European National Identities

Elements, Transitions, Conflicts

Roland Vogt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412852685
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Nacionalismo y patriotismo

Making sense of the perplexing diversity of Europe is a challenging task. How compatible are national identities in Europe? What makes Europe European? What do Europeans have in common?

European National Identities explores the diversity of European states, nations, and peoples. In doing so, the editors focus on the origins and elements of different national identities in Europe and different themes of national self-understanding. Each chapter contributes a unique view of national identities gravitating around myth, historical experiences and traumas, values, ethnic and linguistic differences, and religious fault lines.

This work grounds European national identities within cultural, historical, and political dynamics, which makes the work approachable for many readers, including historians, sociologists, and political scientists. In addition, the editors illustrate that national identities continue to be a source of contention and a challenge to political developments, the demands of immigrants and minorities, and the dynamics of European integration. This book draws particular attention to identity shifts and conflicts within individual European countries.

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Introduction: Making Sense of European National Identities and Diversity

Roland Vogt and Wayne Cristaudo

It is a commonplace that Europe makes little, if any, sense. It is a continent that defies the usual definition of a continent (a large landmass surrounded by water), and its eastern geographical border is arbitrary. The creation of the European Union (EU) and its institutions and decisions makes the matter more, not less, “sensible.” The fact that Cyprus is a member of the EU, and that Turkey in some future date could be a member, only shows how little contemporary Europe has to do with its geographical location. This is compounded by the unlikelihood of Belarus, Moldova, the Ukraine, or even Russia joining the EU any time in the foreseeable future. If Turkey and Cyprus could be members, perhaps it is not surprising that Morocco once applied in 1987 to join the EU and that even Israel has played with the idea.

Given that geographical features fail to give a hint at what makes Europe European, it is necessary to look at its peoples, its history, its cultures, its values, and its civilizational heritage as reference points for understanding the continent’s diversity. As has often been pointed out, Europe is a cultural idea rather than a geographical fact. What makes Europe European is the self-understanding of its peoples and their perception to be separate from their Asian, Middle Eastern, and African neighbors in terms of culture, language, religion, values, ethnicity, race, and history. What also matters is the recognition by others that Europe is indeed a civilization of its own. As such, what make Europe European are the separate identities that mediate an understanding of commonality among Europeans and a sense of difference regarding non-Europeans.¹ As this book will illustrate, there is no such thing as a single European identity. Instead, there are multiple national identities in Europe that all contain common elements of a shared European cultural and civilizational heritage.

By exploring the numerous national identities in Europe it is possible to gain an idea of what differentiates the peoples of Europe, as well as their cultures, their politics, and their self-understandings. National identities provide an insight into the different historical paths of the development of nations. They reveal which conflicts and contestation have led to the formation of emotional bonds among groups of people.² The bonds among one group were often forged at the expense of excluding others.³ Frequently, past wars, revolutions, foundational myths, and traumas form the core of a nation’s sense of self. The German trauma of having perpetrated the Holocaust is just as identity-forming as the Spanish trauma of its civil war. The fact that Poland has been recurrently invaded, annexed, and violently usurped by its neighbors has had very significant consequences for the way the Polish people conceive of their own nationhood.

However, national identities are not only illustrative of history. They also provide an indication of today’s conflicts among and inside European nations. National identities reveal which elements of commonality and difference continue to inform the self-understanding of nations. These elements can be ethnic or linguistic, religious or ideational, political or ideological. While identities do not cause or explain collective behavior, they do point to current sources of conflict, contestation, and debate in European societies.

This book not only sheds light on the differentiations between European nations but also explores how contested identities continue to shape European societies. For a long time, scholarship treated identities as marginal factors for explaining historical, political, and social developments. What counted were power and geopolitics, interests and economic structures, as well as ideologies.⁴ Though nationalism has for a long time captured scholarly and public attention,⁵ it was only after the “cultural turn” in the social sciences that identities, ideas, norms, and values came to be considered as important analytical elements in their own right.⁶ Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities,⁷ Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism,⁸ and Anthony Smith’s work on nationalism and national identity⁹ were only the precursors of a more widespread scholarly interest in exploring the influence of identities on the development of nations and states. This led to a more eclectic but also more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics that shape national self-understandings. Today, it is not only identities that inform a substantial part of scholarship on the development of nations. Language, religion, customs, rituals, memory, and even race have again become part and parcel of the mainstream analytical frameworks.¹⁰

As the different contributions to this book demonstrate, there is significant analytical purchase to be gained from examining national identities and the conflicts they have enabled inside and among European societies. To give an example, as Amaya-Akkermans’ chapter on the Netherlands illustrates, major rifts now run through Dutch society. One of the most controversial fault lines pits the traditional vision of a tolerant and multicultural Netherlands against a sentiment of social fragmentation and malaise triggered by the unsolved problems of large-scale immigration and the fear of Islamization. In this case, the Dutch self-identification as a tolerant, open, and socially progressive nation has come into conflict with the preferences and self-understandings of people who do not necessarily share this consensus or the value system from which it is derived. The rise and prominence of anti-Islamic populist parties—notably Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom, PVV)—sits uneasily with the long-standing democratic traditions and consociational democratic practices that characterized Dutch politics for a long time.¹¹ This rift cannot be fully be grasped without looking at the clashing identities that give rise to it. Economic and institutional explanations are only partially useful in drawing attention to the underlying causes of the Netherlands’ current introspective debates about its identity and role in Europe, because they work on the basis of weak assumptions regarding individual and collective behavior.

People and groups (i.e., nations) do not always make rational choices based on cost-benefit analyses. Nations, just like individuals, are motivated often by emotive reactions, fears, perceptions, uncertainties, beliefs, and ethnic and religious bonds, as well as historical legacies. The concept of “identity” captures these enabling factors for behavior and thus provides a welcome respite from reductionist and deterministic schools of thought.

However, the analytical value of the concept of identity should not be overestimated either. As Brubaker and Cooper point out, “if identity is everywhere, it is nowhere.”¹² The point of drawing attention to national identities in Europe is not to claim that identities determine the behavior of Germany, France, or Spain but instead to make sense of the motivations that enable or constrain collective action. What the contributions to this volume show is that national identities are evolving self-understandings that not only distinguish different peoples from each other but also give them purpose and direction.

For Europe as a whole, the basic commonality is the continent’s Christian heritage. Christianity has, more than any other single variable, enabled European peoples with different languages, customs, and histories to think of themselves as European.¹³ The designate “Europeans” is often said to have emerged to refer to such disparate peoples serving a common cause when Charles Martel led an army of Christian mercenaries from all over Europe against invading Muslim armies at the battle of Tours in AD 732. But as important as Christianity has been to shaping something we can vaguely refer to as a European identity, it is interesting to note that this does not mean that Christians are ipso facto Europeans, nor that all European nations have been essentially Christian nations. Christianity and its heritage are dominant in most but not all of Europe. Albania is a predominantly Muslim country, and large pockets of the Balkans, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, are also predominantly Muslim—not to mention Turkey. Moreover, even within what used to be called Christendom, the cultural development of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant nations has been extremely different. Nowadays, the differences between Catholic and Protestant Europe are receding rapidly, as are the differences between Orthodox and other Christian forms, as is occurring in Greece and Romania.

In the case of the branches of Christianity and the Muslim enclaves in Europe we have clear instances of how identity has been deeply informed or shaped by religious institutions, rituals, shared narratives, and social commands that reproduce themselves through people’s daily actions and appeals. Yet modern commerce, communication, migration, and mass political systems have played an enormous role in changing the mores and identities of peoples, and eroding traditional religious values. Religious identity is not the core of Europeans’ self-understanding, but Christianity (and Judaism) is one of the major ideational foundations on which modern European civilization is built.

Also important in shaping identities are the traditional political and economic structures of a society. The experience and trauma of communism in East Germany, for example, remains visible more than twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down. Countries like Belarus, Russia, and Moldova can hardly have been said to have made successful transitions from communism to market capitalism and liberal democracy. This stands in contrast to other parts of former communist Europe, where the people of Slovenia and Poland, for example, have swiftly cast off communism and the shackles of a centrally planned economy. What is interesting is the difference in their adjustment. Unlike their Czech neighbors, the Poles have generally fallen back onto their Catholic religious heritage, something that makes them—or at least their more conservative values—viewed with suspicion and distaste by less conservatively religious European countries. At least now, though, it would seem that communism as an alternative political and economic system is dead. But the future is an unknown territory, and in crises we cannot always be sure where panic leads. During the breakup of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the revival of murderous nationalism and concentration camps in the Balkans was a grim enough reminder to Europeans of that. And there we saw not only a return to fascist-styled symbols and actions, but even a revival of old religious battles that were particularly arcane, as in the case of Croats and Serbs making more of their respective religious heritage than other Europeans could possibly imagine.

At a time now when a liberal progressive consensus about politics and the economy dominates in Western and much of Central Europe, it is easy to mistake this consensus for an essential or durable feature of modern European identity. Given the relative youth of this consensus, and irrespective of all the high-minded statements of values that come from Brussels and Europe’s national capitals, it would be a brave person who would claim that love of political and economic freedom not only is intrinsic to Europe but also will remain so.

It would be very foolish indeed, then, to think that identities are stable. One does not need to be steeped in post-structuralism to know that they are not. This is as much the case with individual persons as with nations. While the nature of persons and the nature of nations are fundamentally different in important ways, it is all too easy to overlook some common characteristics between them: nations, like individuals, are born and die; they are composed of parts that are often themselves in conflict; and, often as a result of internal conflicts, they experience periods of health and sickness. Some vanish altogether, as Norman Davies has shown.¹⁴ The widespread use of animals to symbolically and artistically express the character of the nation is a good example of how people intuit that nations are like living creatures, and as such have their own living character. How these different “creatures” have lived and fought with each other is of incredible importance to Europe. The emergence of the EU is a direct response to the realization that European nations could no longer afford to tolerate another great war between its members (even if it had to endure a long cold war before a real union became viable). It is also a response to the realization that territorial aspirations and ideological differences can no longer be treated as matters of life and death. Certainly, the EU is deploying all manner of means and outlets to simultaneously convince Europeans that they share a common identity while being proactive in forging one. The greatest obstacle to the project remains the extent to which people cling to other aspects of their identity, in particular their ethnic or national identities.

At the same time as this is happening, great changes have also been taking place in parts of Europe with respect to national identity. Forty years ago no one would have blinked if someone described Spain and Italy as Catholic. But today Spaniards and Italians are no more religious or conservative on issues such as divorce, abortion, and homosexuality than other parts of Western Europe. While it would, however, be mistaken to think that all the European nations are undergoing transformation with respect to their identity, it is nevertheless true to say that the problems facing European nations have changed substantially over the last fifty years, as Europe has become an important economic power, as the Cold War has ended, and as some nation-states have broken up and others have been founded. New challenges have emerged—aging and demographic decline, environmental pollution, economic stagnation, and mass immigration. In terms of identity, perhaps the most challenging of all is the influx of large numbers of non-European (and particularly Muslim) immigrants who often do not feel particularly connected to Europe’s Christian or secular liberal values and heritage.

These challenges have in turn generated diverse responses, including the rise of populist anti-immigration parties that, as in the Netherlands, have paradoxically emerged to champion liberal values, and which are on the attack against what they perceive as the policies of appeasement toward extremists and the selling out of values that they say have made Europe great and capable of finally creating a peaceful and prosperous society. It has also led to a revival of more old-style far-right and ultranationalist (including neofascist) parties, a trend that has been exacerbated by the fallout from Europe’s debt and economic crisis. The polarization of the anti-immigration parties’ discourse is itself a symptom of the flux now taking place in Europe concerning European identities. It would be hard to imagine two more different men than the murdered Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn and the French anti-Semitic and far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. Indeed the differences tell us as much about shifting generational differences in identities and what features of identity some people on the margins of politics are fighting for. It should be remembered that in politics one must watch the margins if one wants to see where future change is likely to happen.

Although the process of European integration, with its pooling and transfer of sovereignty and the creation of supranational institutions, has unsettled the precise boundaries and character of the nation-state in Europe, the nation-state remains the most important unit of legitimate authority and political action. In fact, as Alan Milward has pointed out in his volume o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Making Sense of European National Identities and Diversity
• 2 Belgium: A Nation-State without a National Identity?
• 3 A Riven Nation: Old versus New Britain
• 4 France: Between the Individual and the Universal
• 5 German National Identity: Moving beyond Guilt
• 6 Greek Identity: Between Hellenism and Europeanism
• 7 Italy: One Nation, Three Republics, and a Thousand Identities
• 8 “The Chinese of Europe?” Dutch Identities on Trial
• 9 Poland: A Nation of the In-Between
• 10 Portugal: A Future’s Past between Land and Sea
• 11 Russia’s Nostalgic Present
• 12 Spain: One Country, Many Regional Identities
• 13 Sweden: Social Solitariness
• 14 Turkey as Borderland: Inside Europe, Outside, or In-Between?
• 15 From “Yugoslavism” to (Post-) Yugoslav Nationalisms: Understanding Yugoslav Identities
• 16 Yugoslavs and Europeans: A Tale of Two Supranational Identities
• 17 European Identities: Multiple Forms of a Contested Concept
• Contributors
• Index