To browse Academia. In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal.
In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities. This article analyses the connections between political and economic discourses related to the reframing of the European geopolitical space and the growing relevance attached to the sphere of emotions and sexuality in the interwar period.
The first part deals with the genealogy of the project of Eurafrica as a geopolitical body, as advanced in by Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. The second part discusses how this discourse circulated during the s and was displaced within debates connected with the Europeanisation of colonies.
By looking at the ambivalent and floating borders between sexuality and love, the last part of the article analyses how the stereotype that identifies 'love' as a 'spiritual' and distinctive feature of Europe was articulated by the colonial imaginary on Euro-African loves. Differences in Northern and Southern European gender relations have historical roots that can be investigated in the regions' literature and cinema. The mating morality of romantic love facilitated the West's First Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century.
The Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, used Darwinian perspectives to reveal romantic delusions and double standards. The movement's insights undergirded twentieth-century Nordic gender equality and social democratic governance. Both movements contributed to the transition to our present era's demythologised morality of confluent love, which sacralises gender equality, but the Scandinavians' head start, evolutionary approach and genre choices partially explain why today's Nordic women are more empowered than their Italian counterparts.
