Discursive Strategy: De/Renationalising the Territory

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ‘CENTRIFUGAL’ DISCURSIVE STRATEGY: DE/RENATIONALISING THE TERRITORY

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifi c, increasingly boun- ded territories were discursively, performatively and emotionally con- structed as ‘fatherland’ of certain people, whilst others were defi ned as ‘ethnic minorities’ or ‘of immigrant origins’.1 As shown in the previous chapter, the nationalisation of Luxembourgian territory was not hin- dered by the fact that the country remained an integral part of larger political or economic entities aft er the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the disintegration of the French First Empire. Aft er the Napoleonic Wars, the newly constituted grand duchy of Luxembourg was represented as part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands on maps and in schoolbooks until 1830, and ruled by the Dutch crown until 1890. At the same time, it was part of the German Confederation (1815–1866) and Customs Union (1842–1918). Aft er World War I, it joined the Belgo-Luxembourgian Economic Union and aft er the Second World War it became a founding member of Benelux and of the European Coal and Steel Community, which laid the economic foundations for the European Economic Community and the European Union. Trans- national cooperation schemes have received multiple boosts in the last thirty years with the creation of Saar-Lor-Lux and the Great Region,2 as well as the four subsequent European INTERREG programmes.3

1 See Gérard Noiriel, ed., L’identifi cation: genèse d’un travail d’Etat (Paris: Belin, 2007); Jane Caplan, Documenting Individual Identity: the Development of State Prac- tices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2 Martin Niedermeyer and Peter Moll, ‘SaarLorLux—vom Montandreieck zur “Großregion” ’, in 50 Jahre Saarland im Wandel, ed. H. Peter Dörrenbächer, Olaf Kühne and Juan Manuel Wagner (Saarbrücken: Institut für Landeskunde im Saar- land, 2007), 297–321. 3 INTERREG, the fi rst European programme for the promotion of regional and local cooperation across internal and external borders, was launched in 1990. It has been a key vehicle for the implementation of the European Spatial Development Per- spective (ESDP) which was adopted in 1999. INTERREG IV (2007 to 2013) includes the operational programme ‘Grande Région’, URL: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_pol icy/cooperation/crossborder/index_en.htm; http://www.feder.public.lu (last accessed 16 December 2009). 196 chapter five

While centripetal discursive strategies emphasise the grand duchy’s perceived distinctiveness and ‘nationalise’ its territory notwithstanding its membership of larger political and economic entities, centrifugal strategies stress the ties which link Luxembourg to its neighbours. Th e impulse towards a ‘centrifugal’ understanding of the territory is not diffi cult to discern, especially in recent years. Increasing border trans- action fl ows and crossborder commuter numbers have led to a reinter- pretation of state borders, previously represented as delimitations of a specifi c cultural space or area of communication. In the context of Euro- pean regionalisation processes, borderlands are proclaimed “test beds for the construction of Europe”.4 Th e positive image of the borderland as a bridge between cultures has been applied to Luxembourg before and is now extended to include the whole of the Great Region. Th e discursive construction of the Great Region fi ts thus previous moulds of Luxembourg as European model and an in-between culture. Benoît Majerus has shown how the ‘Europeanness’ of Luxembourg has been highlighted by referring to the active role played by its politicians in the European construction process (from Joseph Bech to Jean-Claude Juncker), to the Luxembourgian ‘roots’ of ‘founding father’ Robert Schuman and to the country’s central geographical position (‘at the heart’ of Europe).5 It role as mediator between France and Germany is further emphasised with reference to its position between Romance and Germanic linguistic and cultural spheres.6 Th e fi rst section of this chapter will present the institutional make-up of the Great Region, deemed necessary to understand the representations of that protean territory and of Luxembourg’s role within in. In order to examine the shift of emphasis from the continuity of national character (as examined in chapter four) to the historical importance of borderland

4 Kommission der Europäischen Gemeinschaft en, ‘Europe 2000+. Cooperation for Territorial Development’, EUREG 2 (1995), 39, cited by Christian Schulz, Interkom- munale Zusammenarbeit im Saar-Lor-Lux-Raum: staatsgrenzenüberschreitende lokale Integrationsprozesse. Saarbrücker geographische Arbeiten 45 (Saarbrücken: Fachrich- tung Geographie der Univ. des Saarlandes, 1998), 15. 5 See Benoît Majerus, ‘Le petit Européen parfait. L’Europe, le Luxembourg et la construction nationale’, in L’Europe de Versailles à Maastricht, ed. Nicolas Beaupré and Caroline Moine (Paris: Seli Arslan, 2007), 225–235. 6 See Claude D. Conter, ‘Mischkultur’, in Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg, ed. Sonja Kmec, Benoît Majerus, Michel Margue and Pit Péporté (Luxembourg: Saint- Paul, 2007), 23–28; Wolfgang H. Lorig, ‘Politische Kultur’, in Das politische System Luxemburgs, ed. Wolfgang H. Lorig and Mario Hirsch (Wiesbaden: VS, 2008), 31–44, here 32–34.