‘Just Read my Magazine!’ Periodicals as European Spaces in the Twentieth Century

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In the autumn of 1922, shortly before French and Belgian troops occupied the German Ruhr as a sanction for the Weimar Republic's failure to fulfil the enormous reparation payments demanded by the victorious allies, the internationalist periodical La Revue de Genève did a survey on the future of Europe.1 Well-known intellectuals from all over Europe, such as André Gide, Hermann Keyserling, and Miguel de Unamuno, responded to the question 'Que pensez-vous que sera l'avenir de l'Europe?' ['What do you think will be the future of Europe?'] by articulating their rather gloomy prospects for the continent.2 Although the participating intellectuals held different ideas on the nature and essential characteristics of Europe's identity, they all agreed that Europe would disappear if it did not rejuvenate its 'unique' civilization and protect its beneficial humanistic values.
La Revue de Genève was, of course, not the only periodical that meditated on the idea of Europe and strove to enhance a sense of European solidarity in an era of crisis and fundamental insecurity. In the interwar years in particular, periodicals such as Die Neue Rundschau, the Europäische Revue, Europe, La Nouvelle Revue Française, the Revista de Occidente, and the Criterion, to name a few, tried to bring about a European reconciliation and functioned as transnational platforms where ideas of Europe were constructed and debated by authors from varying ideological and national backgrounds. It is the pivotal role played by periodicals in the negotiation and dissemination of the idea of Europe in the twentieth century that this special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies seeks to examine.
In this issue, which has an exploratory nature, we propose to study European periodicals as 'European spaces'. A periodical can be considered a European space if it meets three criteria. First of all, it has to display a clearly internationalist, or Europeanist orientation, for instance by frequently referring to political, economic, cultural, or literary developments abroad and/or by publishing articles or editorials aiming to generate transnational understanding. Secondly, its circle of editors, authors, and readers has to be, to some extent, multi-or international. This ranges from periodicals with a multinational board of editors aiming at an international audience (such as avant-garde magazines) to periodicals that are firmly grounded in a specific national context, but work for instance with permanent correspondents from abroad, are part of an international network, or frequently publish contributions from foreign authors. Finally, a periodical can only be regarded a European space if it actively serves as a (transnational) platform where varying, and sometimes conflicting ideas about Europe and Europeanness are articulated, negotiated, and disseminated.
By exploring how periodicals functioned as European spaces, this issue builds on recent trends in the field of the history of the idea of Europe. This field of study explicitly rejects the notion of Europe as an immutable historical, geographical, or cultural given, and examines the wide variety of ways in which Europe and European identity have been constructed and manufactured across time and space. In the last decade, it has moved away from a traditional approach that emphasizes how Europe was imagined by its elites (kings, politicians, academics, clerics, successful authors and writers, etc.), to a more postmodern perspective that focuses on what Europe has meant to different, smaller, and even peripheral groups of people.3 Recent studies have not only examined different groups within society, rather than the elites in Europe's capital cities, but they have also analyzed the associations in which they organized themselves and the different Schauplätze on which they generated and circulated their visions of Europe.4 Periodicals were particularly attractive 'theaters' for Europeanist intellectuals to express, promote and test their ideas, as they were instrumental to them in finding an audience for their views and often served as hubs in larger international networks providing opportunities for encounters that did not occur elsewhere. As means of communication, cultural periodicals seemed apt to mobilize larger groups for European ideals or to inform public opinion, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. However, relatively few studies on the idea of Europe in specific periodicals have been undertaken.5 In fact, this special JEPS issue builds on a previous issue of the Dutchlanguage journal TS: Tijdschrift voor tijdschriftstudies in which the current editors made an initial attempt to study the role of the periodical as a European space.6 It included articles on periodicals such as the Internationale Revue i10, the Cahiers universitaires, La Revue de Hollande, Ver Sacrum, and L'Art Moderne, which in turn were based on lectures held during a conference. The relative silence concerning this topic may have something to do with the fact that the European idea paradoxically seems to thrive on the inability to express or agree upon its meaning.
Throughout history, Europe has proven to be a very flexible concept that inspired a wide variety of groups for disparate reasons. Both left-and right-wing intellectuals, conservatives and radicals, technocrats and romantics, optimists and pessimists, nationalists and internationalists have drawn on the notion of a shared European culture, past, or future. A constant factor in the turbulent history of the idea of Europe, however, seems to be that crises triggered people from all over the continent (or even outside of Europe) to rethink Europe's identity and place in the world. In this respect, the First World War proved to be a cultural watershed. The Great War and the rise of the United States and the Soviet-Union as competing global superpowers not only urged many Europeans to query the self-evidence of Europe's alleged superiority and its association with 'civilization' and 'progress', but also strongly invigorated the dissatisfaction with European culture that had been growing among European intelligentsia since the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, in the eyes of pacifist and cosmopolitan intellectuals, the First World War confirmed the need for a European rapprochement. The economic crisis and rise of the totalitarian regimes in the 1930s further sparked the (transnational) debates about Europe's identity, values, 'spirit', and historical rootedness, and galvanized intellectuals to formulate various blueprints for a European unity, as well as to construct Europe vis à vis Significant Others (such as the United States, Russia, or Asian countries/powers). The Second World War, decolonization, and the emergence and end of the Cold War led to a further reassessment of Europe's identity and role in the world and produced new ideas about a European integration. In recent years, the growing discontent with globalization, the rise of nationalism across the continent, and the increasing tensions between the EU and both Putin's Russia and Trump's America as well as the UK in the wake of Brexit have generated changes in the way Europe imagines itself. These recent developments have encouraged politicians and intellectuals to envision a more concordant, social, and virtuous Europe of the future, but have also informed nostalgic reflections about Europe's decline that resemble the cultural pessimism of the interwar years.7 The recurrent reorientation on Europe that was sparked by the massive changes and deep crises of the twentieth century often went hand in hand with the dream of a European unity, which was seen as a necessary condition for the durable peace and prosperity of the continent. However, Europe was by no means an inclusive ideal. An appeal to a shared European heritage, culture, values, or (Christian) religion often served as a mechanism for exclusion and 'othering'. Periodicals that served as European spaces frequently referred to Europe to demarcate the boundaries of their own discursive community. Not just the contents of the ideas that were conveyed, but also the European or international orientation of a periodical was sometimes employed to exclude certain views and to underline the significance and legitimacy of one's own visions of Europe and European identity. Editors, for instance, sometimes pointed at ideas of foreign authors because they needed a negative counterpart to highlight their own European ideals.
A number of concepts and approaches have proven to be fruitful in understanding how periodicals functioned as European spaces, which can be recognized in the contributions to this issue. In the first place, the concept of European space is indebted to the spatial turn in the humanities. This concept implies that the periodical always has a geographical dimension, in addition to having a physical or material one. As Carlos Reijnen indicates in his article on émigré periodicals in Cold War Europe, the spatial turn in the humanities goes back to the work of Karl Schlögel and Edward Soja, the latter of whom defined the concept of thirdspace as a combination of the perceived, physical space and the represented, mental space. Soja's spatial approach tries to uncover norms within this thirdspace. Here, we therefore conceive of the European space as including both the physical space in which the periodical was situated, and the mental space that the periodical created.
The fact that the periodical as a space can be seen as a mental construction also means it generated new definitions and ideas. Periodicals were not only the European platforms that united and disseminated texts, but they also formulated new definitions of Europe. Periodicals produced new European identities and visions on Europe, and this production of discourse about Europe needs to be understood as a process. European identity does not precede the European spaces, but is one of their products. It is always contingent. One of the specific ways in which periodicals can be studied as European spaces is by combining discourse analysis and institutional analysis. In his book Europese papieren [European Papers], the Dutch scholar Mathijs Sanders has suggested integrating the study of the discursive and rhetorical dimensions of texts with the analysis of the institutional space in which these texts were written.8 While his comments apply to the study of the reception of foreign literature in magazines and other media in the Netherlands, it could also be extended to the study of periodicals as European spaces. With regard to the discursive and rhetorical dimensions of texts, an important focus should be on the 'borders' in the definitions of Europe and Europeanness, and the norms and values that are expressed concerning these borders. Discourse analysis can also be used to compare source texts and translations, as Francis Mus demonstrates in his article on the Brussels magazine L'Art libre. He points to several translation shifts made by the editor in order to accommodate the translated text within the magazine and its internationalist stance.
Institutional analysis is based on Pierre Bourdieu's idea that claims are always made in a social context. In our case, what actors have to say about Europe is not made in a political and cultural vacuum but takes multiple claims by other actors into account. It stresses the competition between actors in the field to have their claims for Europe believed and accepted by others. The approach also stresses how the practices and views of actors can be understood by studying their institutional position, motives, and interests. In this issue, Mus's understanding of L'Art libre clearly originates from a study of the institutional positions of the actors involved in the magazine, an analysis he combines with discourse analysis. While Bourdieu's approach was mainly confined to the national literary field of France, scholars such as Pascale Casanova have taken his approach to the international level.9 Casanova shows how the hierarchies that are at play in the national field also exist in the international literary field, where there is a constant power struggle between actors, institutions, and national literatures.
On the international level, periodicals also constructed ideas about Europe and Europeaness by forming networks of actors. For instance, many of the magazines studied here had a transnational network of editors, contributors, translators, etc., and usually boasted a transnational audience too. This notion of network is explicitly referred to in Jeroen Vanheste's study of T. S. Eliot and the Criterion. He describes the network of writers, academics, and philosophers in many European countries with which Eliot and the Criterion stood in contact. Eliot intended to establish a network for intellectual exchange between European reviews with a shared cultural orientation. Finally, we should add to this brief summary of concepts and approaches for periodical research that the three broad approaches mentioned here -the spatial approach, discourse analysis, and institutional analysis -are not mutually exclusive. As Reijnen reminds us, the spatial and institutional approaches could also be partly combined, as Soja elaborated on Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital by proposing the concept of spatial capital. This is a fruitful notion that obliges us to envision how cultural capital always depends on and creates space. Moreover, the focus on norms in discourse analysis has similarities with Soja's attempts to uncover norms within spaces.
The three articles featured in this issue all deal with periodicals or groups of periodicals as European spaces. Carlos Reijnen shows how émigré periodicals, which during the Cold War period not only focused on emigrants, but also on dissidents at home and West-European intellectuals, were able to shape the discourse on Europe in spite of their peripheral position. The periodicals -the Polish Kultura , the Czech Svědectví , and the multinational Kontinent (1974-) -did not merely function as the passive stages for new ideas on Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Europe at large, but also contributed decisively to forming these ideas. The article studies the émigré periodicals from a spatial perspective and argues that they can be analyzed as European cultural spaces. Reijnen uses this concept to challenge the notion of a homogeneous European public sphere. The particular settings within which the periodicals developed have contributed greatly to the ideas that they expressed.
The second article featured in this issue deals with T. S. Eliot and the Criterion. Jeroen Vanheste discusses how the Criterion, the review that Eliot founded in 1922 and edited until its demise in 1939, functioned as a platform for European writers and thinkers with a shared perception of European identity. In the period after the First World War, Eliot, the Criterion, and the many other European periodicals and intellectuals in its network, contributed to a European reconciliation by emphasizing the common European heritage. This heritage consisted of a combination of classic (Greek and Roman) roots and Christianity that Eliot referred to as 'classicism'. Vanheste also argues that Eliot positioned himself and his magazine in the European tradition of humanist thinking. This humanism of Eliot and the Criterion gradually changed over the years: in the 1930s, the Criterion increasingly emphasized the Christian elements within this humanist framework as a result of the increasing importance of Christianity in Eliot's own life and ideas.
Lastly, Francis Mus's article on L'Art libre , which functioned as the official channel of the French Clarté movement, focuses on how a term such as internationalism was defined within this Brussels magazine. The plea for 'Europeanisation' was made under other epithets such as internationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism, but was usually confined to Europe. Mus studies the problematic relationship between internationalism and the emphasis on Flanders and Flemish reality in L'Art libre. As a social reality, Flanders did indeed fit into the magazine's program to recognize suppressed nations. Yet as an artistic reality, its existence was more problematically situated within a tendency for ever-increasing artistic internationalization. Moreover, Flanders had acquired a fixed and important position as part of the identity formation of the Nordic myth construction, which not only allowed the Belgian literary establishment to distinguish themselves from France, but also to appeal to a kind of innate international nature. Mus's analysis shows a number of discursive strategies that writers and critics used in order to deal with this Flanders/ internationalism tension.
We believe that the articles in this issue demonstrate the value of examining periodicals through the prism of European spaces. The focus on how ideas about Europe were explicitly or tacitly articulated, exchanged, and contested, reveals much about processes of identity formation as well as about the periodicals themselves. This special issue is of course only one small exploration of the topic. Other methodological approaches should be tested, and the concepts and approaches described here could be further defined, especially the notion of spatial capital. In addition, many interesting periodicals for the topic under study, such as Europe, Europäische Literatur, and Merkur, to name just a few, could be explored from this same perspective of periodicals as European spaces.