Reading Response #1

For me, the most important idea that our class lectures, the Wright book, and the Judt book have all touched upon with regard to the European Union is the importance of identity politics. In class professor King noted Kissinger’s comic remark about phoning Europe, but it is certainly indicative of a larger issue. It calls into question what it means to be European and how that can be identified. Perhaps more importantly, even if we can establish what it means to be European, it is inevitably going to require a multicultural definition that also calls into question not only the types of policies that the EU can enact (especially at the second and third pillar of European integration) but also the extent to which the EU can expand before it kills the possibility of actually defining what it means to be European beyond mere geographical distinctions.

For example, the Wright book which we discussed last week showed how in Britain the development of various factions within merely the UK, which is a much smaller entity than the EU, has been solved through devolution. Devolution was necessary in Britain because individuals identified more with Scotland, for example, than they did with Britain. In a similar fashion, the EU looks as if it can only succeed to the extent that it enables people to be European over being British, Belgian, German, etc. because the EU seeks to do the opposite of devolve power – its goal is to elevate issues to a body with supranational authority.

Although Wright hinted to the possibility that the EU may have had some success in causing even Britain with its stable political tradition to accept such an authority, Judt’s analysis of postwar Europe suggests that the EU “project” must first resolve issues of identity before it can delve into substantive issues beyond economic policy. Judt makes a striking comment in his introduction about how the destruction of a multicultural identity within European states actually laid the foundation for the postwar success of those states. He says that Stalin and Hitler provided the foundation for the successes of the modern, progressive European welfare state by “[blasting] flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid” (9).

Fast forward to today and the enlargement of EU has brought back all the issues of identity that the world wars had in some twisted ways resolved by pushing everyone into “their own country” where they lived among “their own people.” From everything I’ve read on the issue, the biggest barrier to Turkey’s inclusion, for example, may not be its political structure as much as its strong Muslim cultural heritage. Is being European, then, fundamentally being Christian? Or is it not being Muslim? Or both? Or neither?

Judt underlines this fact when he says that “Europe is facing a multicultural future,” and that this “has thrown into relief not just Europe’s current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead ‘others’ of Europe’s past were cast far out of mind” (9). This ultimately presents the most important dilemma for the expansion of the EU and its authority. As the definition of what it means to be European expands and encompasses more cultures and peoples, its identity becomes murkier. Expansion strengthens the power of the EU, but weakens European identity, a fundamental source of its legitimacy and power. Finally, identity is often characterized in opposition, i.e. in contrast to the “other” that Judt is referring to and it is worth noting that US policymakers would thus be wise to make sure that the EU does not define itself in contrast to America in the future.