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    The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny
    The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny
    The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny

    By Stephen Green

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    About this ebook

    What—if anything—do the twenty-eight member states of the European Union have in common? Amidst all the variety, can one even speak of a European identity? In this timely book, Stephen Green explores these questions and argues for the necessity of the European voice in the international community.

    Green points out that Europeans can readily define the differences that separate them from others around the globe, but they have yet to clearly define their own similarities across member states. He argues that Europe has something distinctive and vitally important to offer: the experience of a unique journey through centuries of exploration and conflict, errors and lessons, soul-searching and rebuilding—an evolution of universal significance.

    Coming at a time when the divisions in European culture have been laid bare by recent financial crises and calls for independence, The European Identity identifies one of the biggest challenges for all of the member states of the European Union.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHaus Publishing
    Release dateFeb 15, 2016
    ISBN9781910376294
    The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny

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      The European Identity - Stephen Green

      Notes

      What does it mean to be European?

      Europe is the western corner of the Eurasian land mass. It has natural frontiers to the north, south and west, but not to the east. It is easiest to think of its eastern borders as being broadly those of the present-day European Union.

      Are those borders permanent? Not necessarily. But Russia has a very different identity; occasionally down the centuries it has sought to convince itself and others that its outlook is essentially European, but at its heart it is the land of the steppes and forests. It has a geopolitical centre of gravity which is well to the east of Europe, and a culture moulded to this day by the Orthodox heritage which marks it out so distinctly.

      And Turkey? Even in the days of old Byzantium, relations with Catholic Europe were always fractious and sometimes violent. Then came the Ottoman centuries when Turkish military expansion was the constant nightmare of Europe. Now Europe is thoroughly secularised, and Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, sought the same for his country. Yet recent years have shown that Turkey’s secularism is much less deeply rooted. Turkey may eventually join the European Union, but the cultural challenge looks intractable to many on both sides.

      So Europe effectively includes the 28 current member states of the European Union and a few other potential member states in south-east Europe, plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland – and a number of small entities such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Channel Islands, all of which are vestiges of earlier, premodern forms of sovereignty.

      We need to ask ourselves whether this Europe has any real identity. For although the world of the 21st century is ever more global and interconnected, the importance of geopolitics has in no way declined. There are some old and some new great powers on the world stage. There are new actors, new cultural challenges and new sources of instability. Directly or indirectly, Europe will be impacted and profoundly challenged. How the Europeans respond will depend on what they have in common. What if anything – amidst all the kaleidoscopic variety – do we Europeans think we share? What is it to be a European in the modern age? Does it have any significance – geopolitically, commercially or culturally? What future does it have?

      These are questions for all of Europe, but especially for the three leading states of the EU, for each of which they are unsettling in a unique way. For France – used to seeing itself as the moral and political leader of the European project – its whole self-understanding is in play, as the centre of gravity shifts towards a reluctant Berlin. Meanwhile, Britain has for centuries regarded the continent mostly as a threat or a distraction; but it is learning that its own identity is far more fragile than it ever realised. And for Germany, which – because of its deep history – is more truly comfortable with a multi-layered identity than either of the other two, the 20th century still casts a shadow; the role of leadership which has been thrust upon it by the facts of geography and economics still does not come at all easily.

      Few people have ever thought of themselves primarily as Europeans. In the four centuries up to 1914, when Europe was the dynamic centre of the world and when Europeans fanned out over the globe to trade and conquer, they defined themselves by their religion, by their language and by their nationality (which they saw increasingly in racial – and indeed Darwinian – terms). After 1945, in the wake of the moral and physical disasters of what was in effect a second Thirty Years War at the heart of Europe, there was a new determination to achieve a robust and enduring peace. This was the vision of a small European elite, but they were responding to a widespread sense of exhaustion and disgust (which it takes a leap of imagination these days to fully comprehend). It was given effect in the embryonic structures that eventually evolved into the European Union, and blessed – initially from the sidelines – by a Britain which only belatedly, and never wholeheartedly, joined

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