What is a European Identity? The Emergence of a Shared Ethical Self-Understanding in the European Union

European identity; European public space; identity; normative political theory

CRETA (Centrum fürreflektierte Textanalyse)– FachübergreifendeMethodenentwicklung in denDigital Humanities

This paper will present the concept of the newly established Stuttgart DH Center CRETA, which unites very different text-oriented disciplines such as literature, linguistics, history, political science, and philosophy, and which, on the other hand, not only applies methods and modeling techniques from machine learning, computational linguistics, and computer graphic visualization, but has begun to integrate them into a common DH methodology of deep reflective text analysis. Such a further development of the method inventory of the Digital Humanities is a long way and needs many participants. However, we can already illustrate aspects of the conception with case studies of scenarios from ongoing digital humanities projects, and it seems important to us to put the approach up for broad discussion

Collective Identity as Shared Ethical Self-Understanding: The Case of the Emerging European Identity

Against the common view that a European identity is a functional precondition for legitimate EU governance, this article argues that conceptual weaknesses of the term ‘collective identity’ have led to a confusion of several analytic dimensions of ‘identity’ and to an overestimation of strong forms of collective identity. Insights provided by analytic philosophy will be introduced in order to redefine and differentiate ‘collective identity’. The ways in which people refer to themselves as members of we-groups will be outlined and illustrated in order to contribute to an innovative model of the problem and therefore the policy-related formation of collective identities. The article concludes that a strong European identity is not a functional precondition for legitimate everyday democratic governance in the EU. Only in extraordinary situations and in order to institutionalize integration in ethically sensitive policy fields is it necessary that EU citizens discursively agree on an ethical self-understanding of their way of lif

European identity as commercium and communio in transnational debate on wars and humanitarian military interventions

In the discussion on the prospects for democratic reform in the European Union, a collective European identity features prominently among the preconditions of greater democracy. The lack of a common European identity in the realm of foreign, security and defence policy has often been lamented. This paper contributes to this discussion by distinguishing conceptually between two dimensions of collective identity: the pragmatic problem-solving dimension of being members of a commercium on the one hand, and the ethical dimension of being members of a communio on the other. This paper also presents data from a long-term, cross-national empirical investigation of the issue. Do the ‘Europeans’ refer to themselves as Europeans when speaking from the participant perspective? If they do, what do they mean – the EU as a problem-solving commercium or an ethical communio? The paper presents analyses of a full sample of 489,508 newspaper articles on wars and humanitarian military interventions published in the leading conservative and liberal newspapers of six EU member states, and the US as a comparative case, between January 1990 and March 2006. While most of the scientific discourse centres around the communio-dimension, I highlight the importance and empirical presence of the commercium-dimension of European identity

Debating humanitarian military interventions in the European public sphere

What kind of democracy might fit the developing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) given the political developments and the evolution of public debate on security and defence issues over the last twenty years? Different model-designs for a more democratic European Union (EU) in general and a democratized Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) in particular have been proposed. This paper contributes to answering this question by investigating whether and in which ways Europeans were included in a transnational European debate on humanitarian military interventions after the Cold War (1990-2005/2006). The paper analyses a full sample of 108 677 newspaper articles published in the leading conservative and liberal newspapers of six EU member states, and the US as a comparative case. It demonstrates that the ‘national’ arenas of political communication are thematically intertwined and allow ordinary citizens to make up their minds about common European issues in this highly controversial and normatively particularly sensitive realm. Transnational political communication is currently not satisfyingly fed into representative democratic institutions. However, ‘hermetic communicative borders’ between national publics are non-existent and are a poor excuse for a lack of political will to democratise the EU – one way or the other

L’identité Européenne entre commercium et communio

L’échec du référendum irlandais sur le traité de Lisbonne (2008), de même que celui des référendums français et hollandais sur le traité de la Constitution européenne (2005) semblent avoir donné définitivement raison à la critique communautarienne de la politique d’intégration de l’Union européenne (UE) : les communauratiens soutiennent que les citoyens de l’UE ont d’abord besoin de partager une identité européenne avant d’accepter une régulation de leur vivre ensemble au travers de règles et..