Géographie de l’Europe et géographie de la construction européenne

Abstract

This paper concerns the relative visions of Europe and the European Union provided by geography textbooks used in various countries for secondary school. In most of them, the teaching of the geography of Europe precedes the evocation of the EU. In this order, Europe tends to be presented as a reified object while the EU appears mostly as a political actor developing its own spatial strategy. This succession mixes different geographical paradigms and attempts to pursue various educational goals at once, each of them inducing a specific ideological prism. This accumulation of contradictory epistemological frames often provides an ambiguous vision that complicates the possibility to develop a clear understanding of geopolitical issues related to the European process.

Keywords

• geography
• geography of representations
• ideology
• Europe
• European Union
• textbooks