The European Identity

Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny

Stephen Green

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781910376171
• eBook ISBN: 9781910376294
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What—if anything—do the twenty-eight member states of the European Union have in common? Amidst all the variety, can one even speak of a European identity? In this timely book, Stephen Green explores these questions and argues for the necessity of the European voice in the international community.

Green points out that Europeans can readily define the differences that separate them from others around the globe, but they have yet to clearly define their own similarities across member states. He argues that Europe has something distinctive and vitally important to offer: the experience of a unique journey through centuries of exploration and conflict, errors and lessons, soul-searching and rebuilding—an evolution of universal significance.

Coming at a time when the divisions in European culture have been laid bare by recent financial crises and calls for independence, The European Identity identifies one of the biggest challenges for all of the member states of the European Union.

What does it mean to be European?

Europe is the western corner of the Eurasian land mass. It has natural frontiers to the north, south and west, but not to the east. It is easiest to think of its eastern borders as being broadly those of the present-day European Union.

Are those borders permanent? Not necessarily. But Russia has a very different identity; occasionally down the centuries it has sought to convince itself and others that its outlook is essentially European, but at its heart it is the land of the steppes and forests. It has a geopolitical centre of gravity which is well to the east of Europe, and a culture moulded to this day by the Orthodox heritage which marks it out so distinctly.

And Turkey? Even in the days of old Byzantium, relations with Catholic Europe were always fractious and sometimes violent. Then came the Ottoman centuries when Turkish military expansion was the constant nightmare of Europe. Now Europe is thoroughly secularised, and Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, sought the same for his country. Yet recent years have shown that Turkey’s secularism is much less deeply rooted. Turkey may eventually join the European Union, but the cultural challenge looks intractable to many on both sides.

So Europe effectively includes the 28 current member states of the European Union and a few other potential member states in south-east Europe, plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland – and a number of small entities such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Channel Islands, all of which are vestiges of earlier, premodern forms of sovereignty.

We need to ask ourselves whether this Europe has any real identity. For although the world of the 21st century is ever more global and interconnected, the importance of geopolitics has in no way declined. There are some old and some new great powers on the world stage. There are new actors, new cultural challenges and new sources of instability. Directly or indirectly, Europe will be impacted and profoundly challenged. How the Europeans respond will depend on what they have in common. What if anything – amidst all the kaleidoscopic variety – do we Europeans think we share? What is it to be a European in the modern age? Does it have any significance – geopolitically, commercially or culturally? What future does it have?

These are questions for all of Europe, but especially for the three leading states of the EU, for each of which they are unsettling in a unique way. For France – used to seeing itself as the moral and political leader of the European project – its whole self-understanding is in play, as the centre of gravity shifts towards a reluctant Berlin. Meanwhile, Britain has for centuries regarded the continent mostly as a threat or a distraction; but it is learning that its own identity is far more fragile than it ever realised. And for Germany, which – because of its deep history – is more truly comfortable with a multi-layered identity than either of the other two, the 20th century still casts a shadow; the role of leadership which has been thrust upon it by the facts of geography and economics still does not come at all easily.

Few people have ever thought of themselves primarily as Europeans. In the four centuries up to 1914, when Europe was the dynamic centre of the world and when Europeans fanned out over the globe to trade and conquer, they defined themselves by their religion, by their language and by their nationality (which they saw increasingly in racial – and indeed Darwinian – terms). After 1945, in the wake of the moral and physical disasters of what was in effect a second Thirty Years War at the heart of Europe, there was a new determination to achieve a robust and enduring peace. This was the vision of a small European elite, but they were responding to a widespread sense of exhaustion and disgust (which it takes a leap of imagination these days to fully comprehend). It was given effect in the embryonic structures that eventually evolved into the European Union, and blessed – initially from the sidelines – by a Britain which only belatedly, and never wholeheartedly, joined up.

Yet none of this, not even in the early visionary years, represented the emergence of a new and widely recognised European identity. In fact, there is no political appetite – in any member state, and certainly not in any of the big three – to strengthen a European sense of identity by giving any institution or individual role a clear leadership mandate at the European level. This reluctance is not born just from lingering nationalism or from theoretical concerns about the democratic legitimacy of any such mandate. It reflects something much deeper: an insistent question about what that identity is and how it should be projected.

In the last 70 years, the most pressing objective has been achieved: not only has Europe been at peace with itself, but war between the member states has become virtually unthinkable. But the sense of a European identity, though it has grown, remains weak. It is still the case (as evidenced by the official Eurobarometer surveys1) that majorities in every country think of themselves not primarily as Europeans but in national terms (and in the case of Britain fewer than half see their identity in European terms at all). Recent years have seen a growth in the percentage of people who see themselves as national but also European, and a decline in the percentage who see themselves as national only: but for all other than a very small minority the European identity is secondary rather than primary.

When people are asked what are the important ingredients in the European identity, half of those who are citizens of eurozone countries cite the euro. Only half as many cite history and culture. Not surprisingly, fewer than a quarter of those from non-eurozone members cite the euro, although they are about equally likely to cite history and culture. Furthermore, the trend data show that culture is on the wane as an element in people’s understanding of identity: there is evidence that sport is becoming a more important factor – and it is unclear what effect this has on people’s sense of a European identity.

Indeed, the case for Europe is almost never argued in terms of identity. In Britain, even the pro-Europeans argue not on the basis of common values and cultural identity, but on the basis of commerce – from the benefits of the single market and the advantage of critical mass in international trade negotiations. In France and Germany, and in the eurozone more generally, policy debate for the last few years has focussed – for understandable reasons – largely on a near-term macroeconomic imperative of stabilisation and structural reform. The urgent task has been to integrate monetary policy and coordinate fiscal policy – not in order to strengthen any European identity, but to deal with the problems of over-indebted weaker members of the eurozone (above all, Greece) and to get growth going again. The Treaty of Lisbon sets out the member states’ resolve to ‘continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. But apart from rare voices like that of the influential German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (of whom more below), there are few – and no politicians of any significance anywhere – who see the creation and nurturing of a new European identity as a primary challenge, or even as having much relevance, for modern Europeans.

A whole generation has grown up since the fall of the Berlin wall – an event which led to the creation, for the first time ever, not only of a new, unified and peaceful Germany but also of a new European Union embracing almost all of the continent. It is a generation for whom borders are not restrictions, either physical or psychological – and on whose shoulders the burden of the painful past sits ever more lightly. And yet there is more existential angst than ever about Europe’s place in the world and about its whole future. Even instinctive integrationists such as the German elite fret that the vision is being swathed in fog by the complexities of Brussels regulation and the struggles of the eurozone. Meanwhile, the lukewarm British commercial pragmatists never really committed themselves to the concept of Europe as an identity at all.

Yet the facts of history have created shared interests and cultural connections that are in the end more important than the differences. We know we are different from Asia; and we are more different from America than we (especially the British) think we are. We have also been reminded of late that Europe’s huge neighbour to the east – Russia – has a history and a culture which is quite distinctive and that its identity has a different centre of gravity. In a 21st century world of globalisation and great powers – a century in some ways not so very different from the 19th-century world which was also one of globalisation and great powers – Europe needs to define and discover its common identity.

The 21st century is not going to be Europe’s age. Europe is now in long-term relative decline, both politically and economically. It is no longer the energetic, ambitious and aggressive continent it was when the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the British set out over the oceans to plunder, trade and colonise. Europe also is no longer the continent whose technical brilliance the Chinese emperor Qianlong so unwisely spurned when Lord Macartney sought to open commercial dealings with China in 1793. It is no longer the continent where an aggressive Germany sought to settle and Germanise vast tracts of Slav land to the east and unleashed a campaign of unbelievable brutality in pursuit of that goal. And it is no longer the frontline of a Cold War between two superpowers with the capacity to destroy each other and everyone else many times over. Europe has retreated from being the self-defined centre of the world to being what it had been before the 15th century – a corner of the Eurasian land mass. At that time it was backward in comparison either with the sophistication of China (with which it had very little contact) or with the intellectual prowess of the Muslim world (which has left its visible European imprint in the glories of Andalusia). That is not true today: modern Europe is of course one of the most sophisticated and prosperous societies on the planet. But the question about how it can sustain its prosperity and its intellectual stature in an age when the centre of gravity has moved away from it – the question about what it has to offer and on what basis it can expect to retain its influence – is becoming more and more insistent.

The political decline of Europe has been u...

Table of contents

• THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY
• Contents
• What does it mean to be European?
• Identity in variety?
• Enlightenment or enlightenments? The birth of a new European identity?
• The inevitable bonds of geography and history
• The United States of Europe?
• A fragile union of fragile identities?
• Layers of identity and loyalty
• Where next?
• Notes