This issue is a special issue focussed on ‘Cultural Spaces in Europe’. The papers selected for inclusion relate to a series of related questions concerning boundaries and identities within and across Europe. The Guest Editor's Introduction, by Alan Scott, summarises the key themes of these papers and draws out a number of general issues. To complement the selected articles, this issue also includes two related articles on Ideoscapes and Lifeworlds in Europe. Taken together, these articles significantly develop some of those issues raised in issue 9 (5) on culture and mass communications in Europe.
The paper by Sabine Mihelj of Loughborough University examines European newspapers to examine the discursive spaces opened up in debates over the European Treaty. She argues for the need to abandon an exclusive focus on the national frame of reference and to recognise the segmented structure of discourse within and across nations. She shows the continuing importance of class-related perspectives in each of the seven nations studied.
Anu Masso of the Department of Journalism and Communication in the University of Tartu, Finland, uses data from Estonia and Sweden to explore the possibility of common value formation and the geo-political spatial identities involved. She relates this sense of personal spatiality cultivated in the nations of the new Europe to issues of felt closeness and trust and to the consequent problems of cultural adaptation to Europeanisation.