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How history becomes a cross‐border matter: death foretold of a French–German–Swiss textbook
Author(s) -
Dupeyron Bruno
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
the curriculum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.843
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1469-3704
pISSN - 0958-5176
DOI - 10.1080/09585170903424823
Subject(s) - german , acknowledgement , argument (complex analysis) , european commission , political science , economic history , economy , history , economics , international trade , archaeology , european union , medicine , computer security , computer science
The middle of the 1990s saw the creation of a French–German–Swiss history textbook supported by the European Commission. Disseminated to school instructors in the Upper Rhine, it received generally positive reviews, but ended up on the dusty shelves of school libraries. This result was due to several factors, which are analysed in this article. This acknowledgement of failure leads to the argument that European cross‐border cooperation is constrained by a key paradox, referred to as ‘low gravity’, i.e. the attraction of small projects toward the local and regional levels, while major projects are pushed up to the national level.