CHAPTER
I
Introduction:
National Versus
Supranational Identity in Europe
European integration will require a transformation of the way the
average European thinks and acts.
Charles Pentland
A remarkable story is unfolding in Europe. It is a story well worth telling not only for the political and economic change that is taking place of an unprecedented scope and type, and which goes against the grain of so much history in Europe: who could have imagined a generation ago, for example, that Europeans would willingly give up their currencies? It is also remarkable for the comparatively slower, and thus more imperceptible, change that is happening in how Europeans feel about their individual nations and how they relate to them.
But
it is also a story that is often not being told well because its narrative is
hard to discern. This is partly because the lenses we use to examine
international politics are too often distorted by preconceived notions of how
people view their relationship with their nation.
The on-going
construction of the European Union (EU), now accelerating into a future even
more uncertain than before, and the role of that institution as a major agent
of change on a massive scale in Europe raises fundamental questions about the
ability of people voluntarily to acquire new forms of identity with new
political institutions. That is what this book is all about.
The researchers in this book scattered around
seven different countries of Europe to carry out these studies: the United
Kingdom (England, Scotland and Northern Ireland), Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and
Sweden. We went to “the street”
to find out what Europeans of all walks of life think: into homes, garages,
businesses, farms, cafes. We went into local, national and European government
offices. Using a methodology that allowed us unprecedented access into ways of
thinking about identities and affiliations, we could reach a level of analysis
that previous survey research could rarely approach. Tapping into the extensive
opinions of more than 300 Europeans of all walks of life, it became the most
extensive effort yet at cross-cultural, subjective assessment of national and
supranational identity. The point of this unprecedented effort was to focus in
on a key theme: the impact of the process of European integration, as
manifested through the work of the European Union.
There are many who
would say that ingrained habits of Europeans, formed by distinct cultural
backgrounds, would militate against any significant change in personal
affiliation to the nation. These habits will provide a natural brake on the
speed and extent of European integration (Smith 1990, 1992, 1995; Allott 1992;
Sampson 1971, 26; Leonard 1998). Europeans may make some surface changes in
order to keep a job or have the convenience of more open borders, but they will
keep their separate languages and distinct cultures intact. Despite the
undoubted changes that the European Union has brought to the continent, they
say, nationalism is just too strong a basic force in the world.
Nationalism
supposes a strong link of the individual to the nation-state, and these
"Europessimists" can point to plenty of evidence that it is still a
force to be reckoned with today. Throughout the Cold War, with Europe between
the superpowers, it was thought that the kind of nationalism that had brought
such destruction to the continent in the first part of the 20th Century had
been tamed. Yet daily headlines from places such as the former Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia, Israel, Iraq, Northern Ireland and the Basque Country of Spain are
reminders that even into the new century we still seem to be in an age of
ethnic conflict and of extreme forms of nationalist sentiment. Studies have
shown that upwards of two-thirds of the conflicts in the world today could be
of the “identity-based” type that characterizes nationalist motivations (Regehr
1993). Einhorn et al. (1996, 2) have speculated that the collapse of the Soviet
Union, which some say meant the triumph of democracy over tyranny, actually may
only have left in place two ideologies in Europe: nationalism and the market.
Nationalism
certainly appears to remain one of the most powerful forces in contemporary
political life. In surprising places it seems to be coming in from the cold and
becoming part of the mainstream political scene (Suter 1998, 5). Across Europe,
for example, in rich countries and poor, far right-wing political parties are
gaining in strength, parties that seemingly have little in common except for a
fear of foreigners (Seward 2000, 2A).
In
France, the extreme right-wing National Front consistently scored in double
digits in national and regional elections throughout the 1990s, enough to
broker elections between the mainstream left and right. The NF broke through in
the spring 2002 presidential elections and shocked the nation when its leader
Jean Marie Le Pen beat other mainstream candidates and managed a face-off in
the finale with Jacques Chirac.
While neo-Nazi
groups and skinheads in Germany took to the streets and grabbed headlines in
recent years, more quietly far-right political parties have been gaining
electoral strength. As only one example, the German People's Union captured 13%
of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state elections in 1998. This development forced
the governing Christian Social Union in Bavaria to announce a series of
"security initiatives" (expelling foreigners guilty of serious
crimes, stepped up searches for illegal immigrants, increased spending on crime
equipment), all in a state previously known for its low crime rates. For most
of the post-war period the far right has been of little consequence in Germany,
never managing to cross more than 5% of the electorate. Yet, as Gerhard Frey,
head of the German People's Union, declared, "In France, Italy, Denmark,
everywhere the right wing is entering politics and shifting the mainstream body
politic to the right... voting right wing for young people in Germany today is
now part of their culture, like techno music and rollerblading" (Drozdiak
1998, 5).
In Germany this
political change has included increased attacks on the EU. Saxony Premier
Edmund Stoiber has declared that Germany would no longer tolerate being the
"milk cow" that nourishes its neighbors: "We are paying more
into the EU budget than all of the other members combined. That is neither fair
nor acceptable to the German people" (Drozdiak 1998, 5).
The
resolve of EU and national leaders across Europe in the face of the rise of
nationalist parties was tested by the inclusion of the extreme-right Freedom
Party in the Austrian government. Led by Jörg Haider, a charismatic politician
who in the past has made comments favorable to Hitler and pushed an
anti-immigrant stand, the Freedom Party grew from 5% in the early 1990s to 27%
of the vote in 1999 elections. On January 31, 2000, the Portuguese Prime
Minister and then-president of the European Union, António Guterres, issued an
unprecedented warning to a member state when he said that the EU would not
“promote or accept any bilateral official contacts at a political level” with a
government that included the Freedom Party (McNeil 2000, 1). Despite this
strong stand, eventually it was the EU that relented and quietly permitted
Austria to continue as a member in good standing.
It is also
worthwhile for purposes of these studies in (supra)national identity to note
Mr. Haider’s defiant reaction: “no foreigners can tell us what to do.” What
does the word “foreigner” mean now for Austrians when they are now citizens of
the European Union as well as their own country?
The
Netherlands is also facing a situation of coalition government with
anti-immigrant parties. The assassination of the extreme-right candidate Pim
Fortuyn in the weeks leading up to the 2002 elections lead to an outpouring of
support and the election of representatives of his party to the government.
Along with other relatively rich, ex-colonialist European countries, the
Netherlands is dealing with immigrant "guest workers" coming into the
country from former colonies in increasing numbers. The resulting predicament
has been posed as a stark question: "in a white European country, can
these nonwhite newcomers ever truly blend into the national identity?"
(Robinson 1998, 1). This may be especially important for a sense of national
self in Europe where nationality has long been explicitly based on shared
ethnicity—"blood ties"—unlike perhaps the U.S. which views itself as
a nation of immigrants.
Yet
strong nationalist movements that have racial undertones have appeared in the
US in recent years (Tilove 1998, 14), showing this country is not immune to the
sentiment. Nor are other countries around the world immune, no matter their
governments’ professed commitment to multiculturalism. In Australia the racially-based
One Nation Party is growing in strength (Warner 1998, 5). Israel is going
through a painful and protracted debate over immigration and the
"exact" meaning of Jewish identity, ostensibly over which religious
group is qualified to perform conversions, but with a barely-hidden subtext of
power and legitimacy and over who is a "real" Jew (Kraft 1998, A12).
Debates such as this have engendered even deeper and more far-reaching
discussions in Israel over whether it is a Jewish state or a multicultural state
(Sontag 1999, 1).
The
causes for the success of these movements may be many and varied, and may
differ in each country with the special conditions there. They may gain support
due to the perceived failure of the national government to come to grips with
social problems such as unemployment, crime, or immigration. In other places it
may be from a fear of the pace of life in general and of economic globalization
and cultural imperialism, perhaps especially from America.
But it seems that
one factor may be contributing to the process as a continent-wide phenomenon
against which nationalist may rally: the increasing presence of the European
Union in the daily lives of many people. How did this phenomenon of such
obvious non- or even anti-national import rise in the heart of Europe?
The
Emergence of the “European Idea”
Although writers, thinkers and poets from
Dante to Churchill have conceived of a continent-wide political realm of Europe
(Rougemont 1966), it was only in the last century with the formation of the
European Union that it seemed possible that this supranational entity might
actually come into existence on a voluntary basis. The last long-standing
continental political organization, the Christian Empire of the Middle Ages,
was based on feudal order of subservience and pre-modern conceptions of
religious unity more than political engagement. It is only recently with the EU
that so many citizens of Europe in this modern era been called upon to give up
voluntarily at least some of their allegiances to their own political nations.
With the formation
of the nation-state system in Europe, a gradual process over several centuries
but effectively started with the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Wars of
Religion in the 17th Century, Europeans have been drawn into an
ever-tightening web of allegiances to central authorities that reside in
capital cities of separate and distinct nations with carefully drawn borders.
These allegiances were developed and supported through extensive campaigns of
mass education in these nations that emphasized the learning of national
languages and cultures. For the most part, Europeans came to accept the idea of
singular attachments to national political institutions.
While
dreamers might have conceived of a European idea, it took powerful political
leaders such as Napoleon and Hitler, backed by military forces of overwhelming
strength, to try and
force Europeans to overcome their national
attachments, with only limited success and the tragic results of which we are
all familiar. In the destruction of the last of those attempts, World War II,
Europeans seemed to be willing to try again, only this time on a more voluntary
basis.
The forces of recovery and unity came
together following the war to found the forerunner of the EU, the European Coal
and Steel Community, Europe's "first supranational institution"
(Gillingham 1991, xi). Created as an attempt to avoid wars such as the one then just fought and to help
in economic recovery, the ECSC pooled the production by six European countries
of two key resources for building armies, coal and steel. This was a
significant departure from the way things had happened before in Europe with
its history of economic as well as political nationalism. While the ECSC itself
was not a great success (Gillingham says it "did none of the things it was
supposed to do" [p. xi]), it nonetheless had an immediate galvanizing effect on the forces for change
swirling throughout Europe in the immediate postwar period. It directly led to
the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the establishment of the European Community (EC),
the precursor to the present European Union.
European
integration has been an uneven process, proceeding on at least two different
fronts: economic and political. The economic integration that started with the
ECSC proceeded with some faltering throughout its subsequent metamorphoses
through the European Common Market to the European Economic Community, then
more simply the European Community and finally the European Union. At each step
along the way, institutional structures
were added or institutions then in place were
granted significantly more powers to oversee new functions.
With arguably the
lone exceptions of the United Nations and the newly-formed African Union, the
EU is the only supranational organization that is overtly charting a course to
lay direct claim to the sovereign rights of nations. This has important
implications for this project, for the drive to construct the EU calls for the
people of Europe to reorient their thinking about how they relate to their
national political institutions. As Pentland states, "European integration
will require a transformation of the way the average European thinks and
acts" (1973, 242). But how are Europeans to conceive of this European identity?
As we have seen, in Europe especially there
has been a coincidence of several fundamental disturbances that seem directly
related to nationalism: the upsurge of nationalist sentiment described above,
taking place in liberal democracies heretofore committed to multiculturalism;
shocking outbreaks of nationalist rhetoric and consequent ethnic cleansing in
places such as ex-Yugoslavia; often less than enthusiastic support for European
integration; and German unification in which the former East does not always
seem to feel close to its Western counterpart. These developments are raising
"almost existential questions" of what it means to be a European in
contemporary times (Chryssochoou 1996, 297).
In
light of these developments, the increased presence of the EU in the lives of
all Europeans is raising questions about whether this entity can command the
allegiance of millions of people across the continent.
Support for the EU
has at times seemed quite faltering in several of the countries in these
studies, some say because national identity is too strong to permit this
change. Europeans cannot identify with Europe as a whole, the argument goes:
they feel French or German or British, and this is simply all there is to say.
Smith has made the case that something that is a part of a "global
culture" such as the EU is fundamentally different from something that is
part of a national culture. An artefact of global culture is "affectively
neutral" (Smith 1990, 177), with little of the emotional power of national
or ethnic cultures. Elsewhere (1992, 78) Smith writes scathingly of the EU as
embodying
unacceptable historical myths...(and) a
patchwork
memoryless scientific “culture” held
together solely
by the political will and economic interest
that are
so often subject to change.
After
all, it is often argued, who would want to fight and die for the EU? Allott
(1992, 2) is typical of this stance:
All the talk about creating in the minds of the
citizens, a sense of loyalty and attachment to the EC is not worth much now,
given that the new total structure will be as obscure as the Holy Roman
Empire.... One may be called upon to die for the EC in war, but will not be
able to say quite what one is dying for.
Not only mainstream commentators but academics
from the left have raised this point. In wondering why it is that people would
make the ultimate sacrifice for an ideal of nationhood when they
"obviously" would not for the "market zones" that comprise
capitalist states, Benedict Anderson in his classic Imagined Communities
asks for example "who will willingly die for Comecon or the EEC?"
(1990, 53).
There are several
objections one could make at this line of argument. One is that it poses a
strange and hard-to-verify litmus test for comparing identities. It also
ignores the sacrifices of those in current peacekeeping duties on behalf of the
EU in Bosnia and elsewhere. But the most telling criticism is that the evidence
for this supposed dominating attachment of national identity has been skimpy. The
arguments become assertions rather than conclusions based on hard facts.
In
the debate over European unity, arguments that essentialize national identity
are heard frequently. Geert Hofstede, a Dutch academic, questions the future
stability of the EU and argues that Europeans remain "inevitably"
divided by their history: "countries have remained separated precisely
because there existed fundamental differences in thinking and feeling between
them" (Marshall 1996, 24). It is for him a question of "mental
programming."
Niels G.
Noorderhaven, director of the Institute for Research on Intercultural
Cooperation in Maastricht, warns, "... if you try to deny [cultural
differences], then the trouble really begins" (Marshall 1996, 24). Perhaps
not surprisingly, some national leaders might tend to agree. Margaret Thatcher
at a seminar of former world leaders in Colorado, in expressing apprehension at
a unified Germany in the EU, declared, "Her [Germany's] natural character
is to dominate. There's something in this I still fear" (quoted in
Marshall 1996, 24).
Some
analysts have warned of dire consequences of European unity. Invoking
Durkheim’s (1926) fear of social disintegration and Lifton’s (1979) concern for
the human need for symbols, Hazani (1999, 2) sees the EU as part of a
globalization project whose effect is to “desymbolize” human life. The result
of this deprivation of familiar symbols, he believes, would be humans “reduced
to an agony of ‘lifeless life,’ from which they attempt to extricate themselves
in a variety of ways–-most of them harmful.” Hudson (2000, 4) warns of a
borderless Europe “without the certainties of belonging [that] might as easily
produce a fractured self and intolerant and violent reactions to difference.”
In a similar vein, Sampson (1971, 26) argues that attempts to bring unity to
Europe have brought "not unity but a fragmentation verging on near-total
self-destruction."
Not all analysts
are quite as downbeat about how Europeans are faring with greater and greater
unity. Some are more or less optimistic about the prospect for citizen
support of a fully-formed EU (Bailey 1992; Miall 1996), although often
admitting that the contours of an emerging identity are hard to define.
Nevertheless, Smith
sees Europeans today "groping in some confusion toward a new type of
social order, yet are afraid to let go of the old" (1992: 56). National
cultures are the basic stuff of which new identities are being constructed in
Europe, and the process of bypassing them is seen as problematic: "established
cultures," says Smith, "are essentially antithetical to the
development of a cosmopolitan culture, which poses problems for a European
identity" (1992: 55). It is this question of the problem posed by existing
cultural forms for a new identity in Europe that the studies in this volume
seek to address.
The
convergence of all these developments provide an urgency to studies of identity
formation and change: the effect of global forces that undermine national state
authority and divide citizen loyalties, the rise of extreme right- and
left-wing groups in the heart of liberal western democracies, and the seeming
ease with which political leaders of all stripes, mainstream or not, can
manipulate and gain consent of a populace to carry out nationalist agendas.
As will be shown in
this volume of studies, in particular in Europe, the home of the nation-state
and the scene of countless nationalist-based wars, study of the subjective
attachments people have to their political institutions is of critical
importance. There is a need to explore whether those attachments are primarily
and/or exclusively to national, subnational, supranational or other (possibly
even previously unarticulated or unimagined) institutional forms. Work of this
type might even question the very idea of a dominant national identity.
While
the academic literature on the EU has come late to the entire notion of
identity change (Smith, 1991), interest in the EU as an institution and in the
larger integration movement has come together with social scientific focus on
the politics of identity (Connolly 1991; Laffan 1996) to make European identity
a "burning political issue" today (Delanty 1995, vii). As Shore
(1998, 48) puts it, questions of "European identity have come to dominate
the political agenda in Europe, questions that once were subjects of esoteric
interest."
In attempting to
answer these questions, however, the EU literature is distinctly unhelpful. The
problems we have in this regard are of at least three types, two that are
primarily methodological in nature and one that is more philosophical.
First, field data
in EU research is traditionally of a macro type, broad-based quantitative
studies which deal with hundreds and even thousands of people. These surveys
can provide much-needed information and can be very useful to understanding how
Europeans think about the EU. Indeed, the studies in this volume refer often to
the leading survey data in this field, Eurobarometer. But researchers
are only beginning to
use
more individual-level analyses, although these too are few and far between.
This new trend will be discussed in a later section on research in social
psychology.
The second problem
is that there seems to be no research on forms of attachment. The inquiry in
this case would go beyond whether French people are or are not forming
attachments to this emergent political institution, and focus more on the
particulars of those attachments, and especially on the question of how
they may be grouping together in any describable ways. In simple yes/no
questions in broad-based polls such as those of Eurobarometer, this is
too easily missed. Respondents
might for example agree that the EU is a good thing, but only under certain
circumstances. They might thus be positively inclined if the evolution towards
the EU were to be slower for example, or would include more or less attention
to certain aspects of social, economic or security policy. Polling data may
miss these nuances, and simply show general agreement or disagreement. And yet these subtle
nuances are the gist of thought, and can be critical to how citizens ultimately
express their opinion in elections. If that support does not seem deep, as the
French referendum of 1992 seemed to suggest, commentators might too easily
suppose that this is due to citizen unwillingness to try something new,
something that is not "natural" to them.
The final problem
in the debate on national versus supranational identities is that the national
form is usually seen as the norm and a European identity is measured against
it. Commentators assume a weakness of a European identity because they assume
it should have the same basic characteristics as a national counterpart. Thus,
surveys such as Eurobarometer typically ask respondents if they feel
more national or European oriented. But the differences between the two forms
of identity cannot be lightly
dismissed. A European identity, for example, cannot be based on any one
language, as most national identities are. A European identity is also not
based on any clear borders, a capital, or a pre-existing state with long-held
symbols and institutions. A European identity is not necessarily created in
conflict with a national identity, as we have seen in the EU's careful attempts to
acknowledge member state identities, as this comment attests:
...Europeans have been capable of inventing their
own responses to a problem common to the whole world: how to keep one's
cultural identity and at the same time adjust to the modern world, i.e., the
technological revolution. In a way, building Europe is being able to find one's
own direction, something, I feel, that is no longer possible at the national
level. (Vignon 1997, 11)
Because of the perceived lack of attention to identity matters, psychologists have issued a challenge (Breakwell and Lyons 1996) to the field to assess how changing identities have influenced monumental changes in Europe and to examine whether existing theories and methodologies are adequate to this task. These researchers and others (MacDonald 1993; Wilson and Smith 1993) have noted that there has been relatively little research on changing European conceptions of identity in the context of the European Union, and have called for more research and multiple methods to study this complex phenomenon. The project reported on in this volume is, in part, a response to that call, offering Q methodology in a cross-cultural context as an underutilized but potentially valuable tool to help in analyses of identity.
Despite
this lack of attention to identity matters, one can still locate some helpful
lines of inquiry that can provide new ways of thinking about the problem. One
promising avenue is to draw from the theoretical literature on the EU that
comments on possible ways to view the integration process itself. Examining the
debate over how the integration process works could help to see how allegiances
are formed and attitudes toward the process develop.
In
this regard, one of the more perceptive and influential observers of the EU in
its various forms, Charles Pentland (1973), in examining the various
theoretical positions on integration in Europe, described two as predominant:
the functionalist (a primarily economically-derived term that has later
been better labeled as supranationalist in the EU literature) and the pluralist.
These two theoretical positions with regards to the EU will be used in these
studies (joined with an opposing nationalist view of European integration not
analyzed by Pentland, all discussed in more detail in "Methodology"
below) as forms of possible attachment to or detachment from the EU.
According to
Pentland, functionalists, or supranationalists, subscribe to the belief that
"the modern technology of communications, industry and warfare, as well as
the growth of economic, ecological and social problems on a regional or global
scale, present irresistible pressures toward international cooperation and
ultimate political unity" (64). Modern pressures will inevitably compel
people to bypass the
nation-state
and form a "new political community" (Haas 1958, 16). Neither
Pentland nor Haas speculated on what this new political community might be,
although the expectation was that it would happen in Europe and would largely
involve people who generally see the practical value of a supranational state
and the obsolescence of the nation-state. It would likely happen sooner rather
than later because of "real world" pressures primarily from the
global economy and
technological change.
Pluralists,
on the other hand, would see European integration as a much more deliberate
process. States, if they do come together in greater integration, would do so
as a "community of states," characterized by a high level of
interaction among nation-states which essentially maintain their sovereignty.
While not necessarily opposed to a supranational government emerging as a
result of this interaction, pluralists tend at the same time to be skeptical of the idea of
this government acting independently of the will of the constituent states. A
pluralist
reaffirms the nation-states as the bases of
international life and envisages the emergence of an international community
through improvement of the ways in which they regulate their relationship with
each other. The advocates of this view find valuable many of those
characteristics of the international system which, according to other
theorists, are the prime candidates for elimination. (Pentland 1973, 29)
A comment from British Prime Minister Tony
Blair might exemplify best how a pluralist would see identity issues:
On the question of how we run our education and
health systems, welfare state, personal taxation, matters affecting our culture
and identity, I say: "be proud of our diversity and let subsidiarity
rule." (quoted in Eurocom 1998b, 3)
Pluralists would see a natural limiting
factor to political integration—namely, "a significant but persistent core
of national identity
in each state, in whose service governments may feel obliged to act in ways
unproductive for integration" (Pentland 1973, 47). Pluralists might see
the nation-state as a more "natural" fit to human needs, but might be
open to considering ways in which it no longer fits those needs.
In
the chapter on methodology which follows, it will be explained how these two
different ways of thinking about the EU—the supranationalist and the
pluralist—were used, along with a clearly different nationalist approach, as
the bases for the hypothetical forms of attachment in these studies. These
forms, thus derived directly from the EU literature, were then carried out into
the field to see if they describe adequately the way Europeans are thinking
about the issue.
A Multinational
Study of National Identity in Europe: Overview of the Project and Findings
This seven-nation study of national and
supranational identity in Europe in the context of the European Union was begun
in 1998 in France but conducted primarily in all seven during the spring and
summer of 2001. The intent was to investigate the nexus of national and
supranational identity construction, utilizing the intensive subjective
analysis Q methodology. To achieve
optimum cross-cultural comparisons, study instruments were all uniformly
constructed across the cultural spectrum but translated for each locale.
Details about the methodology will be found in the next chapter, and the findings for each country are found in their separate chapters that follow. In this section of the introduction, only general comments will be made on the overall findings of the studies as a group.
In general, and as might be expected, reactions to the
construction of the EU vary across the different cultures in interesting ways
particular to each. German supporters or detractors of European integration do
not see it quite the same as their Danish counterparts, and so on. But the
reactions vary only within certain parameters and do not shatter into thousands
of idiosyncratic forms. Those parameters have been established by the general
discourse that surrounds the phenomenon of integration and that emanates primarily
from Brussels. In country after country, participants in these studies grouped
themselves into surprisingly few clusters of opinion: no fewer than 4 but no
more than 5 groups in each country, with the predominate number being 4 groups.
It should be noted that in Q studies (the method will be explained in the next
chapter), because of the small-n nature of the methodology, more groupings of
opinion might be found in different samplings from other parts of a population
at large, although it likely would not be many more. Also, no fewer groupings
would be found than occurred in the studies.
The first finding of significance of this project,
therefore, is that these groupings varied at all in these different cultural
settings. This departs significantly from the expectations we might have from
the literature, as we have just seen in the work of Pentland, in which only the
two positions are described: the supranationalist and the pluralist. In each of
the studies reported on here, variations on these positions are described; in
no study does the exact groupings of thought occur that we might expect from
Pentland.
Another significant result that emerges
from these studies is the difficulty in finding nationalists in Europe whose
opinion in depth corresponds even roughly with the coherent philosophy of
nationalism described in the literature (see Smith 1983, described in more
detail below in the chapter on methodology). While nationalists of varied
stripes were certainly found in these different countries, the various
components of thought that we expect to see in a coherent nationalist doctrine
are rarely exhibited in any particular persons or groups.
This difficulty in finding classic nationalists might be
because of a phenomenon that several researchers comment upon in their papers
(specifically, the studies in France, Germany and the Netherlands), that of
participants hiding their true feelings from the researchers out of shame of
being politically incorrect. For example, in the chapter on the French study, it
is speculated that nationalist thought in France has “gone underground.”
Or this phenomenon of scarcity of classic nationalists may
be because nationalist thought has been undermined by several generations of
gradual but steady European integration. This seems at least as plausible an
explanation. For example, one of the more nationalist-oriented expressions
occurred in only one grouping in England that Una McCormack labels “Besieged
Nationalist” - besieged because of the defensive nature of the opinion expressed.
This English grouping was the only cluster that even remotely approached the
strong nationalist factor that emerged in France, which itself was less a
separate factor of opinion as it was defined itself in opposition to
supranationalist expression. Perhaps the underpinnings of classical nationalist
doctrine is changing in Europe.
There is a remarkable reservoir of support
within all of these countries for the European Union, at least in the general
sense of feeling the need for the organization. There is, on the other hand,
much less support for specific contours of a European identity. Many Europeans
may be predisposed towards Europe, but may not think of themselves at all as
Europeans. It should be noted that these studies did not try to flesh out these
contours, and simply left the issue aside in pursuit of more general feelings
of affiliation to identities.
There is a great deal of national pride in
each of the countries, with the possible exception of Germany. Because there is
also such significant support for European integration across much of the
political spectrum in these countries, this suggests that Europeans are capable
of multiple identities, and that there is a good deal of support for the
concept – however unconscious – of separating political from cultural identity.
In studies of this kind, it is tempting to
examine the data with an eye to finding those Europeans who are “most
nationalist” or “least supranationalist.” This reading from statistical data
would be, however, the typical aim of large-scale survey research that differs
in kind, if not in principle, from these smaller-scale intensively subjective
studies.
Nonetheless, it is argued here that it may be possible to
compare across cultures, if the research design is constructed to accommodate
this. We argue that it is possible in this multinational project. That is
because these studies all start from roughly the same vantage point: i.e., on
the one hand, reacting to the same continent-wide European discourse that comes
from Brussels and on the other to the basic philosophical underpinnings of
nationalist thought that in principle all people live with in their daily
lives. Here, the general approach would be along the lines pursued by Dryzek
and Holmes (2002, p. 21) in which the comparisons across cultures would have to
be expressed in words rather than statistics.
If such cross-cultural comparison is valid in Q studies,
then French and Danish participants who expressed supranationalist affiliation
exhibited this in the most purely supranationalist orientation among all
participants. By the same token, those in Britain and Germany expressed their
affiliation to supranational identity in the most mixed form. In other words,
these participants seemed less willing to commit to this form of affiliation,
and more mixed their expression with aspects of pluralist or even nationalist
thought. While this may not be so strange a finding for British participants,
coming from a country that is notoriously Euroskeptic, it is rather surprising
for Germans.
As for comparing nationalist expression across the cultures,
it has already been noted that it was hard to find a nationalist as defined in
the literature. Nonetheless, those that did express nationalist leanings were
more purely defined in England, while those expressing mixed feelings about
their national affiliation were more pronounced in Germany, Italy and the
Netherlands.
If the supranationalists and nationalists
take up the extreme ends of a continuum of opinion with regards to European and
national identity, then the large middle ground represents pluralism. This
pluralist sentiment would express some acceptance of the need for European
integration, but at the same time would hold affiliation - more or less
strongly expressed – to the nation-state system and the need for diversity of
cultural expression, at least on the national level. This level of acceptance
of European integration differs widely across the countries, from optimistic in
France and England, to more pragmatic in Denmark to the most pessimistic in
Germany.
In some ways, the large number of “pluralists” in these
studies represent the most interesting groupings for those committed to both
European and anti-European forces in politics: the vast ground out of which
they could draw for their supporters. These pluralists represent those less
committed to political stances on either end of the spectrum, but perhaps
amenable to change under certain circumstances and with convincing appeals.
Outline
of Book
In
sum, the studies that will be presented in this volume, through use of a
focused methodology, will consider various European perceptions of the EU to
examine subjective conceptions of national identity in the context of a rapidly
changing European polity. The goal is to uncover the forms and relative
intensity of attachment that Europeans feel toward their evolving national and
non-national political institutions. A fundamental research issue that is
raised in these analyses is whether the hold of national identity on Europeans'
psyches is so dominant as to hinder significantly any formation of non-national
identities.
The
overall thrust of this analysis can be described as roughly following that
recommended by Wintle (1996, 18): “The emphasis in any model must be on two things:
the reciprocal inter-reaction between the imposition of unity by the state on
the one hand, and the acceptance and conditioning of that unity by (increasing)
numbers of the state’s subjects on the other.” The “state” in these cases will
be either the separate nation-states or the EU.
A
research design to approach the topic will be presented in some detail in
Chapter II. The general reader, interested more in results and the country
studies, will be excused to skip this chapter. But for the more engaged reader,
some explanation of the methodology will be in order and may be of real
interest. It is argued here that Q methodology, supplemented by in-depth
interviews, is a method that can best complement previous research and add to
the literature.
Results of each
country study are presented alphabetically by country in subsequent chapters.
It will be noted that Northern Ireland is included as a separate chapter. This
is because of the complex and interesting differences it presents for identity
questions and because of the research foci of Una McCormack and John Barry. Its
separation thusly should not be construed as commentary one way or the other
upon its status as a part of the United Kingdom.
Finally, a
concluding chapter will address the implications of the research for political
analyses and the possibilities for future European political configurations.
This
research project is designed to contribute to several literatures. These would
include international relations (IR) theory, perhaps especially in recent
efforts to bring culture, identity (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996), ideas
(Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998) and more individual-level analyses into IR; to the
EU literature to add to a growing subliterature on identity matters; to studies
of nationalism, introducing a new and yet little-addressed topic of the
dominance of national identity in contemporary society; and to social
psychology, in response to recent calls for newer methodologies to get at
notoriously elusive questions of identity.
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