‘Out in the blue of Europe’: modernist cosmopolitan identity and the deterritorialization of belonging

ABSTRACT Vieten attempts to intervene in the ongoing ideological attempt to present a particular (modernist) European culture as a founding myth for a European Union identity. Taking the recent debate on transnationalism as a point of departure, she uses some aspects of the life story of the Austrian British writer Hilde Spiel as a case study to discuss deterritorialized belonging, the impact of insecure citizenship and the meaning of a particular cosmopolitan subjectivity. The first part of the article will clarify the terms ‘citizenship’, ‘exile’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘belonging’, and how deterritorialization frames the reading of an individual cosmopolitan subjectivity. In the second part Spiel's understanding of her cosmopolitan identity will be related to contemporary modernist European agendas. In the final part, while discussing some material taken from Spiel's newspaper articles and autobiographical writings, her strategies for coping with shifting attachments to national cultures and the contradictions of diverse and confused national belonging will be illustrated.