Peter Pichler Introduction When we speak of European integration, we usually refer to the European Union (Wiener et.al., 2019). Yet, cultural-historically, this is only half the story. As Kiran Klaus Patel has emphasised (Patel 2013, 2018), the EU (and its predecessors) has been one organisation of European integration among many, such as the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Patel’s narrative of ‘provincialising European union’ (Patel 2013) provides a new perspective as it describes the EU as a contested entity in a pluralistic spectrum of historically varying …