Additionally some twenty workshops and conferences as well as several seminar series have been organised The original point of departure of the project was the observation that from a historical perspective the processes of modernisation in Sweden and Germany exhibit striking similarities, although developments in the 1930s advanced in diametrically opposed directions. The object of the interdisciplinary project at the outset was to foster a deeper understanding of why two basically similar processes of modernisation have resulted in such different problem resolutions. The question of governability studied through an analytical focus on language and culture was at the centre of the project. The construction of community has, in turn, informed important points of departure for both political action as well as political and economic institutions. The role of history, culture, social sciences and religion in processes described using such concepts has been analysed.
Reality is constructed with symbols.
Through a systematic cultural-scientific comparison of various patterns of modernisation and community building over the past two hundred years we have achieved an increased understanding of how fundamentally similar problems can result in very different solutions. This discussion has been developed in the volumes, The Cultural Construction of Norden , Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community and 1848 Memory and Oblivion in Europe . Fruitful questions have dealt with how the image of the Other, through comparing and contrasting as well as identification and rejection, has been incorporated into self-understandings. Autostereotypisation has interacted with xenostereotypisation. Thus, emphasis has been placed upon how, through debate and social contention, in processes of heterostereotyping interests for other cultures function in the act of constructing of community and identity.