Waiting for a European Identity … Reflections on the Process of Identification with Europe

Abstract

This paper questions the introduction, in the mid-1990s, of the concept of European identity for the analysis of citizens' attitudes towards European integration. It argues that this notion was imported from social psychology without appropriate theoretical adaptation to the political democratic nature of the social group that a European polity would be. As a consequence, the current notion of European identity does not contribute very much to an understanding of the long-standing national and social differences of citizens' attitude towards the EU. The paper argues that for the time being, the identification process with a work-in-progress European polity should be conceived following three principles: First, European identity refers to a democratic community, that is, a special kind of social group whose vocation is self government. Thus, the link between citizens matters as much as differentiation with the others. Second, European identity is very definitively a work in progress. Lastly, it is developing in industrial societies, characterised by growing individualism but also remaining strong national identities. Building on Tilly's concept of identity and major works on national identity, this paper suggests a concept of identification with Europe that acknowledges the complexity of competitive processes at stake in identity change.

Key Words:

• Europe
• nation
• political theory
• identity

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my French colleagues Céline Belot, Yves Deloye, Emiliano Grossman and Patrick Le Galès, as well as to the participants at the CINEFOGO conference in Prague and to the editors of this special issue for the discussion and suggestions they provided on the various drafts of the paper. A special thanks to Chantal Barry who helped revising the last version.

Notes

To put this in statistical terms, that is, to keep to the terms that are provable with Eurobarometer, the nation remains a very influential variable in the analysis of attitudes towards the European Union as well as education and social class; although, with appropriate data (that is, by comparing results from higher socio-economic class respondents with standard surveys), Liesbet Hooghe confirms the social gap (2003).

This paper is also based on comparative research that I am currently co-ordinating together with Florence Haegel (Sciences Po, Paris), Elizabeth Frazer (New College, Oxford) and André-Paul Frognier (Catholic University of Louvain) about political discussions. We conducted 24 focus groups in Paris, Brussels and Oxford (8 in each city) on the topic of Europe. The groups were composed of about four to eight participants, socially homogeneous and ideologically diverse. During the group the moderator would write the discussion on a board so that the participants can follow it. The main questions were: What does it mean to be European?, How should the power in Europe be distributed?, Who benefits from Europe? and Are we for or against the entry of Turkey into the EU? The analysis of the groups is in progress. The points in this paper – and more particularly the fact that European identity is not yet a mass-rooted phenomenon and the strong connection between national and European identifications – were very much influenced by the hundreds of hours of discussions that I attended while conducting these focus groups. For more information about this research and a look at the first results, visit http://erg.politics.ox.ac.uk/projects.asp.

This paper is in line with a series of analysis that I have been working on with André-Paul Frognier for 15 years. I shall re-visit in these pages the conceptual approach that we have been using for all these years (Duchesne & Frognier, 1994, 2002, 2008).

Frognier's and Duchesne's first analysis is part of this context. We then questioned the notion ‘Is there a European identity?’ (Duchesne & Frognier, 1994) and concluded that there wasn't.

The distinction between attitudes and identity analysis is a dramatic simplification of a wide variety of possible approaches. For a more sophisticated categorisation, see Belot (2002, 2006).

‘Do you sometimes think of yourself not only as a (nationality) citizen but also as a European citizen? Does it happen often, sometimes or never?’.

The questions used were ones that enquired into attitudes towards a possible dissolution of the EU, a general evaluation of European integration, the speed of integration and national benefit of EU membership. This set of questions remains central in attitude analysis, where it is frequently used to build indexes of support for European integration or the European Union.

Questions that were raised by researchers who continue with the analysis of rationality and integration (Eichenberg, 1999).

Another example of the importance of the identity concept from canonical social psychology, and hence its limited conceptualisation, can be found in Identity, Interests and Attitudes to European Integration (McLaren, 2006).

If their conceptual collection is convincing, on the other hand, the empirical sections that follow are far less sophisticated than Citrin and Sides (2004) or Bruter's analyses (Bruter, 2004, 2005).

And we should keep open the possibility that it's not developing at all … 

This point is also clearly made by Juan Diez Medrano in his excellent book, Framing Europe (2003).

Like Gillespie and Laffan (2006), I shall borrow a few hypotheses about how the shift to Europe may happen from the literature on nations, except that the hypotheses they refer to deal with national and European systems as a whole, whereas I focus on the way individuals think about their political communities, leaving aside the cultural dimension of European identification.

If appropriate indicators for measuring identifications with nation and Europe are available … 

The complete sentence is: ‘In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (Anderson, 1983, p. 5).

Although he refers to national political cultures, his book deals with Spain, Germany (West and East) and the UK (Diez-Medrano, 2003). Our current research project based on focus groups conducted in France, French-speaking Belgium and the UK confirms his findings.