Nationalism and Regionalism in the era of the making of a common European identity

Résumé du document

The year 2000 will be and have already been pivotal for the European Union. Ten new countries became full members of the Union and Turkey is on his way to the membership. But the 2005 failure to make all the countries sign the project of European constitution asks legitimate questions about the European identity. We are going to study the roles of nationalism and regionalism as far as the construction of the European identity is concerned, to see that they can act respectively as obstacle and alternative. A group of people cannot be defined as a group on really simple and basic criteria such as the lone fact of being together most of the time. Being a group means more. A social group can be called so when the individuals who compose it feel a particular feeling of belonging. In other words, if the group is basically constituted by the individuals, the group still has its proper and significant social life for itself.

Extraits

[...] After years of cooperation between the Swedish and the Danish side, no common identity was really created, and f it was the case, the identity would be more Öresund related than European related. Another interesting case to be studied is the case of the regional separatism as you can found for example in the Basque Country in Spain or in Corsica in France. We've assumed that Europe is the sum of its nations. As some elements in those regions don't feel like belonging to an existing nation, how could they feel European? [...]

[...] According to Gupta and Ferguson (1992), the proximity of the boarder changes the people's relation to the territory and therefore their relation to the others, those from the other side of the boarder. Obviously, such people are the best placed to open the way to a European identity as far as they have already learned to tolerate and to know the other. The situation of Diaspora people is somewhat different. They are by definition (Povrzanovic Frykman, 2001) uprooted and in quest of a new identity. This new identity cannot be purely the one from the country that welcomes them. [...]

[...] Nationalism and Regionalism in the era of the making of a common European identity Introduction The years 2000s will be and have already been pivotal for the European Union. Ten new countries became full members of the Union and Turkey is on his way to the membership. But the 2005 failure to make all the countries sign the project of European constitution asks legitimate questions about the European identity. We are going to study the roles of nationalism and regionalism as far as the construction of the European identity is concerned, to see that they can act respectively as obstacle and alternative A common European identity? [...]

[...] According to many academics (especially Cohen p98-99) the European nations today can bind their citizens together thanks to a common past, idealized or not. That's why nations are stills so strong. On the contrary, there exists no European myth and no European hero, so to say. The Italians can take the Roman Empire as a reference, the German have Arminius (who allegedly led the first German rebellion against the Roman troops) and Otto von Bismarck. Europe's common past is way to thin to be able to afford such strong references. [...]

[...] In those respects, we definitely cannot say that any European feeling seem to emerge and even more to prevail anywhere in Europe. On the contrary, it may be diminishing, as is the trust in the European institutions (according to the euro barometer polls). But on the other side, some European citizens do feel more and more of Europe. The middle of the 80s has seen the birth of what we call in French the Euromanifs and what could be translated by Euro demonstrations. [...]