Repository | Book | Chapter

Views on European identity abound and propose different classifications, implicitly or explicitly estimating its future. Not all of them are primarily concerned with contemporary institutional developments as either the main agency or context of that identity (for example, the literature on identity-building by the EU or in the EU), but most are. Even those contemporary studies which are not, and that pursue more comprehensive understandings of "Europeanness' — either in time, as a history of ideas of Europe going back well beyond the post-Second World War period, or in space, considering Europe in geographical terms — cannot really be understood without any reference to that institutional context, which is also their own. As studies on Europe have flourished in parallel with the creation of the institutions that call themselves European, it makes sense sociologically to take that context into consideration. Since the Communities (now Union) dropped the adjective "economic" and started to be known simply as European, they have completed their appropriation of the term and its polysemic connotations. Therefore, although the warnings against the confusion of discourses and myths of Europe with EU institution-building are relevant (García, 1993; Rumford 2009), a clear-cut distinction would be false; it is instead important to grant some theoretical scope for conceptualizing the link between them.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230250437_2

Full citation: