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Copyright 2002 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
ARTICLES
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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Bo Strth
A European Identity
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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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