Introduction: a narrative turn in European studies

In recent years, there has been a tendency to explain the successes or failures in formulating and justifying policy or polity-building proposals for the European Union (EU) in terms of the difficulty in articulating narratives appealing to the contemporary European public. However, narrative analyses are an emerging approach and the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of these debates are sometimes not made explicit. This special issue contributes to debating the potential of narrative analyses for understanding the EU, their methodological and thematic approaches as well as their limits. The articles that follow address three issues. Firstly, they consider how narratives have become prominent in academic interest and political practice in recent years. Secondly, they consider how the EU institutions have embarked in explicit or implicit attempts to build narratives of European political and cultural union through debates on the state of the Union, through cultural committees seeking to give the European project a cultural or artistic 'soul' or through designing euro banknotes. Finally, they analyse societal narratives of 'Europeanness' in relation to history, memory or cultural diversity.