The Changing Face of European Identity

Richard Robyn, Richard Robyn

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134275977
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica

Drawing upon systematic research using Q Methodology in seven countries - Denmark, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden - this volume presents the results of the most extensive effort yet at cross-cultural, subjective assessment of national and supranational identity. The studies attempt to explain how the European Union, as the most visible experiment in mass national identity change in the contemporary world, influences how Europeans think about their political affiliations.

1 Introduction

National versus supranational identity in Europe

Richard Robyn

European integration will require a transformation of the way the average European thinks and acts.

(Charles Pentland 1973, p. 242)

A remarkable story is unfolding in Europe. It is a story well worth telling not only for the political and economic change that is taking place of an unprecedented scope and type, and which goes against the grain of so much history in Europe:who could have imagined a generation ago,for example,that Europeans would willingly give up their currencies? It is also remarkable for the comparatively slower, and thus more imperceptible, change that is happening in how Europeans feel about their individual nations and how they relate to them.

But it is also a story that is often not being told well because its narrative is hard to discern.This is partly because the lenses we use to examine international politics are too often distorted by preconceived notions of how people view their relationship with their nation.

The on-going construction of the European Union (EU),now accelerating into a future even more uncertain than before, and the role of that institution as a major agent of change on a massive scale in Europe, raises fundamental questions about the ability of people voluntarily to acquire new forms of identity with new political institutions. That is what this book is all about.

The researchers in this book scattered around seven different countries of Europe to carry out these studies: the United Kingdom (England, Scotland and Northern Ireland), Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. We went to “the street” to find out what Europeans of all walks of life think: into homes, garages, businesses, farms, cafés.We went into local, national and European government offices. We talked with elites, from socialist members of the European Parliament to officials of the far-right National Front in France. But we also sought out common folks, from day laborers to the unemployed and the retired. So often what we encountered surprised us: an avowedly nationalist former French Foreign Legionnaire who expressed disdain for the anti-immigrant far-right party in France; a Protestant policeman, member of the Ulster Constabulary, who was comfortable with an Irish identity, even if it meant separating from a British identity; numerous Europeans who seemed to yearn for international cooperation but strongly held to a nation-state-oriented world. Using a methodology that allowed us unprecedented access into ways of thinking about identities and affiliations, we could reach a level of analysis that previous survey research could rarely approach. Tapping into the extensive opinions of more than 300 Europeans of all walks of life, it became the most extensive effort yet at cross-cultural, subjective assessment of national and supranational identity. The point of this unprecedented effort was to focus in on a key theme: the impact of the process of European integration, as manifested through the work of the European Union.

The contemporary rise of nationalism in Europe

There are many who would say that ingrained habits of Europeans, formed by distinct cultural backgrounds, would militate against any significant change in personal affiliation to the nation. These habits will provide a natural brake on the speed and extent of European integration (Smith 1990, 1992, 1995; Allott 1992; Sampson 1971, p. 26; Leonard 1998). Europeans may make some surface changes in order to keep a job or have the convenience of more open borders, but they will keep their separate languages and distinct cultures intact. Despite the undoubted changes that the European Union has brought to the continent, they say that nationalism is just too strong a basic force in the world.

Nationalism supposes a strong link of the individual to the nation-state, and these “Europessimists” can point to plenty of evidence that it is still a force to be reckoned with today. Throughout the Cold War, with Europe between the superpowers, it was thought that the kind of nationalism that had brought such destruction to the continent in the first part of the twentieth century had been tamed. Yet daily headlines from places such as the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Israel, Iraq, Northern Ireland and the Basque country of Spain are reminders that even into the new century we still seem to be in an age of ethnic conflict and of extreme forms of nationalist sentiment. Studies have shown that upwards of two-thirds of the conflicts in the world today could be of the “identity-based” type that characterizes nationalist motivations (Regehr 1993). Einhorn et al. (1996, p. 2) have speculated that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which some say meant the triumph of democracy over tyranny, actually may only have left in place two ideologies in Europe: nationalism and the market.

Nationalism certainly appears to remain one of the most powerful forces in contemporary political life. In surprising places it seems to be coming in from the cold and becoming part of the mainstream political scene (Suter 1998, 5). Across Europe, for example, in rich countries and poor, far right-wing political parties are gaining in strength, parties that seemingly have little in common except for a fear of foreigners (Seward 2000, p. 2A).

In France, the extreme right-wing National Front (NF) consistently scored in double digits in national and regional elections throughout the 1990s, enough to broker elections between the mainstream left and right. The NF broke through in the spring 2002 presidential elections and shocked the nation when its leader Jean Marie Le Pen beat other mainstream candidates and managed a face-off in the finale with incumbent President Jacques Chirac.

While neo-Nazi groups and skinheads in Germany took to the streets and grabbed headlines in recent years, more quietly far-right political parties have been gaining electoral strength. As only one example, the German People’s Union captured 13 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state elections in 1998. This development forced the governing Christian Social Union in Bavaria to announce a series of “security initiatives” (expelling foreigners guilty of serious crimes, stepped up searches for illegal immigrants, increased spending on crime equipment), all in a state previously known for its low crime rates. For most of the post-war period the far right has been of little consequence in Germany, never managing to the support of more than 5 per cent of the electorate. Yet, as Gerhard Frey, head of the German People’s Union, declared, “In France, Italy, Denmark, everywhere the right wing is entering politics and shifting the mainstream body politic to the right … voting right wing for young people in Germany today is now part of their culture, like techno music and rollerblading” (Drozdiak 1998, p. 5).

In Germany this political change has included increased attacks on the EU.
Saxony Premier Edmund Stoiber has declared that Germany would no longer tolerate being the “milk cow” that nourishes its neighbors: “We are paying more into the EU budget than all of the other members combined. That is neither fair nor acceptable to the German people” (Drozdiak 1998, p. 5).

The resolve of EU and national leaders across Europe in the face of the rise of nationalist parties was tested by the inclusion of the extreme-right Freedom Party in the Austrian government. Led by Jörg Haider, a charismatic politician who in the past has made comments favorable to Hitler and pushed an anti-immigrant stand, the Freedom Party grew from 5 per cent in the early 1990s to 27 per cent of the vote in 1999 elections. On January 31, 2000, António Guterres, the Prime Minister of Portugal, which held the EU presidency at the time, issued an unprecedented warning to a member state when he said that the EU would not “promote or accept any bilateral official contacts at a political level” with a government that included the Freedom Party (McNeil 2000, p. 1). Despite this strong stand, eventually it was the EU that relented and quietly permitted Austria to continue as a member in good standing.

It is also worthwhile for purposes of these studies in (supra)national identity to note Haider’s defiant reaction: “no foreigners can tell us what to do.” What does the word “foreigner” mean now for Austrians when they are now citizens of the European Union as well as their own country?

The Netherlands is also facing a situation of coalition government with anti-immigrant parties. The assassination of the extreme-right candidate Pim Fortuyn in the weeks leading up to the 2002 elections led to an outpouring of support and the election of representatives of his party to the government. Along with other relatively rich, ex-colonialist European countries, the Netherlands is dealing with immigrant “guest workers” coming into the country from former colonies in increasing numbers. The resulting predicament has been posed as a stark question: “in a white European country, can these nonwhite newcomers ever truly blend into the national identity?” (Robinson 1998, p. 1). This may be especially important for a sense of national self in Europe where nationality has long been explicitly based on shared ethnicity – “blood ties” – unlike perhaps the USA which views itself as a nation of immigrants.

Yet strong nationalist movements that have racial undertones have appeared in the USA in recent years (Tilove 1998, p. 14), showing this country is not immune to the sentiment. Nor are other countries around the world immune, no matter their governments’ professed commitment to multiculturalism. In Australia the racially-based One Nation Party has grown in strength (Warner 1998, p. 5). Israel is going through a painful and protracted debate over immigration and the “exact” meaning of Jewish identity, ostensibly over which religious group is qualified to perform conversions, but with a barely-hidden subtext of power and legitimacy and over who is a “real” Jew (Kraft 1998, p. A12). Debates such as this have engendered even deeper and more far-reaching discussions in Israel over whether it is a Jewish state or a multicultural state (Sontag 1999, p. 1).

The causes for the success of these movements may be many and varied, and may differ in each country with the special conditions there. They may gain support due to the perceived failure of the national government to come to grips with social problems such as unemployment, crime, or immigration. In other places it may be from a fear of the pace of life in general and of economic globalization and cultural imperialism, perhaps especially from America.

But it seems that one factor may be contributing to the process as a continent-wide phenomenon against which nationalist may rally: the increasing presence of the European Union in the daily lives of many people. How did this phenomenon of such obvious non- or even anti-national import rise in the heart of Europe?

The emergence of the “European idea”

Although writers, thinkers and poets from Dante to Churchill have conceived of a continent-wide political realm of Europe (de Rougemont 1966),it was only in the last century with the formation of the European Union that it seemed possible that this supranational entity might actually come into existence on a voluntary basis.The last type of long-standing continental political organization, the Christian empire of the Middle Ages, was based on feudal order of subservience and pre-modern conceptions of religious unity more than political engagement.It is only recently with the EU that so many citizens of Europe in this modern era have been called upon to give up voluntarily at least some of their allegiances to their own political nations.

With the formation of the nation-state system in Europe, a gradual process over several centuries but effectively started with the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century, Europeans have been drawn into an ever-tightening web of allegiances to central authorities that reside in capital cities of separate and distinct nations with carefully drawn borders. These allegiances were developed and supported through extensive campaigns of mass education in these nations that emphasized the learning of national languages and cultures. For the most part, Europeans came to accept the idea of singular attachments to national political institutions.

While dreamers might have conceived of a European idea, it took powerful political leaders such as Napoleon and Hitler, backed by military forces of overwhelming strength, to try and force Europeans to overcome their national attachments, with only limited success and the tragic results of which we are all familiar. In the destruction of the last of those attempts, World War II, Europeans seemed to be willing to try again, only this time on a more voluntary basis.

The forces of recovery and unity came together following the war to found the forerunner of the EU, the European Coal and Steel Community, Europe’s “first supranational institution” (Gillingham 1991, xi). Created as an attempt to avoid wars such as the one then just fought and to help in economic recovery, the ECSC pooled the production by six European countries of two key resources for building armies, coal and steel. This was a significant departure from the way things had happened before in Europe with its history of economic as well as political nationalism. While the ECSC itself was not a great success (Gillingham says it “did none of the things it was supposed to do” [p. xi]), it nonetheless had an immediate galvanizing effect on the forces for change swirling throughout Europe in the immediate postwar period. It directly led to the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the establishment of the European Community (EC), the precursor to the present European Union.

European integration has been an uneven process, proceeding on at least two different fronts: economic and political. The economic integration that started with the ECSC proceeded with some faltering throughout its subsequent metamorphoses through the European Common Market to the European Economic Community, then more simply the European Community and finally the European Union. At each step along the way, institutional structures were added or institutions then in place were granted significantly more powers to oversee new functions.

With arguably the lone exceptions of the United Nations and the newly-formed African Union, the EU is the only supranational organization that is overtly charting a course to lay direct claim to the sovereign rights of nations. This has important implications for this project, for the drive to construct the EU calls for the people of Europe to reorient their thinking about how they relate to their national political institutions. As Pentland states, “European integration will require a transformation of the way the average European thinks and acts” (1973, p. 242). But how are Europeans to conceive of this European identity?

The identity literature

As we have seen, in Europe especially there has been a coincidence of several fundamental disturbances that seem directly related to nationalism: the upsurge of nationalist sentiment described above, taking place in liberal democracies heretofore committed to multiculturalism; shocking outbreaks of national...