Andreea Enache
Psychology Bsc
University of Bucharest
Introduction
Having an issue intensely publicly debated or heavily investigated by scientific means tells us that there is still a long way to go before actually knowing and understanding it; that this dubitative tension around it keeps it permanently in our focus of interest and research, and forces us towards its clarification. European identity is probably one of the most frequently discussed topics in the social sciences arena nowadays, but also one of the most fluid and insecure concepts that politicians, scientists or the civil society are trying to get a grip on. There is a lot controversy with respect to both its existence and contents: public talks and scientific inquiries take on a very large spectrum of colors, from idealization and reification to utter denial. Given such a varied menagerie of attitudes, one cannot help asking oneself: is there a European identity? And, if yes, how does it look and sound? What is it made of? Where does it stem from? What is it that nurtures it and helps it gain such large spaces in the fields of our social consciousness?
Bearing these questions in mind, we will try to find some answers that will take out of the shadows the issue of European identity, in terms of its existence and its forms. This enterprise is one that calls for an extensive investigation and a multi-dimensional study, for which reason it would be rather unrealistic to expect this single article to answer (even if partially) the whole range of questions mentioned above. This is why we decided to embark on a long term project aimed at clarifying these issues by means of continuous and in-depth research. Thus, this essay will be the first out of a series especially dedicated to the understanding of European identity, its development and its final aims.
A state without a nation
Far away from being a finite concept or even one that we could relatively exhaust in a systematic description, the European identity is a construct on its way of being built up, a process that is actively going on both on the top-down axis and the bottom-up one. The stake is not at all negligible: the extremely broad objectives of the European Union and the complexity of the institutional and legislative apparatus meant to ensure their accomplishment cannot be backed up simply by formal mechanisms, no matter how efficient they may be. The EU enjoys at present the comfort of legitimacy and identity in having a flag, a hymn, an Europe’s day, a Constitution, a Parliament, an aquis communautaire, common objectives and strategies for all member countries that seem to be dedicated to making Europe a space of prosperity, security, peace, law, liberty, democracy and human rights’ rule. It obviously tends to become a super-state, reiterating many of the principles of functioning of a nation-state, but denying the appreciation of its ontological philosophy: the nation. In this sense, the EU is very much of a political paradox, lacking the consistency that such an ambitious construction would require in order to gain trust and credibility for its purpose and possibility of being. It is this very aspect of its development towards a super-state structure (with the preservation of some of the traits of the traditional state) that puts forward the acute issue of the rapport between this new European identity and national identities.
It is obvious that contemporary society is moving extremely fast towards new forms of existence and organization. One could of course see in this a strategic change that stems from new challenges and is aimed to face and hopefully solve new problems in new socio-economic and political contexts. However, these challenges do not differ too much from those that the classic authors in political philosophy have outlined some centuries ago. And, if we concede that the fundamental challenges are the same, we should try to find the answer for these “surface” transformations (organizational, institutional and administrative) somewhere else. What the EU lacks nowadays is a political philosophy able to confirm its rationality and reason for being. The top cannot give up the concept of nation because it is more than obvious that such a political enterprise is doomed to die of heart-attack within seconds from its public birth. At the same time, this concept is no longer of use and no longer used in the European project. The EU is thus trying to reduce nation to culture and to equal state with economy and law. In other terms, it aims to break the couple without sacrificing any part. Needless to say that such an attempt resembles too much a lobotomy of the social brain.
However, if we go back to present challenges (economic and political, mainly), we are somehow forced to concede that the nation-state and its highly egotistic style of functioning is no longer able to answer them in an elegant and efficient manner. Still, this new approach and this necessary social schism (between politics & economics and society & culture), must be communicated adequately and rooted in a very solid argumentative basis.
Enlargement and integration: the linguistics of globalization
A second paradox of the European identity is that it claims to be an identity of some, while aiming to be the identity of all, and thus, a non-identity. It is impossible to avoid (however Euro-optimistic one may be) the evidence that the EU’s development (by means of successive enlargements and integrations) is just as good or bad as any form of globalization. Here again, the EU pledge for an innocent globalization, able to offer us all the benefits of such a process without calling for any payback. Either motivated by naivete or political communication strategies, this type of denial is highly detrimental for the credibility of the whole project, cutting down its resources for self-criticism and self-adjustment.
When speaking of identity in the context of our contemporary world (marked by pluralisms, diversity, alternatives and relativisms) a major problem that we stumble over is that “multiple identities”, hybrid, dual identities highlight, after all, an acute present identity crisis – of whatever nature this may be (from psychological, spiritual to collective and political). This is first of all a crisis of our consciousness of belonging; it is, also, a crisis of the power that this act of belonging has on our act of defining ourselves; it is, implicitly, a crisis of our identity landmarks and the values that feed each and every act of identity affirmation o denial. What does it mean to be European at the beginning of the XXI century? If we take the official discourse as measure, to be European does not mean much more or less than to be American, i.e. democrat, free, prosperous, supporter of human rights and law obeying; the only major difference remains the geographical one, which, by virtue of being utterly external, intrinsically stays peripheral. Funnily enough, the language used to put in motion the development of the European Union highly resembles the rhetoric of the USA. After all, the EU was some time ago supposed to become the USE, wasn’t it?
European identity: but where is the Alter?
Commonsensical philosophy usually superposes the space of the real with the space of identity, and allocates the remaining projections and phantasms to the jurisdiction of the alterity. However, we and they are very similar in terms of real/imagined ratio. Moreover, identities engage in quite precarious relations with the real, while being highly significant in terms of what a person’s or group’s projections, ideals, phantasms, and aspirations are: “Every affirmation of the type “We…” should be seen rather as a partial declaration of intention than as a description of reality” (Grillo, 1980, apud. Wintle, 2005). The projection can be planned, facilitated or spontaneous, as well as all three at the same time, in different proportions.
The most surprising aspect of identities is that they have a tremendous power, even if their legitimacy is restricted to the convocation of very few criteria of membership. This power, many times surprisingly well designed for conflict and destruction (take, for example, the ideology of the Gentile race), is the intricate outcome of the projections and phantasms that are consubstantial with each and every identity formation. Most social psychology and psychoanalytical researchers (from Tajfel, the great authority in social identity, back to Freud, with his theory of group formation) claim that at the basis of social identity we have the mechanism of identification. This hypothesis does not remain consequence-less: it ultimately says that social identity is built on the reality of common traits, attitudes, behaviors or beliefs. The social dynamics of group identity formation usually calls for some “material” basis, but this is nothing more than a pretext for projection and fancying. Groups, just as individuals, cannot stay sane unless they preserve a sense of their own self; i.e. unless they do not construct and imagine themselves as identities. This is where and why the quest for the Alter begins as a perpetual counterpart for identity formation. One cannot build an identity without tracing a separation line between what is Self and what is Non-Self. Every identity is, thus, an act of segregation.
Frustrating this logic of identity formation, the European identity subscribes to the “logic” of multiculturalism (which is nothing but a precarious solution for the much too disturbing cultural relativism), and pretends to be able to forge an identity without the back-up of alterity. How can the European discourse remain both politically-correct and internally-consistent is a question that will probably take rather long before getting any satisfactory answer.
European identity: real or imagined?
Modern thought has already got past the belief that identity discourses are descriptive; almost no one with some basic knowledge of social sciences would allow themselves to see social identity as realistic narration or monographic depiction of a group’s behavior, attitudes or beliefs. However, at a commonsensical level of understanding, identities are the real essence of a person’s or a group’s being. Scientifically speaking, identities are prescriptive models of existence and recipes for identification processes that allow the individual to belong and to affiliate. But how does a group subjectively and collectively experience identity? How much of this identity is felt as being part of them, or how much is it experienced as an external firm, meant to signal the existence of an artificial social construction? I ask these questions because validity in science can sometimes turn out to be unsustainable in “real” life, i.e. at an experiential level (which comes down after all to saying that it is only a laboratory concept or theory that becomes utterly useless in terms of ecological efficiency).
European identity comes across two times the problem “real or imagined”: first, when it is asked to say how much it is rooted in reality (are there facts and behaviors consistent and continuous enough so as to allow us to place them under the same name), and, second, when it has to answer whether it is experienced as such (i.e. whether it can be socially and ecologically validated). And this brings us to a pivotal issue: is identity a matter of conscious representation, or can we reify it, objectify it and give it right of existence beyond or outside the Europeans’ social consciousness?
Instead of conclusion
Obviously enough, all the masked and explicit question marks above do not fancy a rapid resolution. We have outlined some of the most important challenges for the European identity project, with the conviction that each such enterprise should start from asking the fundamental questions about its object of interest, the first of these being, of course, the ontological one: does it exist?
If we admit identity to be an act of conscious representation and representation a system of knowledge about a real or imagined object, then we can answer a radical yes. European identity already inhabits our minds, being part and parcel of the social and public dialogue in most countries in Europe. It is, therefore, just as real as any other object in our social reality and can also be legitimately taken as an object of study.