European Journal of Social Theory 5(4): 387401

Copyright 2002 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

ARTICLES

A European Identity To the Historical Limits of a Concept

Bo Strth
E U RO PE A N U N I V E R S I T Y I N S T I T U T E , F LO R E N C E , I TA LY

Abstract The history of a European identity is the history of a concept and a discourse. A European identity is an abstraction and a ction without essential proportions. Identity as a ction does not undermine but rather helps to explain the power that the concept exercises. The concept since its introduction on the political agenda in 1973 has been highly ideologically loaded and in that capacity has been contested. There has been a high degree of agreement on the concept as such, but deep disagreement on its more precise content and meaning. The concept of a European identity is an idea expressing contrived notions of unity rather than an identity in the proper sense of the word and even takes on the proportion of an ideology. In this sense the concept is inscribed in a long history of philosophical and political reection on the concept of Europe. On these grounds the analytical use of identity in social sciences can be questioned. Key words s Europe s heritage s history s identity s the Other

Identity is a problematic and uid concept. If taken literally, it means equal, identical. It is a concept used to construct community and feelings of cohesion and holism, a concept to give the impression that all individuals are equal in the imagined community. The invocation of community, cohesion and holism, yes, of identity, emerges exactly in situations where there is a lack of such feeling. Identity becomes a problem when there is no identity, particularly in situations of crisis and turbulence, when established ties of social cohesion are eroding or breaking down. Identity was a concept in ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics, which did not play any important role in social sciences until the end of the nineteenth century when it was incorporated in the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis. Only in the 1970s and the 1980s did the concept invade the core of the social and historical sciences (Niethammer, 2000).

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The argument in this article is that the history of a European identity is the history of a concept and a discourse. A European identity is an abstraction and a ction without essential proportions. Identity as a ction does not undermine but rather helps to explain the power that the concept exercises. The concept, since its introduction on the political agenda in 1973, has been highly ideologically loaded and in that capacity has been contested. There has been a high degree of agreement on the concept as such, but deep disagreement on its more precise content and meaning. The concept of a European identity is an idea expressing contrived notions of unity rather than an identity in the proper sense of the word and even takes on the proportion of an ideology (Delanty, 1995). In this sense the concept is inscribed in a long history of philosophical and political reection on the concept of Europe. On these grounds the analytical use of identity in social sciences can be questioned (cf. Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). With this point of departure, an important question becomes when and how more precisely the idea of a European identity emerged. What is the history of the concept of a European identity? And how is the concept connected to the historically developed images of Europe and to the institution building in the European integration process that has been going on since the 1950s? Intensied European integration has gone hand in hand with a growing academic and political search for the roots of Europeanness in history, religion, science and culture (Goddard et al., 1994). The meanings of Europe are a discourse of power on how to dene and classify Europe, on the frontiers of Europe, and on similarities and differences. The idea of Europe became, historically and sociologically, a political idea and mobilizing metaphor at the end of the twentieth century, particularly in the wake of 1989. In many versions the emphasis is on Europe as a distinctive cultural entity united by shared values, culture and identity. References are made to Europes heritage of classical GraecoRoman civilization, Christianity, and the ideas of the Enlightenment, Science, Reason, Progress and Democracy as the core elements of this claimed European legacy. There are subtexts of racial and cultural chauvinism, particularly when confronted with Islam. Europe acquires distinction and salience when pitted against the Other. When the differences within Europe are emphasized, it is often in the form of unity in diversity. Religious differences (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christianity) and linguistic differences (Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages) are seen as correlated, (CatholicRomance, Protestant Germanic, OrthodoxSlavic), and essentially are underlying the major ethnic cleavages and conicts, historically and contemporary, in Europe. The European identity was designed and decided at the Copenhagen EC summit in December 1973 (European Commission, 1973). The framework of the meeting was a global order in unexpected crisis. The Bretton Woods Agreement after the Second World War, based on the dollar, had collapsed in 1971 after years of growing tension between the West European states and their American ally. The Vietnam War underpinned the tension and overstrained the dollar. Moreover, frictions had grown considerably in the machinery of economic growth and full employment, mass consumption and mass production mutually reinforcing one

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another, based on the long post-war reconstruction boom, and the investments, which fed the boom. Finally, in the autumn of 1973, the dramatic oil price increase took the Western world by surprise producing a mood of crisis. The idea of European identity was based on the principle of the unity of the Nine, on their responsibility towards the rest of the world, and on the dynamic nature of the European construction. The meaning of responsibility towards the rest of the world was expressed in a hierarchical way. First, it meant responsibility towards the other nations of Europe with whom friendly relations and cooperation already existed. Second, it meant responsibility towards the countries of the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle East. Third, it referred to relations with the USA, based on the restricted foundations of equality and the spirit of friendship. Next in the hierarchy was the narrow co-operation and constructive dialogue with Japan and Canada. Then came dtente towards the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. At the bottom of the list came China, Latin America and, nally, a reference was made to the importance of the struggle against underdevelopment in general (Passerini, 1998). The fact that the Middle East was ranked before the USA in this hierarchical otherization demonstrates the impact of the dollar collapse and the oil price shock. The concept of European identity, in the 1970s, expanded from its dollar and oil price context as an instrument to consolidate Europes place in the international order. It spread in the framework of attempts to establish a European tripartite order of corporatist bargaining to replace the collapsing national arrangements in this respect. In 1977 the MacDougall Report to the European Commission suggested a European Keynesian strategy to bridge the economic crisis and the collapse of key industries, a kind of Euro-corporatist order. A serious attempt was made in 19778 to translate the national tripartite bargaining structures, which had functioned so well during the era of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, to a European level in a politics of de-industrialization in industries like shipbuilding and steel. The idea of a European identity underpinned these efforts. However, in the bargaining about capacity reduction and layoffs of labour the solidarity ties among employers, trade unions and governments followed national lines rather than transnational labour and capital solidarity (Strth, 1987). The proposals in the MacDougall Report were never realized. In the emerging neo-liberal conceptual framework, which in the 1980s ever more replaced national or European corporatist conceptualization, the region was seen as a remedy for weak economic performance in a semantic eld where network, market, nearness and exibility were other key terms. Compensation for the eroding political legitimacy at the national level and the collapse of the political economy was simultaneously sought at the regional and European levels. Identity became the concept in this search for compensation. Success stories about high-performing regions based on nearness and trust in networks were contrasted with negative stories of the old and large-scale industrial districts (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Medick and Schlumbohm, 1978; Hirst and Zeitlin, 1989; Strth, 2000b).

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Parallel to this development, the rhetoric about a European identity became more intense in the change of content and point of reference in the 1980s, after the failure to establish a European tripartite order. How the connection between the change of economic rhetoric, on the one hand, and the idea of a European identity, on the other, was made more precisely is not clear. The European identity, which in the early 1970s was designed for another role, rst, to give the European Community new condence and to dene a new role for the EC in the international order, then to support the Euro-corporatist arrangements, was transformed to support the connection of the local/regional small-scale level with the large-scale European framework, where the nation in some sense was bypassed. Europe and the region were thus not only two alternatives separated from each other, but they were also connected through the identity concept when Europoliticans spent resource packages in emerging regions all over the Europe in order to strengthen European cohesion (identity). And at the same time as they promoted feelings of regional identities, they promoted the emergence of a European identity, when regional and local politicians, employers, trade unions and other voluntary associations joined in lobbying for money from Brussels. The effects on European feelings of belonging were unintended rather than intentional in the wake of EEC politics to improve economic structural cohesion within the polity. In the same vein also the single market discourse worked in the 1980s and the Maastricht Treaty, union and euro language worked in the 1990s. With the more active development of European symbols like the ag, the anthem, the driving licences, etc., connected to the idea of a European citizenship, one can talk about a more intentional European identity politics guided by the Commission since the 1980s and critically analysed by Cris Shore (Shore, 2000). These identity politics can be seen as an attempt to speed up the implementation of what was decided in 1973 although under adjustment to a very different economic and political global situation. Solutions to the political tensions in the wake of eroding nation-state legitimacy after the collapse of the international economic order and production mode in the 1970s were approached through attempts to reconstruct lost national legitimacy through the EC and the idea of making poor regions prosperous. Regions provided with cash from Brussels were not necessarily in opposition to the nation-state but rather were dependent on its support for the cash supply. Success in this respect reinforced both the region and the nation-state as well as Europe. In the rhetoric Europe, the nation and the region are separate and provided with specic identities. However, they constitute three levels of abstraction, which in practice and in politics are entangled. The expressions of their entanglement vary between mutual support and mutual competition. Ideas of belonging are overlapping, inclusive and exclusive in complex and contradictory patterns, where it would be far too simple to put a European identity against national ones. Europe has been and is both an active element of national, and of other identitications and, at the same time, something different and separate from national and other identications. Europe is both We and the Other.

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Europe can reinforce or weaken national and other identications depending on the historical situation and the historical heritage. Identities and interests, which are of the same category as identity, and termed national interest are constructed in the intersection between selfimages and images of the Other. What has the image of Europe in various parts of Europe represented in this respect? To what extent has Europe been an element of self-images and to what extent has it been understood as an element of the Other? In Britain and in countries such as Sweden and Norway, for instance, Europe is referred to as the Continent, i.e. as belonging to the Others. As just suggested, as a rule, the answer to these questions is hardly a mutually exclusive but rather an overlapping issue. Europe has been an element of both national self-understanding, the nation as a part of Europe, and of something different outside the nation. How this mix has varied in Europe geographically and historically since the Second World War and earlier is a key question to be elaborated further. Another point of departure in such an undertaking is that national views on Europe vary not only between nations but also within nations (Malmborg and Strth, 2002). There is not one but several contested views of Europe in the various nations and at various times, although one specic discourse on Europe might be predominating in a country or across countries at a certain point of time. The different attitudes to Europe in general and to the European integration project in particular are divided in the national environments along various lines such as class, gender and age. Europe and Non-Europe: the Historical Relationship Since the Middle Ages the image of a European community has been constructed by demarcation from others, e.g. the Turks or the Chinese (the yellow peril). Here ideas emerging in the nineteenth century of white superiority requiring a special responsibility in the world (the white mans burden) t in. Russia has sometimes been seen as a part of Europe and sometimes as being outside it. There are in particular three mirrors in which the idea of Europe has taken shape: the Oriental/Asian, the American and the East European. In these mirrors the Other has been seen both in terms of inferiority to Europe and in terms of a model to emulate. On rst thought Eastern Europe might look less like a model, but the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and among Communists in Western Europe for much longer, demonstrates the contrary. It is difcult to over-emphasize the importance of the monotheistic competition between Christianity and Islam beginning with the Crusades for the self-understanding of Europe. The Crusades did not curtail commercial and other contacts but built a cultural distinction between a Christian Self and a Muslim Other. This demarcation was further pronounced during the Ottoman expansion into the Balkans in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Turkish peril was propagated through new printed media as the main threat to Christianity. The

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Christian identication against the Ottoman rulers was problematic in the Balkan peninsula inside the Ottoman Empire, however, as the Ottomans had a tolerant regime with respect to religious practices. Moreover, the military and economic power struggle in the Levant, between the Habsburgs, France, Spain and the Italian city-states, penetrated the ChristianIslamic/Ottoman divide and went in many respects beyond the religious dichotomy. Economic interaction and military conicts between Ottoman rulers and European powers in the Mediterranean and in the Balkans were in principle no different from the corresponding interactions within Europe, although they were complicated by the discourse on the Turkish peril. In constantly shifting constellations some European powers made pacts with the Ottoman rulers while others made war. In this way the constructed religious/ethnic borderline between Europe and the Turkish Other became a uid European line of contention (Hfert, 2001). The long-term implication of the Islamic expansion was, irrespective of this porous and uid order of pacts and wars, nevertheless that Europe took on the meaning of being synonymous with Christianity, dened as a community with a distinct territory, a res publica christiana. Christianity represented Europe, Europe was called Christianity. Christianity substituted Europe as a concept for unication. The substitution of Europe with Christianity as a concept for unication and concord was undermined from within through religious wars. When the connection between Christianity and unity was destroyed by the Thirty Years War, Europe took on new meaning in the emerging Enlightenment discourse and became a lodestar for unity. The term Europe came to full the need for a more neutral designation of the common whole. As Denis Hay put it: In the course of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries Christendom slowly entered the limbo of archaic words and Europe emerged for its peoples as the unchallenged symbol of the largest human loyalty (1968: 116). Norman Davies notes that in the early phase of the Enlightenment, it became an embarrassment for the divided community of nations to be reminded of their common Christian identity; and Europe lled the need for a designation with more neutral connotations (1996: 7). With the Enlightenment philosophy the distinction between Christianity and Islam was in a certain sense relativized because religion lost its absolute position. One of the discursive elds in the Oriental image was that dened by the opposition of Enlightenment and despotism, however, not every opposition represented a negative xenostereotype of the Orient in European eyes. The translation of A Thousand and One Nights into French at the beginning of the eighteenth century reinforced the image of an exotic Orient. The recurring enthusiasm for China and India can be seen as either a direct or an indirect criticism which enriched and problematized the European image of itself as a civilizing project. The discursive antinomy among elements of the European view of the Orient was not so much a competition between different schools of thought, as something which characterized individual thinkers. Some, for example, regarded Muhammed as an enlightened philosopher, others as a cheat, while Voltaire admired Muslim tolerance, which he contrasted to Christian intolerance (Strth, 2000a).

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Although the demarcation between an enlightened Christianity and a fanatic Islam was a frequent component of the European discourse, there was at the same time, not only Voltaires opposite view but also the merger of Enlightenment and despotism into one Denkgur which was applied to both Europe and the East. For Europe, the notion of enlightened absolutism was an expression of this merger (Strth, 2000a). These developments are well documented in Edward Saids Orientalism (1978; cf. Piterberg, 2000). Asia and the idea of the Orient were thus one of the mirrors in which a European self-image emerged in a long historical process. It was a mirror in which one could discern many different and competing images, and it was also a mirror where one saw what one wanted to see. The Enlightenment project constructed another divide. Eastern Europe emerged as a concept of demarcation. As Enlightenment philosophers established Western Europe as the seat of civilization, so too they invented an Eastern Europe as its complementary other half. Eastern Europe exhibited a condition of backwardness on a relative scale of development; however, the philosophers did not bestow on Eastern Europe the radical otherness ascribed to non-European barbarians (Bugge, 1999; den Boer, 1995). The opposition between civilization and barbarism assigned Eastern Europe to an ambiguous space. Since Tacitus, the old division of Europe had been between the North and the South, between the Empire and the Barbarians. It was Voltaire who led the way when Enlightenment philosophers shifted their gaze to the contrasts and demarcations between east and west in their construction of Us and the Other. A conceptual reorientation of the European map occurred when the old lands of barbarism and backwardness in the North were displaced to the East (Wolff, 1994). The idea of Eastern Europe was entangled with the evolving Orientalism, for while philosophical geography casually excluded Eastern Europe from Europe, implicitly shifting it into Asia, scientic cartography seemed to contradict such a construction. There was room for ambiguity. The construction of Eastern Europe was a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion: Europe, but, at the same time, not Europe. Our view of Peter the Great is a case in point: enlightened modernizer, prepared to learn from the West, but locked in a more or less hopeless struggle with a barbarian environment. Philosophical geography was a free-spirited activity. It was, as Larry Wolff has demonstrated, not actually necessary to travel to Eastern Europe in order to participate in its intellectual discovery. Some did leave their Paris salons. Madame Geoffrin visited the King of Poland in 1766, and Diderot paid his respects to Catherine the Great in St Petersburg in 1773. Yet no one wrote more authoritatively about Russia than Voltaire, who never travelled west of Berlin, and no one was more creative on behalf of Poland than Rousseau, who never went east of Switzerland. Prague is north of Vienna and slightly to the west, but when Mozart travelled from Vienna to the Bohemian capital it was, nevertheless, a voyage to the East (Wolff, 1994). The establishment of a cordon sanitaire after the First World War is another illustration of the ambiguity in the division between East and West. In the framework of Woodrow Wilsons naive belief in the connection between nationalism

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and democracy, a number of Slavic states from Yugoslavia in the south to Estonia in the north (Estonia does not belong to the Slavic-speaking nations) were given internationally guaranteed autonomy. Finland north of Estonia gained autonomy in 1917 in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution after a bloody civil war, and got its international guarantee somewhat differently, but can be seen as the extension of the cordon sanitaire. As a democratic no mans land between Germany and Russia, the new countries were assigned the role of preventing a new war between these two powers. During the First World War, the Germans were referred to in the West as the Huns, that is, belonging to the barbarian Eastern camp. After punishment in the form of severe war indemnities and political restrictions, Germany was then allowed to cross the borderline and re-enter the Western (democratic) fold. Already, four years prior to this cordon sanitaire being mapped out in Versailles, Friedrich Naumann had published his book Mitteleuropa, which described a domain marked out for German economic and cultural hegemony. This idea, which can be traced back to the nineteenth century, was later on incorporated into the Nazi Lebensraum ideology, in which Mitteleuropa, Osteuropa and Ostraum formed overlapping and mutually supplementary key concepts, and in which the cordon sanitaire was transformed into a German sphere of interest. As we know, the idea of inserting a democratic corridor to prevent a new barbarian eruption died in the 1930s. However, the idea of Mitteleuropa survived and surfaced again in the 1980s (Brechtefeld, 1996). In the political discourse Eastern Europe seems to be perceived as something integral due to its common socialist past and present transitional contradictions. In the Cold War dichotomic thinking (WestEast, capitalismplanned economy, liberalismsocialism, democracytotalitarianism), the image of Eastern Europe was portrayed in mainly negative terms. In such mental dichotomies the frontiers between West and East coincided with political ones. What do such dichotomies represent 1015 years after the end of the Cold War? Beyond the ideological packaging there is a huge territory with rich cultures, different historical experiences and a variety of everyday life. Each East European country has followed its own cultural and historical development, and the problem of national and cultural identication is not new but arose long ago. Correspondingly, there exists a variety of modes of interpretation of Europe, and the connection between Europe and the nation and other identity categories, in the East European countries, developed by philosophers, historians, linguists, artists and other intellectuals. All those cultures should perhaps be understood less in terms of being impoverished by political regimes in the past and economic crisis at present, and more as struggling to recapture again a sense of their own community and reconsidering the past in order to be able to move ahead. It is important to discuss the historical construction of an East European borderline not only from a West European point of departure but also from within the eastern side of the borderline. What has Europe meant there? An element of We or of the Other? It is important to locate the ongoing reconguration of the images of Europe and the nation, and their religious/secular/cultural components in

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macro-historical developments of modern state formation, nation-building, religious change, and the embedded forms of nationalism, along the European EastWest axis. In particular it is important in this historical setting to discern in what directions the EastWest divide has been evolving since 1989. The discourse on Eastern Europe does it belong to the real Europe or not as well as the discourse on America emerged with the Enlightenment. The discourse on the Orient began in the Middle Ages as a demarcation between the Christian and the Muslim spheres. The mirrors have provided xenostereotypes, stereotypes of the Other, which probably have said more about the European spectators than about those in the aims of their gazes. The stereotypes have then been incorporated in the self-understandings and have provoked the emergence of autostereotypes, in complex processes of identity and interest formation and transformation. Such xeno- and auto-stereotypes are, furthermore, not unanimously agreed on but contested. A case in point is the emergence of Japan as a model in a Western Europe struck by identity crisis and general disorientation in the 1970s. The Japanese model was a miracle of economic growth, peaceful industrial relations, and a Confucian labour ethic according to some inuential observers, and a hierarchical authoritarian and union-busting political order according to others. In the debate on Japan as a remedy to the European sickness one saw and projected the expectations one wanted to. The projections were made from ones own normative and political positions. This is how images of the Other work. What has this historical heritage and the three mirrors represented during the second half of the twentieth century, when the West European integration project took shape in the framework of the Cold War, de-colonization and the emergence of the Third World (Tngerstad, 2000)? What was the image of Eastern Europe west of the Iron Curtain? What did Adenauers image of an Atlantic Europe (including the USA) and de Gaulles image of a Europe between the Atlantic and Urals (excluding Great Britain and the USA but including parts of the Soviet Union) mean? What did Europe during the Cold War and the emergence of the European Community represent in countries which today are referred to as Central Europe? What happened to the pre-war German idea of a Mitteleuropa? How did it survive and how was it transformed after the bankruptcy of the Nazi regime? To what extent were the USA and the East European countries parts of Europe and the ideas of a European civilization during the Cold War? Was the USA in and Eastern Europe out, for instance? What has the end of the Cold War meant in respect of the demarcation of Europe? Can the term Central Europe today be seen as an instrument of demarcation from Russia after 1989? What have the events in 1989 meant for the image of Europe? There are many questions. They are all important for the problem of a European identity. One of the most inuential thinkers on the relationships between xeno- and autostereotypes is Edward Said, already referred to above. The Others often incorporate, even appropriate, in their own self-identication the xenostereotypes imposed upon them. This is the thrust of his thesis on the role of Orientalism not only as an instrument of Western understanding of the Orient but also as

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something incorporated in the Oriental self-understanding. Images of Europe and images of Others are intersected and reinforce one another. A key question for further research is to what extent, in what forms and with what content nonEuropean cultures are dened by the European culture. To what extent do non-European cultures dene themselves in terms of what they discern as European particularities? And, vice versa, to what extent does Europe dene itself in terms of what is seen as particularities of other cultures, Islam, for instance? It is interesting to have my historical outline of Europe seen from within by a European related to, even confronted with, corresponding outlines of other cultures from within where Europe is seen from the outside. Such comparisons/confrontations, with a point of departure in Shmuel Eisenstadts and others concept of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 1992), would promote intercultural dialogue as opposed to a clash of civilizations (Strth, 2002). However, the once innovative concept of multiple modernities can be taken one step further, entangled modernities has recently been suggested to express that various cultures do not only exist in parallel but that they are interwoven (Fuchs et al., forthcoming). The problem following from the fact that Europe does not exist without non-Europe and that non-Europe does not exist without Europe, is in other words how to make it the starting point for bridge-building not for demarcation. The practical implication of this way to formulate the problem is that earlier statically dened concepts of strictly separated and self-entrenched civilizations (Europe, the West, the Orient, Islam) should be superseded by more dynamic understandings of the potent meaning-producing processes that construct such entities. Symbolic and geopolitical boundaries between them must be reconsidered and seen as historically and discursively shaped rather than naturally given. Doing so would contribute to more transparent and less norm-laden interpretations and applications of concepts like civilization and modernity. This scenario would focus on the continuous and innite processes of drawing and altering cultural and civilization boundaries, where, be it in terms of violent clash or peaceful competition, different civilizations emerge in historical processes through dense transcultural intersections. The historical mutual formation of Europe and the Islamic Middle East as units of civilization can be understood in this view. The impact of Islam on the construction of Europe and the inverse cannot be overestimated. It impinged on the building of religious and modern discourses and institutions in both Europe and the Middle East (Hfert and Salvatore, 2000). In such a research agenda and political programme there is a need for a European responsibility of a different kind than the Enlightenment civilization mission. In the light of this new responsibility the concept of a European identity is problematic since it conjures up images of a European unity and a ction of peace and concord as well as strength and power. The concept connotes a political utopian projection rather than a political pragmatic project. What currently could be more pressing than to acquaint ourselves with the impact of Islam in the construction of Europe, and its inverse, the many ways it impinged on the building of religious and modern discourses and institutions in

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both Europe and the Middle East? And, in the same vein, the role of Jews and Judaism in a long historical perspective of entanglement, involving both integration and disintegration. The conclusion of this historical outline is that a concept like Europe is constructed in processes of contention and bargaining. The images of Europe do not exist as a natural phenomenon but are discursively shaped. Central to our identications are images of others. The idea of, for instance, a European identity necessarily contains a demarcation from the non-European. This is inherent to all distinctions, they are both inclusive and exclusive. Europe can only be realized in the mirror of Others. These projections probably say more about their producers than about the targets they construct. So if Europe does not exist without non-Europe, and non-Europe does not exist without Europe, the great challenge is how to make this the starting point for bridge-building, not for demarcation. Symbolic and geopolitical boundaries must be urgently reconsidered, and seen as historically and discursively shaped. An Active Europe but in a New Sense What images of Europe and of the Other, in particular the Orient, would transgress established images of demarcated civilizational camps and promote intercultural dialogue? How can new preconditions for intercultural dialogue be established? A tentative rst answer to this question would go in the direction of a more active Europe. Not active in the old sense of propagating one specic European or Western development standard as the gauge for the rest of the world, but a new active Europe as a mediator and a bridge-builder in a global world. The Enlightenment quest for improvement and mastery, with a fundamentalist and totalizing core, would in this new activism scenario be transformed into a communications specialism, based on a readiness to listen to other views and promote dialogue among them. Slogans like cultural diversity and a common heritage or unity in diversity would expand from terms used in a European self-reection to take on global dimensions. In the long run the intercultural dialogue should rather become a transcultural dialogue transgressing established boundaries. This active Europe would be an alternative to a military active Europe. Towards a New Conceptualization of Europe In the historical framework and future scenario as outlined here the concept of a European identity is of limited value. Like the classication of human beings according to ethnicity and race, it has reached its limits. It should be seen as a historical concept which played a crucial role during a difcult phase of European integration between the 1970s and the 1990s. The twenty-rst century requires

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a new conceptual topography less Euro-centred and narcissistic and more global although in another sense than the globalization rhetoric which is nothing but a narrative on Americanization and only repeats the old European version of the white mans burden and civilization mission. In the development of new semantic elds the historically constructed divides through the Baltic and the Mediterranean must be transgressed. I am not suggesting the construction of a new divide through the Atlantic, but more critical distance emphasizing differences between Europe, in a new mediating role, and the USA is urgent. Not least the conceptualization in social theories after the collapse of Marxist theory is almost hegemonically American. The debates between libertarians and communitarians, the neo-liberal rhetoric, with a unilateral focus on the market concept, and the arguments for rational choice and methodological individualism, are all much more inscribed in a specic American history than in European ones. The same goes for the debate on human rights, democracy and ethnicity and for theories of modernity and development. They have nevertheless imposed themselves also as the point of departure, given more or less by nature, for the European theoretical reection on society. On this point concepts must be developed, which much more reect specic European historical experiences in all their variety. Max Weber, for instance, with his intellectual capacity to see Germany and Europe in a context of global cultures, could be a point of departure in such a theoretical reconstruction. Another point of departure could be that part of the Enlightenment heritage, which emphasizes qualities like tolerance and intellectual openness for dissident opinions. An urgent task in a European reconceptualization would be to re-integrate the individual in a social context. Here the concept of a European social responsibility could ll a dangerous gap between a growing nationalism in the wake of nation-state legitimacy decits, and the market-oriented emphasis on the individual deprived of social connections, as Peter Wagner (2000) has argued. Other important elements in a reconceptualization would be to see culture not as an entity with cohesion and xed borders, but, as Gerard Delanty and others have argued, as a oppy concept, describing something in a ux with no clear borders and with internal opposition and contradictions, discursively shaped in contentious social bargaining processes (Delanty, 1995; 1999). It is important not to essentialize Europe but to emphasize the openness of the concept much more than European identity does. In the same vein Gerold Gerber (2000) analyses Malta. His point of departure is that the EU is a paradoxical project. On the one hand, a European identity is supposed to overcome nationalisms and to ensure solidarity among the members; on the other, as in any construction of collective identity, a denition of the Other(s) is required. The inclusion of European insiders implies the exclusion, by whatever criteria, of non-European or not-yet-European outsiders. Thus, humanistic ideals such as equality, freedom and pluralism have come into conict with the need to exclude. All this has been seen and discussed, of course, and a solution does not seem to be in sight. However, Gerber emphasizes the need to accept ambivalences and paradoxes as a fundamental condition of social

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life, rather than being a nuisance to be ordered away. In doing so he refers to Max Weber and Zygmunt Bauman (1991), and he takes note of Neil Smelsers (1998) defence of ambivalence against rational choice. His case study of Malta suggests that politicians and intellectuals, far from being avant-garde, may actually be behind actors in everyday life, when it comes to coping with paradox. While political and economic exigencies are likely to force Maltese ofcials into a choice between Europe and the Arab world, Maltese people may happily embrace the option of being both European and non-European in daily life. As long as the social sciences comply with intellectual and political efforts to construct coherence and order by classifying the social world into categories, they will face the challenges of logocentrism. Yet, a critique of Western metaphysics should not mean the end of science and reason altogether. With the point of departure in his inquiry of Malta Gerber proposes to develop a social science, which takes ordinary actors that is all of us and their practical solutions to ux and paradox more seriously. Politicians, intellectuals and scientists may be inspired by such expertise in how to deal with ambivalence without being afraid. Self-images and images of the Other are not static entities, but are elements in a continuous process. Anja Hnsch (2000) demonstrates this in a study of Arab emigrants encounter with Europe. During emigration, the encounter with the Other leads to both a reection on the self-image and a reection on the previous image of the Other. These types of reection start all over again with the return of the emigrants to their home country, where the culture of origin is confronted after the experiences of Europe have left their traces on the emigrants. Emigration functions as a catalyst for the creation and for the questioning of images and selfimages. Situations of emigration can be described in terms of liminality or rites de passage (Turner, 1987; van Gennep, 1981). Separation is followed by margin/limen and incorporation. The migrant is in a situation of betwixt and between, in a liminal or transitional stage between cultures and countries. This situation leads to a questioning of both culture of origin and the new culture, which is encountered. Given the great number of immigrants in Europe it seems reasonable to argue that they should be incorporated in concepts expressing community and belonging. European identity is no doubt problematic in this respect. The liminal position does not only refer to migrants, however. Arpd Szakolczai (1998), elaborating on Foucault, has argued that modern Western culture is a continuous liminality, a moment of transition lasting for centuries and rooted in the collapse of the Middle Ages. The transient becomes a permanent state. Thus the migrant situation brings with it a double risk of getting lost, namely the risk of falling inbetween two cultures and the risk of falling into the abysses of modernity where anti-structure and uprootedness become part of everyday life. All these examples indicate the direction in which a new conceptualization of culture and feelings of belonging could be elaborated. Ambivalence, transition and being more historically informed are some key elements. The concept of European identity has taken on a career in the direction of essentialism, and does not mediate these elements very well.

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References
Bauman, Zygmunt (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brechtefeld, Jrg (1996) Mitteleuropa and German Politics: 1848 to the Present. London: Macmillan. Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick (2000) Beyond Identity, Theory & Society 29(1): 147. Bugge, P. (1999) Central Europe: A Tool for Historians or a Political Concept?, European Review of History 6(1): 1535. Davies, Norman (1996) Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delanty, Gerard (1995) Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. London: Macmillan. (1999) Social Integration and Europeanization, Yearbook of European Studies 12: 22138. Den Boer, P. (1995) Europe to 1914: The Making of an Idea, in Kevin Wilson and J. van der Dussen (eds) The History of the Idea of Europe. London: Routledge. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1992) A Reappraisal of Theories of Social Change and Modernization, in H. Haferkamp and N.J. Smelser (eds) Social Change and Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press. European Commission (1973) Declaration on European Identity, in General Report of the European Commission. Brussels: European Commission. Fuchs, Martin, Luig, Ute and Randeria, Shalini (forthcoming) Introduction, European Journal of Social Theory. Gerber, Gerold (2000) Doing Christianity and Europe: An Inquiry into Memory, Boundary and Truth Practices in Malta, in Bo Strth (ed.) Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Goddard, Victoria A., Llobern, Josep R. and Shore, Cris, eds (1994) The Anthropology of Europe: Identication and Boundaries in Conict. Oxford: Berg. Hnsch, Anja (2000) Emigration and Modernity: On the Twofold Liminality in Arab and Franco-Arab Literature, in Almut Hfert and Armando Salvatore (eds) Between Europe and Islam: Shaping Modernity in a Transcultural Space. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Hay, Denis (1968) Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hirst, Paul and Zeitlin, Jonathan, eds (1989) Reversing Industrial Decline? Oxford: Berg. Hfert, Almut (2001) Wissen und Trkengefahr. Die Formierung des ethnograschen Wissenskorpus ber die Osmanen in Europa (15.16. Jahrhundert). PhD thesis, European University Institute, Florence. and Salvatore, Armando, eds (2000) Between Europe and Islam: Shaping Modernity in a Transcultural Space. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. af Malmborg, Mikael and Strth, Bo, eds (2002) The Meaning of Europe: Variety and Contention within and among Nations. Oxford: Berg. Medick, Hans and Schlumbohm, Jrgen, eds (1978) Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung: Gewerbliche Warenproduktionen auf dem Land in der Formationsperiode des Kapitalismus. Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. English translation 1981: Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niethammer, Lutz (2000) A European Identity?, in Bo Strth, ed. Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Passerini, Luisa, ed. (1998) Identit culturale Europea: Idee, sentimenti, relazioni. Florence: La Nuova Italia.

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Piore, M.J. and Sabel, Charles F. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books. Piterberg, Gabriel (2000) Orientalist Discourse and Nationalist Historical Narratives in the Middle East: Egypts Ottoman Past, in Almut Hfert and Armando Salvatore (eds) Between Europe and Islam: Shaping Modernity in a Transcultural Space. Brussels: PIEPeter Lang. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge. Shore, Cris (2000) Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London and New York: Routledge. Smelser, N.J. (1998) The Rational and the Ambivalent in the Social Sciences, in American Sociological Review 63: 115. Strth, Bo (1987) The Politics of De-industrialisation. London: Croom Helm. (2000a) Introduction: Europe as a Discourse and Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation to the Other, in Bo Strth (ed.) Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. (2000b) The Concept of Work in the Construction of Community, in Bo Strth (ed.) After Full Employment: European Discourses on Work and Flexibility. Brussels: PIEPeter Lang. (2002) Images of Europe in the World, http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/ ajm/dialogue/links_en.html Szakolczai, Arpd (1998) Reexive Historical Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 20927. Tngerstad, Erik (2000) The Third World as an Element in the Collective Construction of a Post-Colonial European Identity, in Bo Strth (ed.) Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Turner, Victor ([1967]1987) The Forest of Symbols. New York: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, A. ([1909]1981) Les rites de passage. tudes systmatique des rites. Paris: Editions A. & J. Picard. Wagner, Peter (2000) The Exit from Organised Modernity: Flexibility in Social Thought and in Historical Perspective, in Bo Strth (ed.) After Full Employment: European Discourses on Work and Flexibility. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Wolff, Larry (1994) Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
s Bo Strth is Professor of Contemporary History at the European University Institute in Florence. He has published widely in the eld of modernization and democratization processes in Western Europe in a comparative context with a focus on the complexity and the contradictions in concepts such as modernity and democracy. Address: Contemporary History Chair, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre, via dei Roccettini 9, IT-500 16 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy. [email: bo.strath@iue.it]

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