European Identity and national discourses on Europe

Why are hopes fading for a single European identity? Economic integration has advanced faster and further than predicted, yet the European sense of "who we are" is fragmenting. Exploiting decades of permissive consensus, Europe's elites designed and completed the single market, the euro, the Schengen passport-free zone, and, most recently, crafted an extraordinarily successful policy of enlargement. At the same time, these attempts to depoliticize politics, to create Europe by stealth, have produced a political backlash. This ambitious survey of identity in Europe captures the experiences of the winners and losers, optimists and pessimists, movers and stayers in a Europe where spatial and cultural borders are becoming ever more permeable. A full understanding of Europe's ambivalence, refracted through its multiple identities, lies at the intersection of competing European political projects and social processes.

European Politics and Society, 2015

2017

European identity is not only a scientifically interesting question, but also a politically important issue: in fact, sixty years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the European Union finds itself for the first time facing risks that threaten its own existence. The European Union is a limited and incomplete project because Europe's economic integration has not been accompanied by a genuine supranational political union and greater cultural integration. The deficit of democratic representation and cultural integration is due to the fact that the community process is based only on economic rationality and not on a feeling of common belonging. In the current situation in which the Union faces difficult challenges which threaten to undermine the future, it necessary to affirm the policy of interests with a policy of identity. In this essay, we will first concentrate on the concept of identity-that is on the nucleus of values and common institutions-; then we will discuss how t...

The Evolution of European Identities, 2012

The chapters that make up this edited book all arise from a single European Commission Framework 7 collaborative research project, EUROIDENTITIES: 'The Evolution of European Identity: Using biographical methods to study the development of European identity', that ran from early 2008 through 2011. The seven partner teams that made up the project were chosen to represent as widely as possible the experience of recent European history and different parameters of interacting with 'Europe'. The nations in Euroidentities included representatives of the original states of the European Union, both its centre (Germany) and its western (Northern Ireland and Wales) and southern (Italy) peripheries. The new Accession States of the European Union were represented by a large central state (Poland) and two smaller peripheral states (Estonia, denoting a relatively economically successful new member state, and Bulgaria, one less so). The Euroidentities project had its origins in the perception that the bulk of previous empirical work on European identity had been driven by an elitist, 'top down', political science perspective that mirrored the approach of Eurocentric institutions, most notably the European Union itself, towards encouraging or, depending upon one's point of view, imposing Europeanisation upon reluctant populations. The period during which the project was being developed coincided with the rejection of the European Constitution by referenda in the Netherlands and France and the Lisbon Treaty that effectively replaced it was making its uncertain way towards ratification at a time that roughly coincided with the beginning of the project.

2004

What is implied by any sentence which starts with the phrase “We, the Europeans…”? This review article is an attempt to make a sense of Europeanness. It explores the scholarly meanings attached to the term. Main arguments on the theme are grouped into three. Cultural explanations of European identity stress the cultural and historical heritage of Europe; political explanations largely draw on the implications of political and economic integration to the identifications of European Union citizens; the third part of the analysis deals with the works which either reject the cultural/political dichotomy, or include elements from both. There is also a dynamic relationship between European and national identities, and this is also discussed in the review. The review finds that European identity is related to the European integration process. Explanations based on purely cultural grounds do not offer enough evidence. It is more likely to see individuals identifying with Europe as long as these individuals have the opportunity to experience Europe, and make it a part of their lives. European identity is more likely to include both cultural and political elements which are promoted by the European Union actively.

European National Identities