The thesis breaks modern Japanese thoughts on China and Asia into four categories, according to their evaluation of the universalist quality of Europeanness as well as Japan¡¦s role in promoting universalism. These categories are assimilation, Asian renaissance, Resistance and Japanism. The thesis attends specifically to the last category in that it represents a nascent trend in the Japanese thinking that no long considers it necessary for Japan to be associated with either Europe or Asia in order to join the world¡¦s puruisit of universalism.

The aim of this study is to analyze how the EU perceives a European cultural heritage and its role in the EU project during the period 1970-2020. These perceptions do something with the notion of ”the Europeanness” and are part of a narrative construction that expresses conceptions of a European place. This European place is a place beyond territorial locability and something that this thesis seeks to investigate. Attentions is brought to how changes in EU’s cultural heritage discourse are interwoven partly with notions of crisis, partly with renegotiation of a European diversity. Even though, during the 2010s, the EU begun to stress interconnections between ”the Europeanness” and its ”other”, I argue that this interconnectivity is based on a conception of a unique European past. In contrast to previous research I thereby highlight a paradoxical tension between the EU’s perceptions of a European past and a European ”today”. Moreover, this thesis goes beyond the dominant trend in cultural heritage studies and its preoccupation on what is declared to be a heritage, as well as the concentration on what EU wants us to remember. Thereby this study provides an alternative perspective on the EU’s construction of a European cultural community. It’s a perspective that gives emphasize to how a sense of European situatedness is created through notions of a European cultural heritage.

This paper argues that the EU’s enlargement discourse can be understood as a form of political myth wherein a subject must align itself with an fantasmatic ideal type ofEuropean state. It works through positing a past from which the subject must advance, and a mythical horizon towards which the subject strives. The stage in between these temporal phases is understood as liminality, an ontological limbo of sorts. To illustrate how the political myth works, a discourse analysis is conducted by investigating reports by the UN and EU on the status of Kosovo’s alignment with ‘European standards’ and evaluations of the political situation. By applying the political discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, it was found that the image of the past in Kosovo was filled with symbols of ethnic conflict, clan affiliation andlingering communism, while the mythical horizon of European integration promised a utopian idea of multi-ethnicity, rule of law and freedom of movement. Kosovo in the process of integration is then stuck in a liminal phase between these temporal points, while the EU through a set of categorical measurements constructs not only Kosovo’s identity but also the ideal image of a European state and how to become one.

The aim of following diploma thesis is research on the relationship between state identity and foreing policy of Georgia in period of 1991 - 2014. Although Georgia is situated on the crossroads between Europe and Asia, local elites potray the country as part of the Europe. Georgia is conducting long-term policy aimed at integration into Western structures and this orientation is often explained as the evidence of influence of ideas on foreign policy. Despite significant popularization of research on ideas in international relations, this is not the case of young post-Soviets countries. Using foreign policy analysis together with social constructivist approach, I am analysing development and the core of Georgian state's identity and its relationship with foreign policy. The object is to understand modern history of the country from ideational a foreign policy point of view.