Von der nationalen zur europäischen Identität? Potential und Problematik von Europakarten auf Briefmarken

In view of the fact that national maps were circulated in the 19th and early 20th century to strengthen people’s national consciousness, this article inquires whether the six EC founding states have in turn been using maps of Europe or the territory encompassed by the EC members since the 1950s in order to promote a sense of supranational community among the citizenry. Postage stamps, mass-produced by the national postal administrations, serve as the source material for this investigation. The analysis, however, reveals that the four largest countries initially made little use of cartographic representations of Europe. Only in the course of the eastward enlargement of the EU did European maps begin to appear frequently on stamps. One explanation for this surprising finding is the fact that the European unification process aimed at territorial expansion right from the start, but that maps have the contrary effect of implying that borders are fixed. It was therefore only when the European division was overcome that European maps were increasingly used to represent the continent as a closed space.