A R T I C L E S

A European Identity
To the Historical Limits of a Concept

Bo Stråth

E U RO PE A N U N I V E R S I T Y I N S T I T U T E , F LO R E N C E , I TA LY

Abstract
The history of a European identity is the history of a concept and a discourse.
A European identity is an abstraction and a fiction without essential propor-
tions. Identity as a fiction does not undermine but rather helps to explain
the power that the concept exercises. The concept since its introduction on
the political agenda in 1973 has been highly ideologically loaded and in that
capacity has been contested. There has been a high degree of agreement on
the concept as such, but deep disagreement on its more precise content and
meaning. The concept of a European identity is an idea expressing contrived
notions of unity rather than an identity in the proper sense of the word and
even takes on the proportion of an ideology. In this sense the concept is
inscribed in a long history of philosophical and political reflection on the
concept of Europe. On these grounds the analytical use of ‘identity’ in social
sciences can be questioned.

Key words

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Europe

■

heritage

■

history

■

identity

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the Other

Identity is a problematic and fluid concept. If taken literally, it means equal, iden-
tical. It is a concept used to construct community and feelings of cohesion and
holism, a concept to give the impression that all individuals are equal in the
imagined community. The invocation of community, cohesion and holism, yes,
of identity, emerges exactly in situations where there is a lack of such feeling.
Identity becomes a problem when there is no identity, particularly in situations
of crisis and turbulence, when established ties of social cohesion are eroding or
breaking down. Identity was a concept in ancient Greek philosophy and mathe-
matics, which did not play any important role in social sciences until the end of
the nineteenth century when it was incorporated in the emerging discipline of
psychoanalysis. Only in the 1970s and the 1980s did the concept invade the core
of the social and historical sciences (Niethammer, 2000).

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The argument in this article is that the history of a European identity is the

history of a concept and a discourse. A European identity is an abstraction and
a fiction without essential proportions. Identity as a fiction does not undermine
but rather helps to explain the power that the concept exercises. The concept,
since its introduction on the political agenda in 1973, has been highly ideologi-
cally loaded and in that capacity has been contested. There has been a high degree
of agreement on the concept as such, but deep disagreement on its more precise
content and meaning. The concept of a European identity is an idea expressing
contrived notions of unity rather than an identity in the proper sense of the word
and even takes on the proportion of an ideology (Delanty, 1995). In this sense
the concept is inscribed in a long history of philosophical and political reflection
on the concept of Europe. On these grounds the analytical use of ‘identity’ in
social sciences can be questioned (cf. Brubaker and Cooper, 2000).

With this point of departure, an important question becomes when and how

more precisely the idea of a European identity emerged. What is the history of
the concept of a ‘European identity’? And how is the concept connected to the
historically developed images of Europe and to the institution building in the
European integration process that has been going on since the 1950s?

Intensified European integration has gone hand in hand with a growing

academic and political search for the roots of Europeanness in history, religion,
science and culture (Goddard et al., 1994). The meanings of Europe are a
discourse of power on how to define and classify Europe, on the frontiers of
Europe, and on similarities and differences. The idea of Europe became, histori-
cally and sociologically, a political idea and mobilizing metaphor at the end of
the twentieth century, particularly in the wake of ‘1989’. In many versions the
emphasis is on Europe as a distinctive cultural entity united by shared values,
culture and identity. References are made to Europe’s heritage of classical Graeco-
Roman civilization, Christianity, and the ideas of the Enlightenment, Science,
Reason, Progress and Democracy as the core elements of this claimed European
legacy. There are subtexts of racial and cultural chauvinism, particularly when
confronted with Islam. Europe acquires distinction and salience when pitted
against the Other. When the differences within Europe are emphasized, it is often
in the form of unity in diversity. Religious differences (Catholic, Protestant,
Orthodox Christianity) and linguistic differences (Romance, Germanic and
Slavic languages) are seen as correlated, (Catholic–Romance, Protestant–
Germanic, Orthodox–Slavic), and essentially are underlying the major ethnic
cleavages and conflicts, historically and contemporary, in Europe.

The European identity was designed and decided at the Copenhagen EC

summit in December 1973 (European Commission, 1973). The framework of the
meeting was a global order in unexpected crisis. The Bretton Woods Agreement
after the Second World War, based on the dollar, had collapsed in 1971 after years
of growing tension between the West European states and their American ally. The
Vietnam War underpinned the tension and overstrained the dollar. Moreover,
frictions had grown considerably in the machinery of economic growth and full
employment, mass consumption and mass production mutually reinforcing one

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another, based on the long post-war reconstruction boom, and the investments,
which fed the boom. Finally, in the autumn of 1973, the dramatic oil price
increase took the Western world by surprise producing a mood of crisis.

The idea of European identity was based on the principle of the unity of the

Nine, on their responsibility towards the rest of the world, and on the dynamic
nature of the European construction. The meaning of ‘responsibility towards the
rest of the world’ was expressed in a hierarchical way. First, it meant responsi-
bility towards the other nations of Europe with whom friendly relations and co-
operation already existed. Second, it meant responsibility towards the countries
of the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle East. Third, it referred to relations
with the USA, based on the restricted foundations of equality and the spirit of
friendship. Next in the hierarchy was the narrow co-operation and constructive
dialogue with Japan and Canada. Then came détente towards the Soviet Union
and the countries of Eastern Europe. At the bottom of the list came China, Latin
America and, finally, a reference was made to the importance of the struggle
against underdevelopment in general (Passerini, 1998). The fact that the Middle
East was ranked before the USA in this hierarchical otherization demonstrates
the impact of the dollar collapse and the oil price shock.

The concept of ‘European identity’, in the 1970s, expanded from its dollar

and oil price context as an instrument to consolidate Europe’s place in the inter-
national order. It spread in the framework of attempts to establish a European
tripartite order of corporatist bargaining to replace the collapsing national
arrangements in this respect. In 1977 the MacDougall Report to the European
Commission suggested a European Keynesian strategy to bridge the economic
crisis and the collapse of key industries, a kind of Euro-corporatist order. A serious
attempt was made in 1977–8 to translate the national tripartite bargaining struc-
tures, which had functioned so well during the era of economic growth in the
1950s and 1960s, to a European level in a politics of de-industrialization in
industries like shipbuilding and steel. The idea of a European identity under-
pinned these efforts. However, in the bargaining about capacity reduction and
layoffs of labour the solidarity ties among employers, trade unions and govern-
ments followed national lines rather than transnational labour and capital soli-
darity (Stråth, 1987). The proposals in the MacDougall Report were never
realized.

In the emerging neo-liberal conceptual framework, which in the 1980s ever

more replaced national or European corporatist conceptualization, ‘the region’
was seen as a remedy for weak economic performance in a semantic field where
‘network’, ‘market’, ‘nearness’ and ‘flexibility’ were other key terms. Compensa-
tion for the eroding political legitimacy at the national level and the collapse of
the political economy was simultaneously sought at the regional and European
levels. Identity became the concept in this search for compensation. Success
stories about high-performing regions based on nearness and trust in networks
were contrasted with negative stories of the old and large-scale industrial districts
(Piore and Sabel, 1984; Medick and Schlumbohm, 1978; Hirst and Zeitlin,
1989; Stråth, 2000b).

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Parallel to this development, the rhetoric about a European identity became

more intense in the change of content and point of reference in the 1980s, after
the failure to establish a European tripartite order. How the connection between
the change of economic rhetoric, on the one hand, and the idea of a European
identity, on the other, was made more precisely is not clear. The European
identity, which in the early 1970s was designed for another role, first, to give the
European Community new confidence and to define a new role for the EC in
the international order, then to support the Euro-corporatist arrangements, was
transformed to support the connection of the local/regional small-scale level with
the large-scale European framework, where the nation in some sense was by-
passed.

Europe and the region were thus not only two alternatives separated from each

other, but they were also connected through the identity concept when Euro-
politicans spent resource packages in emerging regions all over the Europe in
order to strengthen European cohesion (‘identity’). And at the same time as they
promoted feelings of regional identities, they promoted the emergence of a
European identity, when regional and local politicians, employers, trade unions
and other voluntary associations joined in lobbying for money from Brussels.

The effects on European feelings of belonging were unintended rather than

intentional in the wake of EEC politics to improve economic structural cohesion
within the polity. In the same vein also the single market discourse worked in the
1980s and the Maastricht Treaty, union and euro language worked in the 1990s.
With the more active development of European symbols like the flag, the
anthem, the driving licences, etc., connected to the idea of a European citizen-
ship, one can talk about a more intentional European identity politics guided by
the Commission since the 1980s and critically analysed by Cris Shore (Shore,
2000). These identity politics can be seen as an attempt to speed up the
implementation of what was decided in 1973 although under adjustment to a
very different economic and political global situation.

Solutions to the political tensions in the wake of eroding nation-state legiti-

macy after the collapse of the international economic order and production mode
in the 1970s were approached through attempts to reconstruct lost national
legitimacy through the EC and the idea of making poor regions prosperous.
Regions provided with cash from Brussels were not necessarily in opposition to
the nation-state but rather were dependent on its support for the cash supply.
Success in this respect reinforced both the region and the nation-state as well as
Europe. In the rhetoric Europe, the nation and the region are separate and
provided with specific identities. However, they constitute three levels of abstrac-
tion, which in practice and in politics are entangled. The expressions of their
entanglement vary between mutual support and mutual competition. Ideas of
belonging are overlapping, inclusive and exclusive in complex and contradictory
patterns, where it would be far too simple to put a European identity against
national ones. Europe has been and is both an active element of national, and of
other identitifications and, at the same time, something different and separate
from national and other identifications. Europe is both We and the Other.

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Europe can reinforce or weaken national and other identifications depending on
the historical situation and the historical heritage.

Identities – and interests, which are of the same category as identity, and

termed ‘national interest’ – are constructed in the intersection between self-
images and images of the Other. What has the image of Europe in various parts
of Europe represented in this respect? To what extent has ‘Europe’ been an
element of self-images and to what extent has it been understood as an element
of the Other? In Britain and in countries such as Sweden and Norway, for
instance, Europe is referred to as ‘the Continent’, i.e. as belonging to the Others.

As just suggested, as a rule, the answer to these questions is hardly a mutually

exclusive but rather an overlapping issue. Europe has been an element of both
national self-understanding, the nation as a part of Europe, and of something
different outside the nation. How this mix has varied in Europe geographically
and historically since the Second World War and earlier is a key question to be
elaborated further.

Another point of departure in such an undertaking is that national views on

Europe vary not only between nations but also within nations (Malmborg and
Stråth, 2002). There is not one but several contested views of Europe in the
various nations and at various times, although one specific discourse on Europe
might be predominating in a country or across countries at a certain point of
time. The different attitudes to Europe in general and to the European inte-
gration project in particular are divided in the national environments along
various lines such as class, gender and age.

Europe and Non-Europe: the Historical Relationship

Since the Middle Ages the image of a European community has been constructed
by demarcation from others, e.g. the Turks or the Chinese (‘the yellow peril’).
Here ideas emerging in the nineteenth century of white superiority requiring a
special responsibility in the world (‘the white man’s burden’) fit in. Russia has
sometimes been seen as a part of Europe and sometimes as being outside it. There
are in particular three mirrors in which the idea of Europe has taken shape: the
Oriental/Asian, the American and the East European. In these mirrors the Other
has been seen both in terms of inferiority to Europe and in terms of a model to
emulate. On first thought Eastern Europe might look less like a model, but the
Soviet Union in the 1920s, and among Communists in Western Europe for much
longer, demonstrates the contrary.

It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the monotheistic

competition between Christianity and Islam beginning with the Crusades for the
self-understanding of Europe. The Crusades did not curtail commercial and other
contacts but built a cultural distinction between a Christian Self and a Muslim
Other. This demarcation was further pronounced during the Ottoman expansion
into the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Turkish peril was
propagated through new printed media as the main threat to Christianity. The

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Christian identification against the Ottoman rulers was problematic in the Balkan
peninsula inside the Ottoman Empire, however, as the Ottomans had a tolerant
regime with respect to religious practices. Moreover, the military and economic
power struggle in the Levant, between the Habsburgs, France, Spain and the
Italian city-states, penetrated the Christian–Islamic/Ottoman divide and went in
many respects beyond the religious dichotomy. Economic interaction and military
conflicts between Ottoman rulers and European powers in the Mediterranean and
in the Balkans were in principle no different from the corresponding interactions
within Europe, although they were complicated by the discourse on the Turkish
peril. In constantly shifting constellations some European powers made pacts with
the Ottoman rulers while others made war. In this way the constructed
religious/ethnic borderline between Europe and the Turkish Other became a fluid
European line of contention (Höfert, 2001).

The long-term implication of the Islamic expansion was, irrespective of this

porous and fluid order of pacts and wars, nevertheless that ‘Europe’ took on the
meaning of being synonymous with Christianity, defined as a community with
a distinct territory, a res publica christiana. Christianity represented Europe,
Europe was called Christianity. Christianity substituted Europe as a concept for
unification. The substitution of Europe with Christianity as a concept for unifi-
cation and concord was undermined from within through religious wars. When
the connection between Christianity and unity was destroyed by the Thirty Years
War, Europe took on new meaning in the emerging Enlightenment discourse and
became a lodestar for unity. The term Europe came to fulfil the need for a more
neutral designation of the common whole. As Denis Hay put it: ‘In the course
of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries Christendom slowly entered
the limbo of archaic words and Europe emerged for its peoples as the unchal-
lenged symbol of the largest human loyalty’ (1968: 116). Norman Davies notes
that in the early phase of the Enlightenment, ‘it became an embarrassment for
the divided community of nations to be reminded of their common Christian
identity; and “Europe” filled the need for a designation with more neutral conno-
tations’ (1996: 7).

With the Enlightenment philosophy the distinction between Christianity and

Islam was in a certain sense relativized because religion lost its absolute position.
One of the discursive fields in the Oriental image was that defined by the
opposition of Enlightenment and despotism, however, not every opposition
represented a negative xenostereotype of the Orient in European eyes. The trans-
lation of A Thousand and One Nights into French at the beginning of the eight-
eenth century reinforced the image of an exotic Orient. The recurring enthusiasm
for China and India can be seen as either a direct or an indirect criticism which
enriched and problematized the European image of itself as a civilizing project.
The discursive antinomy among elements of the European view of the Orient was
not so much a competition between different schools of thought, as something
which characterized individual thinkers. Some, for example, regarded Muhammed
as an enlightened philosopher, others as a cheat, while Voltaire admired Muslim
tolerance, which he contrasted to Christian intolerance (Stråth, 2000a).

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Although the demarcation between an enlightened Christianity and a fanatic

Islam was a frequent component of the European discourse, there was at the same
time, not only Voltaire’s opposite view but also the merger of Enlightenment and
despotism into one Denkfigur which was applied to both Europe and the East. For
Europe, the notion of enlightened absolutism was an expression of this merger
(Stråth, 2000a). These developments are well documented in Edward Said’s Orien-
talism (1978; cf. Piterberg, 2000). Asia and the idea of the Orient were thus one
of the mirrors in which a European self-image emerged in a long historical process.
It was a mirror in which one could discern many different and competing images,
and it was also a mirror where one saw what one wanted to see.

The Enlightenment project constructed another divide. Eastern Europe

emerged as a concept of demarcation. As Enlightenment philosophers established
‘Western Europe’ as the seat of civilization, so too they invented an ‘Eastern
Europe’ as its complementary other half. Eastern Europe exhibited a condition
of backwardness on a relative scale of development; however, the philosophers
did not bestow on Eastern Europe the radical otherness ascribed to non-European
‘barbarians’ (Bugge, 1999; den Boer, 1995). The opposition between civilization
and barbarism assigned Eastern Europe to an ambiguous space. Since Tacitus, the
old division of Europe had been between the North and the South, between the
Empire and the Barbarians. It was Voltaire who led the way when Enlightenment
philosophers shifted their gaze to the contrasts and demarcations between east
and west in their construction of Us and the Other. A conceptual reorientation
of the European map occurred when the old lands of barbarism and backward-
ness in the North were displaced to the East (Wolff, 1994). The idea of Eastern
Europe was entangled with the evolving Orientalism, for while philosophical
geography casually excluded Eastern Europe from Europe, implicitly shifting it
into Asia, scientific cartography seemed to contradict such a construction. There
was room for ambiguity. The construction of Eastern Europe was a paradox of
simultaneous inclusion and exclusion: Europe, but, at the same time, not Europe.
Our view of Peter the Great is a case in point: enlightened modernizer, prepared
to learn from the West, but locked in a more or less hopeless struggle with a
barbarian environment.

Philosophical geography was a free-spirited activity. It was, as Larry Wolff has

demonstrated, not actually necessary to travel to Eastern Europe in order to
participate in its intellectual discovery. Some did leave their Paris salons. Madame
Geoffrin visited the King of Poland in 1766, and Diderot paid his respects to
Catherine the Great in St Petersburg in 1773. Yet no one wrote more authorita-
tively about Russia than Voltaire, who never travelled west of Berlin, and no one
was more creative on behalf of Poland than Rousseau, who never went east of
Switzerland. Prague is north of Vienna and slightly to the west, but when Mozart
travelled from Vienna to the Bohemian capital it was, nevertheless, a voyage to
the East (Wolff, 1994).

The establishment of a cordon sanitaire after the First World War is another

illustration of the ambiguity in the division between East and West. In the frame-
work of Woodrow Wilson’s naive belief in the connection between nationalism

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and democracy, a number of ‘Slavic’ states from Yugoslavia in the south to Estonia
in the north (Estonia does not belong to the Slavic-speaking nations) were given
internationally guaranteed autonomy. Finland north of Estonia gained autonomy
in 1917 in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution after a bloody civil war, and
got its international guarantee somewhat differently, but can be seen as the exten-
sion of the cordon sanitaire. As a democratic no man’s land between Germany and
Russia, the new countries were assigned the role of preventing a new war between
these two powers. During the First World War, the Germans were referred to in
the West as the Huns, that is, belonging to the barbarian Eastern camp. After
punishment in the form of severe war indemnities and political restrictions,
Germany was then allowed to cross the borderline and re-enter the Western
(democratic) fold. Already, four years prior to this cordon sanitaire being mapped
out in Versailles, Friedrich Naumann had published his book Mitteleuropa, which
described a domain marked out for German economic and cultural hegemony.
This idea, which can be traced back to the nineteenth century, was later on incor-
porated into the Nazi Lebensraum ideology, in which Mitteleuropa, Osteuropa and
Ostraum formed overlapping and mutually supplementary key concepts, and in
which the cordon sanitaire was transformed into a German sphere of interest. As
we know, the idea of inserting a democratic corridor to prevent a new barbarian
eruption died in the 1930s. However, the idea of Mitteleuropa survived and
surfaced again in the 1980s (Brechtefeld, 1996).

In the political discourse Eastern Europe seems to be perceived as something

integral due to its common socialist past and present transitional contradictions.
In the Cold War dichotomic thinking (West–East, capitalism–planned economy,
liberalism–socialism, democracy–totalitarianism), the image of Eastern Europe
was portrayed in mainly negative terms. In such mental dichotomies the fron-
tiers between West and East coincided with political ones. What do such
dichotomies represent 10–15 years after the end of the Cold War? Beyond the
ideological packaging there is a huge territory with rich cultures, different
historical experiences and a variety of everyday life. Each East European country
has followed its own cultural and historical development, and the problem of
national and cultural identification is not new but arose long ago.

Correspondingly, there exists a variety of modes of interpretation of Europe,

and the connection between Europe and the nation and other identity categories,
in the East European countries, developed by philosophers, historians, linguists,
artists and other intellectuals. All those cultures should perhaps be understood
less in terms of being impoverished by political regimes in the past and economic
crisis at present, and more as struggling to recapture again a sense of their own
community and reconsidering the past in order to be able to move ahead. It is
important to discuss the historical construction of an East European borderline
not only from a West European point of departure but also from within the
eastern side of the borderline. What has Europe meant there? An element of We
or of the Other?

It is important to locate the ongoing reconfiguration of the images of

Europe and the nation, and their religious/secular/cultural components in

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macro-historical developments of modern state formation, nation-building,
religious change, and the embedded forms of nationalism, along the European
East–West axis. In particular it is important in this historical setting to discern
in what directions the East–West divide has been evolving since 1989.

The discourse on Eastern Europe – does it belong to the ‘real’ Europe or not

– as well as the discourse on America emerged with the Enlightenment. The
discourse on the Orient began in the Middle Ages as a demarcation between the
Christian and the Muslim spheres. The mirrors have provided xenostereotypes,
stereotypes of the Other, which probably have said more about the European
spectators than about those in the aims of their gazes. The stereotypes have then
been incorporated in the self-understandings and have provoked the emergence
of autostereotypes, in complex processes of identity and interest formation and
transformation. Such xeno- and auto-stereotypes are, furthermore, not unani-
mously agreed on but contested. A case in point is the emergence of Japan as a
model in a Western Europe struck by identity crisis and general disorientation in
the 1970s. The Japanese model was a miracle of economic growth, peaceful
industrial relations, and a Confucian labour ethic according to some influential
observers, and a hierarchical authoritarian and union-busting political order
according to others. In the debate on Japan as a remedy to the European sickness
one saw and projected the expectations one wanted to. The projections were
made from one’s own normative and political positions. This is how images of
the Other work.

What has this historical heritage and the three mirrors represented during the

second half of the twentieth century, when the West European integration project
took shape in the framework of the Cold War, de-colonization and the emerg-
ence of ‘the Third World’ (Tängerstad, 2000)? What was the image of Eastern
Europe west of the Iron Curtain? What did Adenauer’s image of an Atlantic
Europe (including the USA) and de Gaulle’s image of a Europe between the
Atlantic and Urals (excluding Great Britain and the USA but including parts of
the Soviet Union) mean? What did Europe during the Cold War and the emerg-
ence of the European Community represent in countries which today are referred
to as ‘Central Europe’? What happened to the pre-war German idea of a Mittel-
europa? How did it survive and how was it transformed after the bankruptcy of
the Nazi regime? To what extent were the USA and the East European countries
parts of ‘Europe’ and the ideas of a European civilization during the Cold War?
Was the USA in and Eastern Europe out, for instance? What has the end of the
Cold War meant in respect of the demarcation of ‘Europe’? Can the term ‘Central
Europe’ today be seen as an instrument of demarcation from Russia after 1989?
What have the events in 1989 meant for the image of Europe? There are many
questions. They are all important for the problem of a European identity.

One of the most influential thinkers on the relationships between xeno- and

autostereotypes is Edward Said, already referred to above. The Others often
incorporate, even appropriate, in their own self-identification the xenostereotypes
imposed upon them. This is the thrust of his thesis on the role of Orientalism
not only as an instrument of Western understanding of the Orient but also as

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something incorporated in the Oriental self-understanding. Images of Europe
and images of Others are intersected and reinforce one another. A key question
for further research is to what extent, in what forms and with what content non-
European cultures are defined by the European culture. To what extent do
non-European cultures define themselves in terms of what they discern as
European particularities? And, vice versa, to what extent does Europe define itself
in terms of what is seen as particularities of other cultures, Islam, for instance?

It is interesting to have my historical outline of Europe seen from within by

a European related to, even confronted with, corresponding outlines of other
cultures ‘from within’ where Europe is seen from the outside. Such compari-
sons/confrontations, with a point of departure in Shmuel Eisenstadt’s and others’
concept of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 1992), would promote intercultural
dialogue as opposed to a clash of civilizations (Stråth, 2002). However, the once
innovative concept of multiple modernities can be taken one step further, ‘entan-
gled modernities’ has recently been suggested to express that various cultures do
not only exist in parallel but that they are interwoven (Fuchs et al., forthcom-
ing). The problem following from the fact that Europe does not exist without
non-Europe and that non-Europe does not exist without Europe, is in other
words how to make it the starting point for bridge-building not for demarcation.
The practical implication of this way to formulate the problem is that earlier stat-
ically defined concepts of strictly separated and self-entrenched civilizations
(‘Europe’, ‘the West’, ‘the Orient’, ‘Islam’) should be superseded by more dynamic
understandings of the potent meaning-producing processes that construct such
entities. Symbolic and geopolitical boundaries between them must be reconsid-
ered and seen as historically and discursively shaped rather than naturally given.
Doing so would contribute to more transparent and less norm-laden interpre-
tations and applications of concepts like ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’. This
scenario would focus on the continuous and infinite processes of drawing and
altering cultural and civilization boundaries, where, be it in terms of violent clash
or peaceful competition, different civilizations emerge in historical processes
through dense transcultural intersections. The historical mutual formation of
Europe and the Islamic Middle East as units of civilization can be understood in
this view. The impact of Islam on the construction of Europe and the inverse
cannot be overestimated. It impinged on the building of religious and modern
discourses and institutions in both Europe and the Middle East (Höfert and
Salvatore, 2000).

In such a research agenda and political programme there is a need for a

European responsibility of a different kind than the Enlightenment civilization
mission. In the light of this new responsibility the concept of a European identity
is problematic since it conjures up images of a European unity and a fiction of
peace and concord as well as strength and power. The concept connotes a political
utopian projection rather than a political pragmatic project.

What currently could be more pressing than to acquaint ourselves with the

impact of Islam in the construction of Europe, and its inverse, the many ways it
impinged on the building of religious and modern discourses and institutions in

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both Europe and the Middle East? And, in the same vein, the role of Jews and
Judaism in a long historical perspective of entanglement, involving both inte-
gration and disintegration.

The conclusion of this historical outline is that a concept like Europe is

constructed in processes of contention and bargaining. The images of Europe do
not exist as a natural phenomenon but are discursively shaped. Central to our
identifications are images of others. The idea of, for instance, a European identity
necessarily contains a demarcation from the non-European. This is inherent to
all distinctions, they are both inclusive and exclusive. Europe can only be realized
in the mirror of Others. These projections probably say more about their produc-
ers than about the targets they construct. So if Europe does not exist without
non-Europe, and non-Europe does not exist without Europe, the great challenge
is how to make this the starting point for bridge-building, not for demarcation.
Symbolic and geopolitical boundaries must be urgently reconsidered, and seen as
historically and discursively shaped.

An Active Europe but in a New Sense

What images of Europe and of the Other, in particular the Orient, would trans-
gress established images of demarcated civilizational camps and promote inter-
cultural dialogue? How can new preconditions for intercultural dialogue be
established?

A tentative first answer to this question would go in the direction of a more

active Europe. Not active in the old sense of propagating one specific European
or Western development standard as the gauge for the rest of the world, but a
new active Europe as a mediator and a bridge-builder in a global world.

The Enlightenment quest for improvement and mastery, with a funda-

mentalist and totalizing core, would in this ‘new activism’ scenario be trans-
formed into a communications specialism, based on a readiness to listen to other
views and promote dialogue among them. Slogans like ‘cultural diversity and a
common heritage’ or ‘unity in diversity’ would expand from terms used in a
European self-reflection to take on global dimensions. In the long run the inter-
cultural dialogue should rather become a transcultural dialogue transgressing
established boundaries. This active Europe would be an alternative to a military
active Europe.

Towards a New Conceptualization of Europe

In the historical framework and future scenario as outlined here the concept of
a European identity is of limited value. Like the classification of human beings
according to ethnicity and race, it has reached its limits. It should be seen as a
historical concept which played a crucial role during a difficult phase of European
integration between the 1970s and the 1990s. The twenty-first century requires

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a new conceptual topography less Euro-centred and narcissistic and more global
although in another sense than the globalization rhetoric which is nothing but a
narrative on Americanization and only repeats the old European version of the
white man’s burden and civilization mission. In the development of new semantic
fields the historically constructed divides through the Baltic and the Mediter-
ranean must be transgressed. I am not suggesting the construction of a new divide
through the Atlantic, but more critical distance emphasizing differences between
Europe, in a new mediating role, and the USA is urgent. Not least the
conceptualization in social theories after the collapse of Marxist theory is almost
hegemonically American. The debates between libertarians and communitarians,
the neo-liberal rhetoric, with a unilateral focus on the market concept, and the
arguments for rational choice and methodological individualism, are all much
more inscribed in a specific American history than in European ones. The same
goes for the debate on human rights, democracy and ethnicity and for theories
of modernity and ‘development’. They have nevertheless imposed themselves also
as the point of departure, given more or less by nature, for the European theor-
etical reflection on society. On this point concepts must be developed, which
much more reflect specific European historical experiences in all their variety.
Max Weber, for instance, with his intellectual capacity to see Germany and
Europe in a context of global cultures, could be a point of departure in such a
theoretical reconstruction. Another point of departure could be that part of the
Enlightenment heritage, which emphasizes qualities like tolerance and intellec-
tual openness for dissident opinions.

An urgent task in a European reconceptualization would be to re-integrate the

individual in a social context. Here the concept of a European social responsi-
bility could fill a dangerous gap between a growing nationalism in the wake of
nation-state legitimacy deficits, and the market-oriented emphasis on the indi-
vidual deprived of social connections, as Peter Wagner (2000) has argued.

Other important elements in a reconceptualization would be to see ‘culture’

not as an entity with cohesion and fixed borders, but, as Gerard Delanty and
others have argued, as a floppy concept, describing something in a flux with no
clear borders and with internal opposition and contradictions, discursively
shaped in contentious social bargaining processes (Delanty, 1995; 1999). It is
important not to essentialize Europe but to emphasize the openness of the
concept much more than ‘European identity’ does.

In the same vein Gerold Gerber (2000) analyses Malta. His point of depar-

ture is that the EU is a paradoxical project. On the one hand, a European identity
is supposed to overcome nationalisms and to ensure solidarity among the
members; on the other, as in any construction of collective identity, a definition
of the Other(s) is required. The inclusion of European ‘insiders’ implies the
exclusion, by whatever criteria, of non-European or not-yet-European ‘outsiders’.
Thus, humanistic ideals such as equality, freedom and pluralism have come into
conflict with the need to exclude. All this has been seen and discussed, of course,
and a solution does not seem to be in sight. However, Gerber emphasizes the
need to accept ambivalences and paradoxes as a fundamental condition of social

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life, rather than being a nuisance to be ordered away. In doing so he refers to Max
Weber and Zygmunt Bauman (1991), and he takes note of Neil Smelser’s (1998)
defence of ambivalence against rational choice. His case study of Malta suggests
that politicians and intellectuals, far from being avant-garde, may actually be
behind actors in everyday life, when it comes to coping with paradox. While
political and economic exigencies are likely to force Maltese officials into a choice
between Europe and the Arab world, Maltese people may happily embrace the
option of being both European and non-European in daily life. As long as the
social sciences comply with intellectual and political efforts to construct coher-
ence and order by classifying the social world into categories, they will face the
challenges of logocentrism. Yet, a critique of Western metaphysics should not
mean the end of science and reason altogether. With the point of departure in
his inquiry of Malta Gerber proposes to develop a social science, which takes
‘ordinary’ actors – that is all of us – and their practical solutions to flux and
paradox more seriously. Politicians, intellectuals and scientists may be inspired by
such expertise in how to deal with ambivalence without being afraid.

Self-images and images of the Other are not static entities, but are elements in

a continuous process. Anja Hänsch (2000) demonstrates this in a study of Arab
emigrants’ encounter with Europe. During emigration, the encounter with the
Other leads to both a reflection on the self-image and a reflection on the previous
image of the Other. These types of reflection start all over again with the return
of the emigrants to their home country, where the culture of origin is confronted
after the experiences of Europe have left their traces on the emigrants. Emigration
functions as a catalyst for the creation and for the questioning of images and self-
images. Situations of emigration can be described in terms of liminality or rites de
passage (Turner, 1987; van Gennep, 1981). Separation is followed by margin/limen
and incorporation. The migrant is in a situation of betwixt and between, in a
liminal or transitional stage between cultures and countries. This situation leads
to a questioning of both culture of origin and the new culture, which is encoun-
tered. Given the great number of immigrants in Europe it seems reasonable to
argue that they should be incorporated in concepts expressing community and
belonging. ‘European identity’ is no doubt problematic in this respect. The liminal
position does not only refer to migrants, however. Arpád Szakolczai (1998),
elaborating on Foucault, has argued that modern Western culture is a continuous
liminality, a moment of transition lasting for centuries and rooted in the collapse
of the Middle Ages. The transient becomes a permanent state. Thus the migrant
situation brings with it a double risk of getting lost, namely the risk of falling in-
between two cultures and the risk of falling into the abysses of modernity where
anti-structure and uprootedness become part of everyday life.

All these examples indicate the direction in which a new conceptualization of

culture and feelings of belonging could be elaborated. Ambivalence, transition
and being more historically informed are some key elements. The concept of
European identity has taken on a career in the direction of essentialism, and does
not mediate these elements very well.

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■ Bo Stråth

is Professor of Contemporary History at the European University

Institute in Florence. He has published widely in the field of modernization and
democratization processes in Western Europe in a comparative context with a
focus on the complexity and the contradictions in concepts such as modernity and
democracy. Address: Contemporary History Chair, European University Institute,
Robert Schuman Centre, via dei Roccettini 9, IT-500 16 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI),
Italy. [email: [e-mail]]

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