The “European cultural television channel,” ARTE, was launched by France and Germany in 1991 with a mandate to encourage the “coming together of European peoples.” This project examines how ARTE producers and programmers at the channel understand and participate in the ongoing cultural construction of national and transborder identities in Europe, arguing that the production of media at ARTE provides insight into ways in which narratives about nation, Europe, and world are negotiated, assembled, and connected together. This six-chapter thesis provides ethnographic detail of various contexts of media production work at ARTE's Strasbourg headquarters that make evident the ways in which ideas about French-ness, German-ness, and European-ness coalesce and circulate at the channel, both in informal social interaction and in contexts of media production. It examines points of friction and connection as producers and programmers draw on a variety of narrative strategies for communicating to a trans-border audience what a “European,” transnational, or post-national culture, history, and identity might mean. It describes the myriad difficulties that ARTE staff have run up against, including changing television technologies and audiences, cross-national misunderstandings, and national-political administrative tensions, arguing that staff at the channel have had to come to terms with their limited ability, or inability, to cultivate a European viewership, cultural community, or “imagination.” In so doing the thesis seeks to revise and update Benedict Anderson's highly generative theory of the nationally mediated “imagined community,” identifying the ways in which nationally oriented production practices, sensibilities, and technical infrastructures make evident the frictions, paradoxes, and ambivalences marking “trans/national” spaces and projects.