Transfigurations of the European Identity

Transfigurations of the European Identity

Edited by

Bulcsu Bognár and Zsolt Almási

Transfigurations of the European Identity, Edited by Bulcsu Bognár and Zsolt Almási

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Bulcsu Bognár, Zsolt Almási and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5624-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5624-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................... vi Europe Reloaded: Tradition, Reality, Project—An Introduction ................ 1 FERENC HÖRCHER Identity and Identity-building in Europe: A Citizenship Perspective ........ 21 LÉONCE BEKEMANS Multiracial and Transnational European Identities in Contemporary English Novels........................................................................................... 42 KINGA FÖLDVÁRY Europeana: The European Identity Transfigured for and through the Digital .................................................................................................. 61 ZSOLT ALMÁSI Multi Colours—One Kaleidoscope: Cultural Representation of Europe Abroad as a Reflection of its Identity ........................................................ 85 ÁGNES KÖRNYEI The Influence of Mass Media on Modern Society: Transfigurations of Media Perception in Europe ................................................................ 106 BULCSU BOGNÁR On the Dilemma of the European Identity of the Chinese ....................... 128 ANETT KOZJEK-GULYÁS The Potential Role of Civil Religion in Shaping the Identity of Citizens: the United States v. Europe ..................................................................... 149 KÁROLY PINTÉR Bibliography ............................................................................................ 168 Contributors ............................................................................................. 184 Index ........................................................................................................ 187

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The present volume exploring the intricate and inspiring problem of European identity could not have come into being without the help and encouragement of a variety of people and a generous grant.

First and foremost, we are grateful to people who gave an institutional help during the long process of completing this book. Although the forthcoming list will not / cannot be complete, we will make an attempt to thank some distinguished people by name. We are grateful to Szabolcs Szuromi (President of Péter Pázmány Catholic University), Tamás Roska (former Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics—PPCU), Máté Botos (Dean of the Faculty of Humanities—PPCU), Miklós Kőszeghy (Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities—PPCU), Dóra Hoffmann (Project manager at the Faculty of Humanities—PPCU) who provided the institutional background for our work, and whose encouragement went much beyond the call of duty.

Also we are grateful to the editorial board of the Cambridge Scholars Press, and all the people from the publishing house who led us through the difficulties of finalising and publishing this volume. Without their help the volume would be less reader-friendly, and could have hardly reached its target audience.

Besides the help and encouragement of individuals, this volume could not have been completed without a grant of the European Union and the Hungarian Government. Both the research project that lies behind this volume and this publication were generously supported by the TÁMOP 4.2.1. B-11/2/KMR-2011-0002 grant of the European Union and the Hungarian Government. Without this grant we would not have had the opportunity, time and leisure to carry out a research project of this size and depth.

Zsolt Almási Bulcsu Bognár

EUROPE RELOADED: TRADITION, REALITY, PROJECT—

AN INTRODUCTION

FERENC HÖRCHER

Titian and the Three Faces of Prudence Titian, the famous Venetian Renaissance painter has a masterpiece from the 1560s, housed in the National Gallery of London, entitled The Allegory of Prudence.1 We see three male heads, that of an old man, a middle aged person, and that of a young man, as if they belonged to one common creature. Each one of them looks into different directions: one might claim that the old face looks into the past (on the left), the middle aged one looks into the spectator’s eyes, representing the present, while the young face looks into an unknown future. Presumably, the character of all the three of them is represented by the animal faces below them: the old man is to be identified with the wolf, the middle-aged one with the lion, and the young one with the dog. But again all three animal heads seem to belong to one common creature. And we can read the following carefully chosen inscription above: “Ex praeterito/praesens prudenter agit / ne future actionē deturpet” (“learning from the past, the present acts prudently, not to corrupt future actions”).

At first sight, the painting seems to be one of the most obvious allegorical or symbolic representations. However, art historians keep interpreting it. It was perhaps Erwin Panofsky who devoted most of his time and energy to solve the riddle, as one can learn from his Titian’s

1 See the painting on the internet homepage of the National Gallery in London: “An Allegory of Prudence” about 1550-65, Titian and workshop, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/titian-and-workshop-an-allegory-of-prudence.

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Allegory of Prudence: A Postscript.2 But naturally, there are a number of later interpretations of the paintings, too.3

However, if we want to make sense of it for our purposes, we need to clarify certain points first. First, prudence is understood here as one of the four cardinal virtues: excellence in making the right judgement in response to important questions.4 Virtues belonged to the long European intellectual framework, which was determined by ancient philosophy and Christian theology. For both of these epochs, virtue meant a key factor in bringing human behaviour to the optimum on the individual’s level. However, this virtue of practical wisdom was not individualistic: it was not simply built on personal intelligence or the like. Rather, it represented the collective wisdom inherited from our ancestors, and applied to the present. This is so eloquently phrased by Edmund Burke, when he writes about the “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”5 Burke’s notion can be traced back to Cicero’s concept of mos maiorum, an idea, according to which ancestors are important contributors to our own daily activities as well.6 Understood as such, prudence means actually to follow the norms our ancestors established, accepting that there is a continuity of identity between them and us. Certainly this Roman kind of

2 Erwin Panofsky, “Titian’s Allegory of Prudence: A Postscript,” in Erwin Panofsky: Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955, 1983), 181-205. 3 See for example Simona Cohen, “Titian’s London Allegory and the three beasts of his selva oscura,” Renaissance Studies 14, no. 1 (2000) and Erin J Campbell, “Old Age and the Politics of Judgment in Titian’s allegory of prudence,” Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Poetry 19 no. 4 (2003): 261. 4 Josef Pieper, Prudence, transl. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Faber and Faber, 1959). 5 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790 (The Harvard Classics, (1909-14)), Paras. 150–174 http://www.bartleby.com/ 24/3/7.html (accessed December 10, 2013). 6 Henriette van der Blom, Mos, maiores, and historical exempla in Cicero, in Henriette van der Blom, Cicero’s Role Models. The Political Strategy of a Newcomer (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). In Hungarian, see: Szekeres Csilla, “Filozófia és politika Cicerónál,” Ókor VII. no. 3 (2008): 27-34, who gives the most important loci of Cicero’s references to mos maiorum the following way: dom. 56 and 80–81; Sest.16; 17; 73; 98; 140; de or. 3,74–77; rep. 1,3; 2,30; 3,41; 5,1; Tusc. 4,1; Lael.18 skk.; 40–41; off. 1,121; 2,41; 2,65–66; 3,44; 3,47. In German, see Bernhard Linke and Michael Stemmler, Mos maiorum. Untersuchungen zu den Formen der Identitätsstiftung und Stabilisierung in der römischen Republik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000).

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traditionalism is later to be balanced by considerations which made instant answers to pressing questions more important than the sheer reliance on ancient wisdom. And yet Burke gained fame with his insistence on the wisdom of the past—just in the time when history was restarted by the French revolutionaries.

But why is Titian’s painting interesting for us, here and now, in the 21th century, when we want to make sense of the European predicament? This volume of collected essays, the outcome of a two year intensive period of research at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, tries to figure out how Europe can be identified today from the perspective of the humanities and the social sciences. In other words it offers an assessment of Europe’s conditions, here and now. But as scholars of the humanities these authors are aware of the fact that one can hardly make a single statement about the present in any humanities discourse without at least trying to make an effort to look into the past as well. And as scholars of the social sciences they are aware of the fact that no scientific description has any relevance without some future use of it. The authors of this volume are, therefore, looking at the present, with their eyes focused on the past and the unknown future, as well. For indeed, how could one claim anything about the European identity, without taking account of its rather adventurous, sinful and glorious past? And again: how could one assess the character of European identity, if one does not make an effort to look into its future? Certainly, it is very prudent that the present authors are trying to measure the past, the present and the future of Europe as aspects that belong together. And therefore this introduction needs to follow suit and try to provide some general remarks on the topic keeping this wide perspective—made even wider by the most varied research methodologies used—as open as it can be.

The Greco-Roman Political-Philosophical Origins of Europe

Perhaps Europe was somewhat narrowly defined by turn-of-the-century Anglo-French Catholic historian, Hilaire Belloc, when he claimed that it was based on the remnants of the Roman Empire and the Christian faith.7 However, it is remarkable that he, too, looked into the past to make sense

7 Hilaire Beloc, Europe and the Faith (Project Gutenberg, 2003) http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8442/pg8442.html (accessed December 10, 2013).

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of the concept itself. And his historical sense seems to point to the right direction. Indeed the Romans themselves were able to rely on their ancestors, if we regard the Greeks their ancestors, and Christianity, too, was based on the Hebrew’s religion. Let us see what these two lines—the Greek-Roman philosophico-political and the Hebrew-Christian religious tradition—added to Europeans, fashioning their common (?) identity.

It would be futile to pretend to be able to explain the Greco-Roman experience in a few paragraphs. One can hardly exaggerate the importance of this venture as for the later fate of the Continent. Yet there are a few important remarks one can extrapolate from this line of history, leading from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, to Cicero and Seneca, if one tries to rethink it relying on a prudence educated by this very tradition.

1. Self-reflection. 2. Man is a political animal. 3. Rule of law and customs. 4. Mixed government and self-governance.

Now let us make sense of each of these four ideas, as they relate to an acclaimed European identity.

Self-reflection is a means to reach one’s own self and to have access to the Other. Recall first of all the warning on the Apollo-Temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself!”.8 This was apparently not much more than a popular Greek proverb which however came to the status of a quasi-religious teaching, but as such does not lie too far away from the very essence of the teachings of the Greek philosophical tradition, as represented in the unwritten legacy of the much debated Socrates, who was both the finest achievement and the most important critic of the Greek city-state. What does this short imperative amount to? Well, it is perhaps just an argument which tries to encourage one to be prepared for self-examination. It suggests a perception of the world in which knowledge is not necessarily about external reality, the things out there, but something that can be directed into your own depths as well. Humans are able to imagine themselves not simply as the agents of their own thoughts, but also as their subjects. This way a distance was created by the cognitive capacity and the agent himself (most of the time it was a male). They were certainly separated by a temporal border—you cannot act and reflect on yourself acting in the same time. But this move was all important in the birth of the European consciousness: it enabled the agent to reach out for the other. 8 Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones (Perseus Project), 10.24.1 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0160%3Abook%3D10%3Achapter%3D24%3Asection%3D1 (accessed December 10, 2013). The Greek terms were: γνῶθι σεαυτόν or σαυτόν.

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Man is a political animal, i.e. an individual with duties and responsibilities towards the community he is caught up in. We first come across the term in Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher claims: “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.”9 This is again a claim of some lasting effects. For what it seems to imply is that human beings are not born alone, as individuals, who can then come together to create a community, as later contractual theory supposed. On the contrary: they are born within a natural community, of which they cannot help to be members of. This does not mean, of course, that they should accept it (just as they had inherited it) without trying to fix it. On the contrary, given their reasoning faculty they have got the power to change it for the better. Aristotle is not arguing in favour of a rigid traditionalism therefore. He is ready to accept that each generation has to reflect on the actual constitution of their polis, in order to adjust it to the circumstances of the day.

Aristotle himself invests much energy into finding out the basic rationale of politics, the art of ruling the city, in Athens. His Politics is a summary of his findings, and certainly, he does not turn out to be an advocate of what is considered by modernity the greatest achievement of Athenian society: Greek democracy—i.e. of democracy as it was understood in his own day. He would prefer a regime of virtuous aristocrats to any form of democratic rule or to lawlessness. But most importantly, he is ready to admit that no human creativity on the top of a constitutional regime provides safeguards against unjust rule as safe as the rule of law:

it is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens: upon the same principle, if it is advantageous to place the supreme power in some particular persons, they should be appointed to be only guardians, and the servants of the laws, for the supreme power must be placed somewhere; but they say, that it is unjust that where all are equal one person should continually enjoy it.10

He also adds, why this arrangement is safer than simply relying on the wisdom of the ruler:

9 Aristotle, “Politics (Ellis)/Book 1,” Wikisource, http://en.wikisource.org/w/ index.php?title=Politics_(Ellis)/Book_1&oldid=3537811 (accessed December 19, 2013). 10 Aristotle, “Politics (Ellis)/Book 3,” Wikisource, http://en.wikisource.org/w/ index.php?title=Politics_(Ellis)/Book_3&oldid=3537815 (accessed December 19, 2013).

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he who would place the supreme power in mind, would place it in God and the laws; but he who entrusts man with it, gives it to a wild beast, for such his appetites sometimes make him; for passion influences those who are in power, even the very best of men: for which reason law is reason without desire.

In other words, Aristotle regards laws a better reservoir of human rationality than the character and virtue of a ruler, whose prudence can be challenged by desire—an idea easily traced back to his master, Plato, who in the Phaidros claimed that desires are the most important challenges to human rationality. Laws are cold reason, objective, distanced from their legislators, and this way, saved from the temptations of desire.

Yet it is also important that Aristotle is cautious as far as the interventions of reason are concerned in human affairs. Indeed, the philosopher is aware of the limits of a universalised rationality when particular human judgements are concerned. His solution to bridge the gap between universality and particularity is first practical wisdom, Titian’s virtue of prudence (called by Aristotle phronesis), and secondly also customs, habitual conventions, the accepted ways of our forefathers, Cicero’s mos maiorum. Customs or habits (Aristotle does not distinguish between the individual and the communal level of the term) are second nature to human beings—they lead us to action almost unreflectively. Importantly, Aristotle talks about a lower kind of customs, called ethos, and a more refined level one, nomos, which is usually translated into English as “law,” but it still preserves a customary element to it. This is basically the difference between a more archaic Greek legal thought and concepts like ius and lex in the Roman law systems. In any case, the customary element is still there even in the Roman phase of the process—emphasising a more personal, and less reflexive element to politics.11

The fourth principle is mixed government and self-governance. Also, the Greco-Roman tradition endowed European posterity with the idea that there is a need to differentiate between elements or building blocks of a political community and also to negotiate among their claims to obtain legitimate power. The idea is already there in Aristotle, whom some

11 For a detailed explanation of Aristotle’s ideas of customary law, see the contribution of James Bernard Murphy, “Habit and Convention at the Foundation of Custom,” in The Nature of Customary Law. Legal, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Amanda Perreau-Saussine and James Bernard Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 53-78.

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interpreters understand to argue for a mixed government.12 But the survival of the idea is due to Cicero, who picked it up from the works of Polybius and worked it out in a systematic manner in The Republic.13 The idea is that each and every level of society (the royal element, the better class or the leading citizens and the multitude or the masses) has to contribute to the bonum commune communitatis, in a way that balances and moderates their separate interests in the interest of the whole res publicae: “one which shall be well tempered and balanced out of all those three kinds of government, is better than that.”14 These ideas will resurface in the Renaissance (for example in Machiavelli), and will directly lead to ideas of the balanced constitution and the separation of powers as presented by Montesquieu. It also implies the republican tradition of the merits of self-government, finally elaborated by Rousseau and Kant.

The Hebrew-Christian Political Theological Origins of Europe

If we summed up in a few basic points of the most relevant aspects of the philosophical background to European identity, let us venture to do so in connection with political theology. In this respect we rely on Böckenförde and István Bibó, when we refer to

1. the idea of imago dei, and human dignity derived from it. 2. the separation of Church and state, and freedom of religion

derived from it. And let us have a short look at both of these points.

Christianity brought with it a number of novelties when compared to the religions of the Greco-Roman period. First of all, it was a monotheistic religion, and secondly, one which focused on the afterlife of the believer and not on his or her present one. But even more importantly, Christianity

12 In fact the classification of society and the forms of rule attributed to them was originally worked out by Plato himself. 13 Polybius, Histories, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. (London—New York: Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.), Book 6. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0234%3Abook%3D6%3Achapter%3D1 (accessed December 4, 2013). 14 Cicero, The Republic, I. xlv. https://archive.org/stream/republicofcicero00cicerich#page/n7/mode/2up (accessed December 4, 2013). For a recent analysis of Cicero’s constitutional scheme, see: Elizabeth Asmis, “A New Kind of Model: Cicero’s Roman Constitution in ‘De republica,’” The American Journal of Philology 126 no. 3 (Autumn, 2005): 377-416.

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taught that Jesus was the son of God, and as such he was born by a human mother, to live and die as humans do, in order to save humanity from the original sin of the first pair of humans. Jesus, being man and God at the same time, reveals the fact that human beings share a divine element, that they were created in the image of God (imago dei). This is a term used in the Old Testament (the Book of Genesis), in other words it is something Christianity took over from the Jewish religious tradition.15 But it resurfaced quite a few times in the New Testament as well16, meaning both that Jesus was himself the image of God, and that humans were created in the image of God. In both cases it opened up the way for an understanding of the human being, according to which each one of us has a unique personality of our own, which is equally dear to God, and therefore which has an internal merit that cannot be denied or questioned. This idea brings us straight to the concept of human dignity, the idea that each human being (as a singular creation of God) has a dignitas of his/her own, which should be respected and honoured. It was on this basis that the concept of individual human rights—i.e. that there are certain entitlements that belong to us as human beings—was born by advocates of the natural law doctrine.

A second point which is closely linked to the history of Christianity, is the idea of the separation of the Church from the State. First of all, one has to realise that Christianity is one of those religions which claim that a community of believers, called the “Church” is required for the right way of honouring God. This is not evident, and it has a number of consequences. Most of all, it has a tremendous impact on the organisation of the ruling of a given community. Jewish religion was not only a belief-system, a religious teaching of God, but also a legal order, a way of structuring and ruling society. Christianity took the model over, when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. This was the res publica Christiana, an arrangement, which did not distinguish this temporal from eternal power. However, during the Investiture Contest, a competition started between the two swords, as they came to be called, and as a result of it, ecclesia (the church) got separated first conceptually, and later literally, from the unity of the orbis christianus, including worldly power. And this lead to the possibility for the ruler to separate what came to be called government from the ecclesia, at the time of the religious warfare and other theological disputes.

15 See the following loci in the Book of Genesis (1-11): Gen 1:26–27, Gen 5:1–3. 16 See the following loci in the New Testament: 1 Corinthians 11:7 and Epistle of James 3:9.

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If we want to make sense of the serious consequences of these two features of the Hebrew-Christian political theological tradition of Europe, we have to relate first to the Enlightenment with the sort of secularisation of public life which is so characteristic of modernised Europe17, and so unparalleled in any other cultures (including the USA). Burckhardt’s concept of the Renaissance, Cassirer’s view of the Enlightenment, and the Weberean concept of disenchantment (Entzauberung), all of these were founded on the assumption that the spiritual power should actually disappear from the horizon of people’s interest, as they recognize the essentially this-worldly nature of human life. Interestingly, however, human beings and even in the most advanced European communities tend to keep their faith and their enchantedness. Therefore, the whole concept of secularization needs further investigation as pointed out by Charles Taylor’s in his recent magisterial work, The Secular Age.18 One should understand the humanistic tradition and the age of Enlightenment in a different light, too, if one realises that the Ancien Regime was not simply the progressivist utopian atheistic world of a Diderot or the Baron D’Holbach.

And certainly the political and social history of the 20th century needs to be reinterpreted in a revisionist mode as well, after the catastrophes caused by the two types of anti-religious totalitarian regimes. One should make it clear that the hope of the disappearance of religion from a secular society was misconceived, and that believers and atheists are prone to live together in one society in the foreseeable future. And yet this should not surprise us if we consider the fact that the separation of Church and State, so strictly realised in the American Constitutional tradition did not cause the birth of a secular society. On the contrary: what it achieved is a thriving cohabitation of a wide range of religions and churches. In other words: one of the secrets of the survival of Christianity in a centralised world of bureaucratic states is religious freedom, and freedom of conscience in general. But the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue19 took a further step when it alludes to the possibility that in fact modern constitutional democracies may be in need of religiously active civil

17 Jürgen Habermas, (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989). 18 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007). 19 Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, ed. Florian Schuller and trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

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societies, in order to foster citizen activity to give the constitutional practice a cogency and relevance in these individualised political communities.

The Past Present: a Long Shadow of Imperial and Imperialist Europe

Present day Europe still seems to suffer from a bad conscience raised by its inability and unwillingness to come to terms with its own past. Its political manners give ample proof of this: political correctness let political actors leave a number of taboos untouched and also presses European public discussion to be cautious with certain issues they regard as sensitive. If we want to understand this phenomenon we need to see how the untouched past still gears the present and blurs the future. I would like to speak about two of the long shadows of the past: the European empire inside the continent, and outside of it, the European global empire.

Europe as a geographic unit was always small enough to tempt rulers of an absolutist leaning to try to unite it. And we know that since the start of its known history it has fallen victim to absolutist rulers on a regular basis—even if not always for a long time. Alexander the Great, the Roman Emperors, Charlemagne, Louis the Great, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin—these are only a few of the more efficiently powerful of this type of tyrants. Although present day Europe likes to take pride in its democratic past—that democracy was first discovered and also practised in Europe at a time when barbaric aliens were not even aware of how to organise their societies—Europe should still confess and remember the deeds of which it is less proud: the tyrannical and oppressive parts of its longstanding history.

If there is a tendency in Europe to try to paint with more beautiful colours its past than it actually looked like, there is nothing to wonder about that: historical memory, as indeed all sorts of human memory, tends to recall what seems nice from the past and tries to forget about the traumatising moments, the more so as history writing was born in the context of idealising political power, in order to stabilise the present by repainting the past. One should have a look at the way historical writing surfaced in Europe to understand why it had always been so rare to make real effort to try to recapture the tantalising past. Let us pick out three moments of the history of European history writing to show the phenomenon. These will be the following: antique historians, court historians, professional scientific historians.

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First, we should go back to the origins of modern historiography, namely to ancient historical writings. European history writing is based on the Antique Greek and Roman tradition, in two ways. First, history writers always took as their role model the antique forerunners, from the father of history, Herodotus, to Thucydides and Xenophon in Greece, to the mediator Polybius, down to the Roman authors, like Cato the Elder, who originated the Latin style, Julius Caesar, the autobiographical historian, Cicero, the orator, Strabo, Livy, but perhaps most influentially Plutarch and Tacitus.20 Certainly, there were critics of the regimes among them, but more often, history writing is about the glory of the given community, with good reasons. Culture as such was still not an autonomous sphere of activity: it depended directly on the interest of the political community, both organically and functionally, originally connected to either politics or to religion, or sometimes to both. In a sense, historical writing served as a way to direct the ways people remember their ancestors, and the past of their community: it was an early way of memory politics, for example his references to the forefathers of Rome. He was, of course, not an academic historian—his use of history was basically determined by his own political affiliations and aspirations. And in spite of this fact—that his interest in history was quite secondary—one should always keep in mind, that “the influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language.”21

Certainly, the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire transformed the way the past was encapsulated in stories about it in Europe later. No doubt the primary inspiration to relate to the past was the Bible, especially as it presented the past of the Jewish people and also the way it projected a teleological account of history. Through its theological teaching of falling into sin, repentance and redemption it provided a linear and progressive account of history, following a predetermined pattern. The New Testament also inspired historical writing, as it centred on a depiction of the life narrative of Jesus, and this way worked out the new standards of giving an account of a particular human being’s life. Of course, Christian narrative writing had an influence on political and social history writing in a very complex but also very direct way in Medieval Europe: think about Bede, the 7th-century English monk, who earned the title of “The Father of English History,” with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731), a narration in which Church 20 Michael Grant, Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation (Ney York: Routledge, 1995). 21 Michael Grant’s claim in: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Selected Works (Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd, 1971), 24.

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history becomes closely connected to what came to be regarded as “national history.”

Another example could be Anonymous, a writer who most probably studied at the University of Paris in the 12th century, and referred to himself as the clerk (notarius) of King Béla III of Hungary. He wrote the magisterial Gesta Hungarorum, about the early history of the Hungarians, with the very definite aim of providing a kind of ideological support to his king. He is an early example of court history writing, another one of which is already an example of mixing up the rebirth of ancient and the continuity of the medieval Christian tradition, in the court of King Corvinus Mathias, in the 15th century Hungarian Kingdom. This king, saturated with the spirit of Renaissance humanism, was rather active in cultural life as well. Among others, including artists, scholars, architects and entertainers, he invited the Italian humanist, Antonio Bonfini and made him his court historian, commissioned him to write a new history of the Hungarian kingdom, which he succeeded to finish only after the premature death of his master, under Vladislav II, with the title Rerum Hungaricum Decades. Although we have a number of reasons for Bonfini and his like to write official court histories, the sort of history writing practised by them did certainly not help to keep an objective account of the past of the European nations. On the contrary they rather served to distort it, for ideological reasons.

This was indeed the sort of history writing that was meant to be counterbalanced by the introduction of a more detached, scientific type of history writing in the late Enlightenment and the early 19th century. Voltaire still started as a court historian, when he wrote his famous Age of Louis XIV in 1751, shamelessly, but also quite honestly glorifying his hero, the Sun King. However, he starts a new chapter in European historiography by demanding more facts in historical narratives. And this is the direction followed by the Ranke-school, initiated by the father of modern historical writing, Leopold von Ranke. Although he had tremendous impact on historical methodology, the real revolution in European self-awareness was postponed: the German historians were quite effective functionaries in German nation building, a programme with well-known tragic effects in 20th-century global history. To change from a court historian to a national historian does not solve the riddle of the historian: how to give a written, narrative account of the past without distorting it. And this should not be seen as simply a German problem. Whig historiography as depicted by Herbert Butterfield mirrored similar

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tendencies in British historical writing22 of discounting the historical responsibility of the Brits on a global scale, and most certainly French perceptions of the nation’s past do not usually include so many instances of recollecting the shameful moments of efforts for global French hegemony. This surprising blind spot in the history writing of the leading nations of Europe is the more astonishing, as all of them share, even if not in the same proportion, the responsibility of European glories and sins.23

These three moments might serve as good examples to show that historiography in itself is no guarantee for an honest confrontation of the past. For indeed, the past always appears in a better disguise than it originally wore. Historians shamelessly tend to forget about the shameful elements of the past of their masters. But if the shameful elements cannot play their part in building up the memory of a community, they will let themselves be felt in indirect ways. European histories, both in their ancient, or Christian imperial-monarchical courtly, and national versions, do rather cover the past instead of recovering it. Therefore recent criticism of the traditional methodologies of history writing aims at a more critical approach to the past. There are philosophical approaches, like that of Paul Ricoeur, who tries to heal with a phenomenological method the traumas of the second world war, or self-reflective gestures within the profession itself, like in the so called Historikerstreit in Germany in the 1980s.24 This debate about the relevant interpretations of the German past in light of Hitler’s Nazi Germany brought to the forefront the concept of the politics of memory: that indeed to decide what is to be remembered within a political community means nothing less but the exercise of power. On the other hand, if members of a community can agree about the basics of the past, they can hope to create a better future by this very act. So the historical narratives of the past of Europe can only be hoped to lead to a realistic present result if it also takes into account the historical disasters of

22 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and sons, 1931). Butterfield was rediscovered as a major historiographer of modernity by the so called Cambridge School of the history of political thought and more particularly, by one of its key exponents, Professor Quentin Skinner. 23 For a comprehensive account of Europe’s problematic past see Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 24 For an overview see: Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Strath, A European Memory?: Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (np: Berghahn Books, 2010). For a recent Hungarian overview of the German debate see: Kálmán Pócza, Emlékezetpolitika: Múltfeldolgozás és történelemtudomány Németországban 1945 után [Politics of Memory: processing the past and historical science in Germany after 1945] (Budapest: Attraktor Kiadó, 2011).

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the recent past of the 20th century as well—the moment when Europe’s global prestige falls below any earlier nadirs.

The Recent Past: Europe of the 20th Century

The German Historikerstreit is only one sign of the sort of difficulty one has to confront when trying to make sense of the European past. But it is not simply by chance that the debate broke out in Germany, and that it tried to clear up how to deal with the most shocking moment of 20th-century European (and global) history: the Holocaust. From the perspective of the 21st century the debate whether the Holocaust was an exceptional event, or whether it should be historically understood in the context of 20th-century totalitarianisms, seems to be ill-targeted and mostly politically motivated. The debate partly missed its aim because the relevance of the Holocaust in conceptualising our knowledge of the past is not minimised, but rather gains in significance if—starting out from it, when trying to make sense of something that is humanly incomprehensible—we rely on a wider concept, which includes all sort of mass murder, including Russian, Chinese, Korean or any other type of left or right wing totalitarian regimes, not to claim their similarities, but to work out a language to talk about inhuman regimes. In this respect even the term itself has its own history.

Although the concept of the totalitarian state was first used in the positive sense in Fascist Italy, it soon came to acquire an exceptionally strong critical overtone, and began to cover all regimes that try to dominate every aspect of the individual’s life, inside and outside of the political realm. In this respect among the standard works which might be used to make sense of the totalitarian past is Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) and Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of it in her magnificent historical overview, entitled The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The positive outcome of the heated and politically strongly motivated German debate is the recognition that there is a chance to discuss issues of the utmost political, moral and personal sensitivity, including ones which touch upon the identities of the debaters. However the only viable aim of the debate—to arrive at workable compromises on understanding issues related to our common past—is not yet achieved.

The debate gained a new relevance after the 1990 fall of the iron curtain, and the birth of a new Europe. It served as a model for the intellectual and political elite of the Central and Eastern European countries, which were liberated through a global political arrangement, made possible by Russian perestroika and glasnost, to try to recover their

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own past. However, due to the sharp debates between intellectual and political elites of Europe in its post communist period, the debate seems to be misguided again. For while a number of the leading elite of the newly liberated countries try to argue for a common policy of remembrance in Europe, encouraging the public opinion and the authorities of the Union to take due care of recognising traumas of different nature in different periods among different peoples, Jewish survivals and their religious and non-religious communities as well as the intellectual and political elite of the Left argue that a comparison between these traumatic events may result in “a kind of cancelling out of damages” caused by the Holocaust, as it was phrased by Habermas.25

The unhappy consequences of the politically motivated sharpening of the debate resulted in the deep division in the European recollection of its 20th-century past, as expressed by the reaction to the Prague Declaration of 2008 (initiated by Vaclav Havel and also by the German ex-dissident, later Bundespresident Joachim Gauck) by the Seventy Years Declaration of 2012, initiated by MEPs of the left of the European Parliament. This is a sign of the troubled self-identity of present day Europe, in a question which could perhaps be simply solved along the lines of Noble prize winner Hungarian Jewish writer Imre Kertész, who—having had firsthand experience of both the Nazi and the Soviet regime—claimed similarities between their mechanisms26 and had harsh critical words about the misguided political uses of the past.27

25 Jürgen Habermas “Eine Art Schadenabwicklung: Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung” [“A kind of cancelling out of damages: the apologetic tendencies in German writing on postwar history”] Die Zeit, 18 July, 1986 also included in: Jürgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: kleine politische Schriften VI (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp. 1987). 26 Imre Kertész, The Holocaust as Culture, trans. Thomas Cooper (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2011). 27 Iris Radisch, “Ich war ein Holocaust-Clown” Die Zeit, 21 September, 2013, http://www.zeit.de/2013/38/imre-kertesz-bilanz (accessed December, 10, 2013). He writes there: „Im Holocaust habe ich nie einen deutsch-jüdischen Krieg gesehen, sondern die Technik eines totalitären Systems.” and also: „Es ging nur darum, die Sprache zu finden für den Totalitarismus, eine Sprache, die zeigt, wie man eingemahlen wird in einen Mechanismus und wie der Mensch sich dadurch so sehr verändert, dass er sich und sein eigenes Leben nicht mehr wiedererkennt.”

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Europe: Present Challenges and Alternative Futures

It is in this context that one should sit down and read the essays of this volume. For indeed Europe needs to be aware of its own history of ideas if she wants to provide viable identities to her citizens. And scholars can be helpful to find out resources for raising awareness of one’s belonging. The authors of the essays in this book are all fascinated by the complex history of Europe, but they do not finish their story in the past. On the contrary: what they aim at is confronting the European present with these pasts in their minds, and trying to open up the field of discussion as far as strategies to adopt are concerned. For indeed the humanities are strong in revitalising the pasts, and the social sciences can be helpful new vistas for discussion about future strategies. In what follows let us have a glance at the directions chosen by these authors when handling the perplexing questions of a potential European identity.

It is Professor Bekemans, the only invited author in the volume from the University of Padua, Italy, who reaches the problem from the most abstract level of the social sciences, providing an overview of the topic from a bird’s eye perspective. He, the holder of an EU promoted Jean Monnet chair, and the author of a recent book length study of the topic, tries to identify both the exact meaning of the terms identity and Europe, and aims to give a short summary of the basic forms of potential identity-building on a continental level. This is therefore a very useful introduction to the topic—even if it is not concerned too much either with the Continent’s past as some of the other authors or with the particularities of the question—but nonetheless it provides some of the key concepts that will keep returning in the book, including identity-building, cultural heritage, community, the nation state or the other.

Perhaps Károly Pintér comes the closest to the final phase of our earlier thought chain in an essay investigating the concept of civil religion as it resurfaced first in the US context and then as it was transplanted to Europe. Dr. Pintér is a specialist of American history, therefore he is ideal for a comparison between the US and the EU as far as the problem of the integration of the citizenry is concerned. Most critics of the European integration, after all, emphasize that the case is quite different from the American, where it was much easier to hammer out a common federal identity, as the national pasts did not play a counterbalancing part in that case. Pintér starts out from the famous dictum of Bellah:

there are […] certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious

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dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling the American civil religion.28

But the author soon turns towards a Durkheimian understanding of the role of religion in community building. And the most interesting part of his analysis is a typology of different sorts of civil or non-civil religions (or non-religions) playing a role in integrating their relevant political communities.

With civil religion we embark on a research agenda which focuses on the soft elements of identity. For indeed, if you try to conceptualise a European sense of identity, what is required is less of a political, and more of a cultural nature. And religion, even if we narrow it down to civil religion, is already a cultural building block of identity. The more so if we take it in the sense meant by Durkheim when he referred to the internalised control functions of religion over social integration, achieved through the use of symbols and cult. Religion, for Durkheim, is “an eminently collective thing,” or more precisely, a phenomenon which has the function to bind the community together by letting people internalise the external norms of the society.29 No doubt, other cultural phenomena can serve the same function, as some of the further essays of this book point out.

Kinga Földváry focuses, for example, on novels, more precisely, on contemporary English novels which present problems of narratives of multiracial and transnational European identities. While of course in the United Kingdom, which has a long and troubled history of imperial rule, such stories are much less uncommon than in other, more homogeneous societies, and in countries, where the concept of the nation state was more vehemently enforced, it is still useful to see the lively details novels can provide of the life stories of people of multiethnic background. For it is in the little moments of everyday life that human identity shows itself in its most realistic form, and novel writers are this way able to realise a kind of 28 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 no.1 (1967). 29 Durkheim claims: “We arrive thus at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element thus holds a place in my definition that is no less essential than the first: In showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing.” Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. and intro. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 1995 [1912]), 44.

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sociographical work which might otherwise require long and well-funded research groups. But the most suggestive findings of this essay are from the very convincing analyses of the linguistic dimensions of some of these books—for language is perhaps an even more sensitive mirror of one’s real identity, than the conscious claims, or internalised beliefs or formalised rituals. Through language use one can easily detect all the nuances of a complex plural structure of identities that we encounter in these figures. This way language proves to be one of the most important media through which identity can be investigated. Of course, researchers with a humanities background are real experts on the linguistic front.

No doubt this is the reason that another essay confronts the same issue from a different angle. Zsolt Almási presents himself as an expert on the field of digital humanities: he is interested in the question of the effect of the digital medium on our perceptions of the common European cultural heritage. Almási works with the tripartite structure of identity, construction (of the identity), and context (of the construction), and is interested in the interplay between unity and diversity within the European cultural heritage. His object of analysis is Europeana, and he takes as his research target a quote from the secondary literature: “Europeana in many ways is a pan-European project with the overall purpose of boosting ‘Europeanness.’”30 He starts out from the four aims Europeana intends to achieve (“aggregate,” “facilitate,” “distribute” and “engage”31), and tries to make sense of the project through his interpretation of what is achieved by the web service in relation to these concepts. It is fascinating to see how a philologist is able to read and interpret the “language” of a complex webpage, in order to find out its relevance in building a European identity.

There is another author in the book who is engaged in an analysis of contemporary technological development on our daily life. Bulcsu Bognár in his paper offers a sociological analysis of the developments brought about by the accelerated spread of up-to-date communication systems in the world. Bognár builds his research into the interplay between information technology and society on Luhmann’s system theory, this way firmly grounding it in contemporary German language social analysis. He is more specifically interested, however, in the Central and Eastern European regional developments, providing fresh insights into the practicalities of the issue in recent social transformations in Central and 30 Pelle Snickars, “Against Search,” in A Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns (Oxford, UK-Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2013), 270. 31 Who we are? Europeana, http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/about (accessed November 17, 2013).

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Eastern Europe, applying recent milieu research findings and a historical interest in the preconditions to recent processes. The author convincingly argues that the widespread distrust of the reliability of mass media messages is due here to the experience of authoritarian and centralised regimes having ruled for a sufficiently long time in the region to distort media perceptions among the public.

Finally one needs to deal with the two essays which try to make sense of European identity in its confrontation with the “Other.” One of them looks at the exchange still from this side, the other one gives an overview of it from the perspective of one actual embodiment of the “Other.”

Ágnes Környei chooses European cultural diplomacy as the focus of her investigation: she not only gives a handy summary of the basic results of European-wide efforts to introduce Europe on the global cultural stage—one of the oldest and the newest member there, but also hints at the perhaps surprising experiences cultural diplomats can gain when they try to find the market in alien cultures for the products of European culture and art. For no success on this field can be envisaged without confronting the image formed by potential partners of Europe and European identity. This way, she argues, cultural policy can help Europe to find its communicable identity in two ways: first by encouraging political leaders and cultural opinion mongers on the European and national levels to try to hammer out the outlines of this common identity, and secondly by encouraging the same people to learn more about the views others cherish of Europe, and this way to arrive at a better founded self-knowledge.

The other author, Anett Kozjek-Gulyás looks at the self-perception of Chinese communities living in Europe. This is of course a rather special interface of Europe and her other, but this is exactly why it might be relevant for the core question of the whole volume: changes in the context of a society necessarily enforces it to reload its culture, in order to mirror its identity in accordance with the changing context. Europe, for the moment, is, of course, not yet a fully-fledged society, but the urgency to build up a comprehensible identity is felt by it, partly because of the challenges of the new international contexts. The reason why Europe has a lot to learn from the experiences of Chinese communities confronting European identity is that it functions as a mirror: Europeans this way have an occasion to compare the image they cherish of themselves with the view of them as presented in the struggles of foreign groups trying to keep up their own tradition in the alien world of Europe.

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Summary: Europe as a Common Project

Although Venice, one of the emblematic cities of Europe and European cultural identity, was not established by the Romans, it had a long, glorious, but troubled past by the time of Titian. It was a thriving cultural centre in her days, the Venice of Shakespeare’s Othello and his The Merchant of Venice. Some 200 years later, in the time of Canaletto and Casanova, it already experienced its decline. By the 20th century it was not much more than a shadow city, Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig.

If we took as our starting point Titian’s painting of prudence, let us finish by taking Venice as our final example. While the city was the meeting point of a number of European and non-European cultures, it was successful to keep its pronounced European ID during its long history of adventurous centuries. The question for us, the present generation, is how to imagine a city like this reloading itself in the context of a global change of climate—meaning by this expression both the ecological changes and the financial-political transformations. We know about the common European and global projects of saving Venice, including the decision of the UNESCO to take it on its list of the World Heritage sites. The future of Venice, however, is still an open question, dependent on its own inhabitants and on the creativity and respect for tradition of the decision-makers of Italy and Europe.

Let us take this example as an ample illustration of the openness of European identity, the future of which depends on the success of the project of the many nations and minorities that build up the culture(s) of the continent to create a common identity for themselves, while preserving their own separate identities as well. This volume of essays offers its readers a glance of Europe’s cultural identity, past, present and projected.

IDENTITY AND IDENTITY-BUILDING IN EUROPE:

A CITIZENSHIP PERSPECTIVE1

LÉONCE BEKEMANS

Introduction

History illustrates that Europe is a dynamic and evolving entity with many faces, multiple identities and diversified forms of cooperation. Europe is a 2,000-year-old civilisation with a multiplicity of cultures; it is also a socio-economic model and exhibits a unique integration process. The whole of European history is characterised by forms of and attempts at economic, political, military and cultural cooperation as part of the search for equilibrium between integration and diversity within certain contours. Europe is however in the first place a community of shared values; it is a value-based community, based on values such as the centrality of the human being, freedom, equality, respect for human rights, and acceptance of diversity as an asset, tolerance, justice and solidarity. Europe is also a political project: “we are not forming a coalition of states, we are uniting people” Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European integration process said in 1950. Today it presents itself as a diversified but coherent societal model shaped by vague geographical frontiers, fundamental values of freedom, solidarity and respect for the common cultural heritage and shared historical experiences of others.

In his essay “The Crisis of the Mind” Paul Valéry2, the French poet and philosopher, describes the common characteristics of Europe. It is a

1 A first version of this chapter was presented at the Workshop “The European Citizen from the Perspectives of the Humanities, Reconceptualising the European Citizen: Identity, Culture, Religion, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 16 Nov. 2012. 2 “The Crisis of the Mind” was written at the request of John Middleton Murry. “La Crise de l’esprit” originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published

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Europe of the spirit which is shaped by the legacies of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, has made humanism its foundation and is rooted in Christianity. This means that Europe is a world of historical references, memories and experiences shared by people.

The commonalities of this cultural heritage, briefly of the cultural specificities of Europe and the Europeans, concern: 1) the rescue of history from memory with a focus on ideas which travel irrespective of borders; 2) the move beyond assimilation and multiculturalism towards European interculturalism so that the management of diversity and of living with differences is the focal point; 3) the acceptance of change so that the dialogues and mutual listening become the driving social force; and 4) the learning from humility so that Europe can draw from its religious and non-religious traditions and from its Christian roots in learning how to practice humility. In his 1922 public lecture Paul Valéry defines the “Homo Europaeus” as: “a man in whom the European mind can come to its full realisation. Wherever the names of Caesar, Caius. Trajan, and Virgil, of Moses and St. Paul, and of Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid have had simultaneous meaning and authority, there is Europe. Every race and land that has been successively Romanized, Christianized, and, as regards the mind, disciplined by the Greeks, is absolutely European.”3

In his book The Origins of European Civilisation4 Hendrik Brugmans, a committed European federalist, first rector of the College of Europe and converted Christian, identified two major elements of European civilisation: the active participation to its many spiritual heritages and a series of historical experiences from the Roman Empire onwards. Consequently, he distinguished three phases in the process of European civilisation: the Empire of Constantine which is a Mediterranean Europe (Saint Augustine); a Medieval or Christian Europe and the Europe of the Nation state. A fourth Europe is now taking shape. We should therefore not forget that the Mediterranean area has been the cradle of European civilisation, the Europe of culture and ideas, the genius loci.5 It is in the

the same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Française. (From History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, Vol. 10:. 23-36). 3 Jeroen Vanheste, “The Idea of Europe,” in T.S. Eliot in Perspective, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 56. 4 Hendrik Brugmans, Les Origines de la Civilization (Liège: Georges Thone, 1958). 5 This thesis is well supported in Hendrik Brugmans, Théorie des Grands Espaces. Trois Etapes de la Civilisation Européenne (Lisboa: Instituto Superior de Ciêncas Sociais e Politica Ultamarina, 1963); and Hendrik Brugmans, “Europe: One

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broader space of today’s Europe that Jeroen Vanheste rightly places the original virtue of the spirit of humanism and Christianity, namely democracy, dialogue, and respect for the rights and harmonious development, which implies a common heritage and values rooted in Christianity.6

In short, Europe presents a multiple of faces, multiple identities, and multiple expressions and experiences. They are presented by myths, historical figures, patrons, political and moral leaders, and founding fathers. In this process Christianity constitutes a force for unity and solidarity in and outside Europe. Identity and identity-building have been examined by numerous scholars from various disciplines and perspectives. Many have contributed to an understanding of the complexity and the dynamism of these terms and have even offered theoretical instruments to deal with their changing realities. However identity remains an open concept, increasingly shaped by growing interdependencies and transformations in the current international system. The globalising world is characterised by some asymmetry between the growing extra-territorial nature of power relations and the continuing territoriality of the ways in which people live their everyday lives.

The European Union can be perceived as a unique but complex system of governance with a policy mix of supranational and intergovernmental elements. After many centuries of rivalries and wars among European countries, the end of the Second World War paved the way for a peace-building process of integration. This process has followed a “neo-functionalist” step-by-step approach very much embodied by Jean Monnet, envisaging spill-over effects from the economy to the political area and beyond. We are convinced that the only way of making people identify with Europe and build a sense of belonging without trying to replace national affiliations or marginalise regional or national identities is the development of a community driven political project, embodied in a set of shared values and common principles. Such a political consensus might give coherence to its actions, legitimacy to its institutions and inspire the citizens of Europe.

Civilization, One Destiny, One Vocation,” in Dream, Adventure, Reality, ed. Hendrik Brugmans (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 11-39. 6 Jeroen Vanheste, Guardians of the Humanist Legacy, The Classicism of T.S. Eliot’s Criterion Network and its Relevance to our Postmodern World (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2007).

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I. Conceptual Framework

1. Concept of Identity Identity is related to the way individuals reach certain self-awareness, in relation to their family, social or ethnic group, language, culture, religious affiliation and political commitment. It is often expressed by the idea of “belonging.” Therefore psychological and social factors play an important role in creating that awareness. As identity always implies both a strong interaction between the individual and the group and an affirmation of a group as distinct from other groups, its political implications are fundamental. This is especially the case in the different ways identity can be experienced or exploited. However, identity determination is not a constant invariable process, but changes over time according to criteria such as birth, family, language, religion, territory, etc. Nowadays this has become more complex with the heightened mobility of people and the trespassing of visual and virtual borders; it has also become more disturbed by the growing individualisation and vagueness of the moral norms within society. In short, given the growing interdependent trends of globalisation in today’s world a shift has taken place from a more static definition of identity to a more contextual and dynamic understanding of identity. Such a relational identity requires an open attitude towards “the Other.” It requires a desire to listen to them and to induce comprehension of and benefit from dialogue with them. However many people are still afraid that intercultural encounters result in a loss of identity and create insecurity. Therefore, to overcome the perception of “the Other” as potential threat, it is necessary to build the sense of belonging as close as possible to the citizen and to valorise local communities and cities as living places of intercultural conviviality. Subsequently, a spill-over effect can support the building up of identities, characterised as belonging to a group differentiated but sharing a basic set of common values and interests.

2. Concept of European Identity

In search of the identity of Europe we have to accept that Europe presents a whole range of peoples and thus a great diversity of languages, cultures and religions. In theory and in practice Europe should be seen as an added (enriched) value to our multiple identities. The European identity relates to a community of shared values such as solidarity, the rule of law, respect