Europe is the name for a scintillating variety of historically emerged concepts, constantly developed and discussed over time. Its complexity and fuzziness is reflected in a multitude of myths, topoi, symbols and boundaries, which all constitute shared knowledge of the concept of EUROPE and which continue to influence attempts to (de- and re-)construct European identity. The case studies collected in this volume investigate the competing concepts of Europe in political and public discourses from a wide range of perspectives (e.g. frame semantics, discourse linguistics, multimodal analysis), focusing on the following aspects: How is EUROPE conceptualised, (re-)negotiated and legitimised by different political actors, political bodies and institutions? How does "the European idea" change throughout history and how is the re-emerging idea of nationality evaluated?

Sabine Heinemann is full professor of Romance Linguistics at Karl Franzens University, Graz, Austria. Her research interests focus on language change, (historical) dialectology and minority languages (especially Friulian), cognitive semantics and, recently, the language of advertising and political discourse. Uta Helfrich is full professor of Romance Linguistics at Göttingen University, Germany. Her major research interests include language variation and change, the semantics, syntax and pragmatics of discourse in general, and political and media discourse in particular. Judith Visser is full professor of Romance Philology (linguistics, didactics and methodology of language teaching) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Her main research areas are sociolinguistics, folk linguistics, metaphors and political discourse.