Where Does Europe End? The Representation of Europe and Turkey in Italian Primary Textbooks

Abstract

Critical Geography and Critical Geopolitics demonstrated how popular and academic geographies are
not “naive” forms of knowledge, arguing that, rather than describing the World, they “build” it.
Geographical Education, in particular through School Geography, plays a relevant role in this process
of geo-graphing, mainly because, in many cases, it is still considered as an ‘objective’ knowledge,
based on factual and a-critical descriptions of spaces, places and processes. Moreover, reflecting on its
educational dimension, we can understand how Geography suggests a body of narratives, biases,
spaces and limits that contributes to the construction of children and young students’ image of the
World. For this reason we can affirm that School Geography is a tremendous tool for the reproduction
of the “Common Sense” stated by Antonio Gramsci, and for the consolidation of the “Cultural
Hegemony” of dominant social classes, or - according to Alain Reynaud - of dominant “socio-spatial”
classes. This paper, through a critical reading of a sample of 49 Italian Primary School Textbooks,
investigates the linkage between the idea of “Otherness” and the construction of a “supposed”
European identity. We focus in particular on the iconic and cartographic representation of Turkey in
opposition to the European Union. First of all we show how maps and visual representations reproduce
mighty geopolitical discourses, and then we point out the narratives through which this iconic body geo-writes the relation between Europe and Turkey in terms of a cultural, geographical and political
opposition. We argue that maps and images reinforce the boundaries between EU and Turkey, by
depicting them as discrete, and clearly separated geographical entities. The paper aims to demonstrate
that this reinforcement is based, and leaned, on a variable and, in some cases, incoherent representation
of some pivotal concepts of the Political Geography such as borders, State, nation and development.