European Identity Turmoil

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The most important reason for the unending crisis in Europe is always related in one way or the other in the issue of identity and it is not clear in which geopolitical direction Europe in its collectively as a community is heading to. In addition, illiberalism and right-wing populism have joined Eurosceptic voices that seek to “take back control” from Brussels elites who are portrayed as distant from national societies. Europe has been challenged by identity politics for quite some time now that not only repudiates liberalism but frames European cosmopolitanism as the enemy of “true” freedom. However, Europe appears to be a resilient place and has resisted these illiberal challenges. One reason for this perhaps is that fact that attempts to fix national and European identities according to a narrow and rigid set of categories or historical understandings have always ended in violence and very often in disaster. The aggression we are witnessing against Ukraine is clearly a product of such narrow-minded thinking, and it is also a disaster for Russia.

If we think that the European identity allows space for broader inclusion, how do European and national identities interact? The argument that national sentiment often needs to be distinguished from the European identity, particularly in cases where national sentiment goes hand in hand with the attempted imposition of unambiguous and singular understandings of what being a European means in terms of birth, religion, orientations etc. We could even argues as far as the progressive European identity which is the antithesis of the strident nationalism which as José Álvarez Junco (2017) has observed, is in reality a social imaginary based on a form of collective narcissism. And indeed, narcissistic self-referentiality is the notion that certain group specific ways of being or seeing the world are inherently correct and/or better than others. Moreover, nationalism becomes a problem when, exacerbated by socio-economic stress and geopolitical instability, it results in obscurantism, identity bordering and an aggravated accentuation of perceived difference between people, cultures and states.

There is no denying that political debates regarding the “essence” of European identity will not let up soon, driven as they are by delusional imaginaries of a pure Europe that many find attractive. Identities are certainly defined by certain characteristics, histories and worldviews but they also need to adapt, lest they petrify and decay, as such their definition needs to be open-ended. If both European and national identity are understood to be organic, primordial and permanent rather than constantly created, we will find that our own identities are destiny rather than choice. Equating all of this to an “authentic” European identity would reduce it to a set of simplistic tropes of geographical rootedness, folkloristic kitsch and falsified histories.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has also suddenly increased the perceived threat posed by a potential invasion of Russia for EU member states. Whether such outside threats lead to a stronger common identity of a group, and more cooperation, has been a crucial question for a long time.

Anecdotally, the foundation of many nations was fostered by an outside threat. Think about the American War of Independence against the British Empire or the foundation of a united Germany after a war against France. The EU itself and its predecessors were developed at least partly as a response to the military threat posed by the Soviet Union, and the Cold War is supposed to have had a unifying effect (Bordalo et al. 2021). It is therefore clear that the EU identity is undergoing some serious threats and Europe as a whole needs to act while ignoring on the fact that each state holds a particular real identity card and go to preserve strong unit that they had been building for years. This beyond doubt has to be proven in Ukraine as well as support Finland on others to protect their own state ID cards and their future generations from what may be yet to come.

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