3 - The identity of a multinational polity

Summary

European identity has become an all-pervasive concept. In the debate on integration it is used so frequently that to call its currency inflationary would be an understatement. Thus there is an evident risk of the concept turning into a catchall formula whose possible meanings vary arbitrarily from one context to another. Typically, those who tend to evoke it with emphatic intentions are also inclined to amalgamate what they take to be the ‘objective’ attributes of a European identity, as they may be derived from the realms of geography, history, culture and politics, with normative proposals for what should placed at the core of this identity, be it the canon of ‘occidental values’ or the idea of a ‘social’ Europe. All in all, adding the adjective ‘European’ to the identity concept does not seem to help very much in clarifying terms in a discursive field which is in any case permeated by all kinds of semantic ambiguities.

In this chapter, I do not intend to give a systematic inventory of the manifold ‘identity issues’ discussed so intensely in different social science disciplines over the last two to three decades. As is to be expected, the steady multiplication of scholarly uses of the category has already triggered the first massive counter-reactions. Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 2–3), for example, speak of an ‘“identity” crisis’ in the social sciences, a crisis they relate to the devaluation of meaning caused by overproduction.