervention of France in July 1778, it became a transatlantic war, which in June 1779, when Spain entered the conflict, was transformed into a global war. This global conflict, fought in four continents as well as on the high seas, was rooted in the centuries-old confrontation between France, Spain, and Britain for the expansion and control of their empires. France and Spain shared a mutual interest in weakening the British. During the first stages of the conflict, both countries “secretly” supplied the American rebels, but as the war spread, their approaches differed. While France, with no territories in North America, allied with the recently proclaimed independent United States; Spain, with a vast American empire to protect, would only consider France as its official ally. Despite their different interests and tactics, Franco-Spanish joint operations in Europe, the Caribbean, and the South of North America, were decisive for the final British defeat.

Since the founding of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Americans have rooted their national identity in their relationship with the wider world. America’s geopolitical position, its civilizing mission, its identity as the home of a chosen people, and its security requirements have shaped not only Americans’ external relations but also their very sense of themselves and who they are in a world of other peoples.

American nationalism has of course had several other sources than the outside world.1 The virtue of republican self-government – what might be identified as “civic nationalism” – has been an obviously powerful font of America’s self-identity, particularly the ways in which Americans have seen themselves as different, even superior, to other countries.

Chapter Twelve addresses the circulation and reception of Shakespeare’s plays in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century, showing how the non-classical elements of his drama vitally contributed to Romantic-period literature and culture. Beginning with a comparison of commemorations of the Bard’s bicentenary in various European capitals, the chapter then looks at his early reception in Germany and France. While Voltaire, Goethe, and Herder celebrated him as a natural genius, French critics realigned Shakespeare’s plays according to neoclassical rules. French audiences increasingly sought out melodrama, however, and accepted these ‘irregularities’, which also inspired Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays. The chapter demonstrates the productive convergences between Shakespearean drama and melodrama, pantomime, harlequinades and other popular theatrical forms, in particular as political satire. It then looks at how Tieck and A.W. Schlegel promoted Shakespeare as the supreme playwright and as part of the German opposition to Napoleon, leading to the banning of his plays in Vienna and elsewhere, and to many literary appropriations in Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller. The chapter concludes with a survey of some of Shakespeare’s influences on drama in Italy, Spain, and, again, France.

In the last thirty years, the historiography of Spanish-American independence has emphasized the paradoxical centrality of the Spanish revolutionary process, with the key role of the Cortes of Cadiz, in the general economy of emancipation. It also emphasized the role of Saint-Domingue/Haiti as a factor of regional destabilization. As a consequence of these revisions, the French Revolution is no longer considered as the intellectual and political source of these movements. Nevertheless, they allow us to rethink the Franco-Hispanic relationship, and beyond that, the Atlantic revolutionary cycle, by reformulating two classic issues. The first is the re-evaluation of the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions in Spanish America. The second is concerned with the forms of their appropriation by the actors of independence.

Studying the relationship between the process of European integration and nuclear energy means coming to grips with two of the central issues of the international system that emerged from the Second World War. Ever since the fateful dropping of two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the key questions of international politics has been whether the power of the atom is compatible with a world of nation states or whether its immense destructiveness needs a radical rethinking of the international system and the creation of some form of supranational framework to manage it. But is the atom really shareable, or – as General de Gaulle supposedly said – le nucléaire ne se partage pas? Such a question is obviously linked to the second issue, namely what can be achieved by the experiment of European integration. How far can it go? How much of their traditional powers are European nation states willing to abandon, and how far are they willing to go in sharing some of their most jealously guarded national secrets and prerogatives? Can Europe truly share the management of nuclear energy, in all its scientific, civilian and military applications? And if so, to what purpose? Is the ultimate goal of European integration the restoration of a Europe puissance or something else?

It is a truism that not all citizens hold the same opinions when it comes to the European Union (EU), European collaboration, integration, the euro and more. That is rather logical. Why would they? The EU today covers a vast range of policy areas and it seems perfectly legitimate to support some initiatives more than others. Some citizens might be satisfied with how the EU operates, but do not feel that they reap the (economic) benefits, or vice versa.

In general terms, the past decades have seen a significant rise of Euroscepticism across many EU member countries. At the same time, support for pro-EU parties has also increased. This may seem contradictory, but it could also be a hint that EU attitudes can be mixed, ambivalent or multidimensional. We currently do not have a very good overview of how different dimensions of attitudes to the EU have developed over time. Most research was constrained to very limited indicators of public support in most public opinion surveys.