Which identity for Europe?

Contents.

1. Introduction.

2. Mapping the formation of identity : structures, aspects and dimensions.

3. The post-national perspective
3.1. The European Union as a post-national form of state
3.2. Post-national identity formation: setting criteria for the analysis
3.3. Evaluating the criteria
3.3.1. Does the EU possess a “collective” proper name?
3.3.2. Can the EU rely on a myth of common ancestry?
3.3.3. Does Europeans share an historical memory?
3.3.4. Are there elements of an European common culture?
3.3.5. Is there an European homeland?
3.3.6. Does solidarity unify Europeans?
3.4. Preliminary conclusions

4. The Postmodern perspective.
4.1. The European Union as a postmodern form of state
4.2. Which criteria for a postmodern identity formation?
4.3. How to investigate identity in a postmodern Europe?
4.4. How to characterize European identity from a postmodern standpoint?

Conclusions

References

1. Introduction.

In the last decades, the debates about the existence and the meaning of an European identity raised all the time more. Some scholars approached the theme, focussing on a “common historical heritage”, which would point to a basis for a collective identity (Habermas 2001; Giesen 2003), others based their arguments on political and institutional similarities among European countries like human rights protection, democracy and rule of law (Risse 2001). In other cases, the studies on the topic focussed on the ambivalent employ of the term “identity”, arguing its (ab)-use, above all in EU-Treaties, instead of more obviously expressions as “legitimacy” or “sovereignty” (Bruha/ Rau 2000).

The aim of this paper is to examine the topic from two distinctive perspectives: a post-national and a post-modern. The paper suggests a sort of “back to the roots” of the enquiry, approaching the theme neither with pre-existent assumptions nor with the goal to order puzzled arguments. The study will not pursue the question about the existence of a collective European identity, but will search for possible ways and circumstances, in which “identity” in Europe (restricting the focus on the European Union) may emerge.

The central question of the paper will be if the development of an European identity is plausible and if a widespread process of socialisation may prevail on the national structures of the member states (hereafter MSs) and lead to the growth of common “procedures” and “functions” among European populations. In order to answer the question the more satisfactory as possible, the dissertation proposes two differing angles for the analysis with the intend to compare the findings resulting from dissimilar criteria of examination.

In a first part the EU will be considered as a post-national political order, deriving from the dissolution of its MSs. After a short explanation on the political nature of the Union from this standpoint, the dissertation will explore the option of an emerging post-national identity in the European Union, adopting the criteria proposed by Anthony Smith in his study of national identities (Smith 1991). The analysis will evaluate if the EU attend the proposed criteria in order to assess the coming out of a post-national form of social identification.

In its second part, the paper will approach the subject from a postmodern different. After a description of the political features of a Union from this standpoint, the discussion will focus on the possibilities for the formation of identity according to new assumptions deriving from the analysis. Explicitly: the implosion of the spatial and temporal dimensions, the absence of clear social and territorial boundaries and the consequent emergence of new latent and negotiable territorialities. Afterwards the paper will try to delineate the plausible patterns in the development of identity and to give an outlook on the possible conceptualisations of the subject.

2. Mapping the formation of identity : structures, aspects and dimensions.

Social sciences conduct the studies on identity chiefly focussing on two patterns for analysis: psychodynamic and sociological. Both the approaches seek to find the relationship between the inner and the outer world in distinct modes. Notwithstanding the methodological differences, for both conceptions “the struggle to define the self is linked to the way in which a community constructs conceptions of people and life” (Plummer 2003:281). Accordingly, identity can be conceived as a homogeneity derived from the resistance to an outer and organised in a temporal continuity (Utzinger 2005:240).

Identity is in fact only pursuable when discernible from alterities. A personal identity, for instance, is not given as a transcendent construct (Assmann 1999:132), but is the result of a confrontation with the “Other”, based on the struggle for self-understanding and self-recognition (Delanty 2005:51). Following the same patterns, a social identity, which constitutes the “logos” for a collective identity, is only imaginable in an environment, where other actors move and perform, showing their differences as well as similarities (Gephart 1999:145). In its progression, identity shows a reflexive construction organized in an inclusive and an exclusive structure, which makes possible the growth of a perceivable entity (Utzinger 2005:240).

Therefore a “space”, where identity can expand and get in touch with alterities, is a necessary condition to shape distinctive qualities. The development of identity is to imagine as a twofold process (inclusive and exclusive), ordered in a context, specifically in a “space”, and performing through a “narrative dimension” (Delanty 2005:51), so in a “time”, which is essential to provide it with an history and a memory of itself. Both aspects (time and space) are not separate units, but parts of a dialectical dynamism (Giddens 1991:17). They are not independent, but interdependent. “Time” and “space” subsist under the same conditions in which internal and external structures of identity advance, because of their reflexive mutually reliance.

According to the interpretation of André Utzinger (2005:240-44) of Mead’s identity theory, social identities progress in a threefold process, based on the distinctions under three inter-reliant extents: socialisation, procedures and functions (Utzinger 2005:241-242). “Socialisation” is the starting point for the growth of identities. Only through interactions with others, it is possible to build a proper understanding of the own individuality and to distinguish entities among themselves. In the words of George Mead (1934:201):

“The fact that all selves are constituted by or in terms of the social process, and are individual reflections of it (…) is not at least incompatible with, or destructive of, the fact that every individual self has its own peculiar individuality, its own unique pattern; because each individual self within that process, while it reflects in its organised structure the behaviour pattern of that process as a whole, does so from its own particular and unique standpoint within that process, and thus reflects in its organised structure a different aspect or perspective of this whole social behaviour pattern from that which is reflected in the organised structure of any other individual self within that process”

If “socialisation” leads to the coming out of peculiar aspects in personal or social identities, “procedures” concretise the results of socialisation in establishing differences between “in-group” and “out-group” (Sumner in Utzinger 2005:243). It is, in other words, the moment, in which identities may shape common ideas, shared values or norms and subsequently organise themselves in familiar structures which foster the existence of a “Wir-Gefühl” (Gephart 1999:45), i.e. a “group identification” (Jenkins 1996:23).

The next step subsequent to “socialisation” and the establishment of “procedures” is the configuration of “functions”, which allow a long-lasting subsistence of identities. “Functions” confer the social group a distinctive system for identification. “Functions”, which may be compared with the Weberian “Gemeinschaftsglaube” (Kelly 2003:73-93), cover a key-role in the spread of a meta-group as in the case of national communities.

Notwithstanding their theoretical proximity, “functions” and “procedures” must not be confused. Their itemisation is essential to discern between the characterization and the formation of a social group. According to Richard Jenkins (1996:23):

“(…) It makes sense to distinguish processes of group identification and social categorisation. This is the internal-external dialectic once again. Both processes, group identification and categorisation, can feed back upon each other, and are likely to do so. Problematising the group-category distinction brings us back to the centrality of power (and therefore politics) in processes of identity maintenance and change. It is typically in political contexts that collective identities are asserted, defended, imposed or resisted.”

Even if some theories assert that identification reflects a biological derived psychological dynamic (Bloom 1993:33; Mead 1934), Jenkins’ clarification is important to distinguish between usually stable primary groups (families) and more fragile secondary groups (communities). In the second case it is in fact more complex to spread out procedures and functions and reach a stable identification dynamic.

The prior listed distinctions on structures (internal/external), aspects (time/space) and dimensions (socialisation/ procedures/ functions) of identity should grant the research some clear orientations. The study will consider the progression of identity, relying trusty on the above outlined concepts.

3. The post-national perspective.

3.1. The European Union as a post-national form of state.

Various integration theories have approached since the sixties the European integration, trying to explain in different ways the political “nature of the beast” (Risse 1996). Several scholars have proposed distinct analysis on the EU to describe on the one side its original meaning and on the other side its possible evolution. For the aim of this paper, it is not significant to discuss about which theory could be the most convincible, but to illustrate with which requirements the EU can be considered as an emerging post-national form of state. James Caporaso (1996:35) outlines these conditions, looking at the European Union as a system emerging from the Westphalian order:

“In the Westphalian state system is composed of sovereign states within anarchy, the EU can integrate politically only by transcending the sovereignties of individual states, by cajoling them into accepting the status of subordinate units, and by reconstituting state sovereignty at a higher level. This requires that we see the EU as an embryonic political structure in the process of acquiring its distinctive sovereign status and surreptitiously draining these ‘powers’ from the Member States”.

From a political point of view, the central point in the discussion about the possibility for the EU to replace the meaning of the MSs is “sovereignty”. The European Union should acquire a higher legal and political recognition than the MSs, in order to legitimate itself as a post-national authority.

Because of the existing controversy in the argumentations on this topic^[1], this first part of the paper will examine if the European Union could fill the same requirements, which drew the MSs national identities.

After the French revolution a nation state can be “idealistically” interpreted as resulting from the combination of two conditions: the existence of an ethnic community (“Volk”) and a territorial bounded sovereign country (Schubert/Klein 2006:205). If the analysis on sovereignty allows to suppose the implications of the EU for states organisation, it is not sufficient to debate the possibility of an emerging post-national European identity. If changing national borders may affect the extent of “socialisation”, they do not entail consequential changes in “procedures” and “functions”. In order to analyse this second aspect, the study will rely on national variables and find out if the results permit to foresee the evolution of an European identity from a post-national point of view.

3.2. Post-national identity formation: setting criteria for the analysis.

The analysis on the possibility to envisage the existence of an European ethnic community (“Volk”) will proceed according to the attributes listed by Anthony Smith (1991:21) in his research concerning the basic characteristics of national identities:

- a collective proper name;
- a myth of common ancestry;
- shared historical memories;
- one or more differentiating elements of common culture;
- an association with a specific homeland;
- a sense of solidarity for significant sectors.

As Smith (1991:21) states in his study on national identity:

“The more a given population possesses or shares these attributes (and the more these attributes that it possesses or shares), the more closely does it approximate the ideal type of an ethnic community or ethnie. Where this syndrome of elements is present we are clearly in the presence of a community of historical culture with a sense of common identity.”

Even if the employ of “ethnic” attributes is controversial and may be confused with racial exclusionary requirements^[2], it permit to fix some variables to measure the degree of shared positive properties in a community in order to evaluate the option on the coming out of a meta-group (Trunk 2001:16).

The criteria proposed by Smith should be understood as conditions to internalise identification dynamics between national populations. In the case of the European Union it should be valued, if these conditions are fulfilled or partially present to estimate the possibility of a post-national identification among citizens of different MSs.

In this context “national identity” is to understand according to William Bloom (1990:52) as:

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^[1] According to integration theories this “shift of powers” may happen in different ways, which have been outlined by numerous scholars in the last decades. The neo-functionalist reading of Ernst Haas, for instance, envisages the possibility to reach indirectly a deeper integration through functional spills-over, which affect in a roundabout way other domains. As an example market regulations in the seventies have encouraged workers mobility and brought indirectly to the diffusion of hybrid habits in the society (Kaelble 2005:302-305). Following the functional argumentation one should expect as a consequence the birth of an European society and the establishment of the EU as a post-national organization. Other approaches of the European integration doubt the neo-functional argumentation, arguing that the EU on the contrary strengthen the national executives, which remain the principal actors involved in the development of European politics. At a societal level, it would mean that the emergence of an European supranational feeling of belonging remains incompatible with nation state-identities, notwithstanding some degree of internalisation (Risse 2001:216).

For further readings: Wolf, Dieter (2006): Neo-Funktionalismus. In: Bieling, Hans Jürgen/ Lerch, Marika (Hrsg.): Theorien der europäischen Integration. Verlag für Sozialwissenschften, Baden-Baden, 65-90; Moravcsuk, Andrew (1993): Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach. In: Journal of Common Market Studies 31:4, 473-524.

^[2] In the analysis of Anthony Smith: “Such a community must be sharply differentiated from a race in the sense of a social group that is held to possess unique hereditary biological traits that allegedly determine the mental attributes of the group. In practice ethnies are often confuses with races, not only in the social sense but even in the physical, anthropological sense of subspecies of Homo sapiens such as Mongoloid, Negroid, Australoid, Caucasian and the like. Such confusion is the product of the widespread influence of racist ideologies and discourses, with their purportedly ‘scientific’ notions of racial struggle, social organism and eugenics. In the hundred years from 1850 to 1945 such notions were applied to the purely cultural and historical differences of ethnies, both inside Europe and in colonial Africa and Asia, with results that are all too well known” (Smith 1991:22).