THE AMBIGUITY OF EUROPE:‘Identity crisis’ or ‘situation normal’? Open Access

There is a great deal of talk about Europe. From the communiqués and cheer-leading of summit meetings, to conversation and controversy in tavernas, bodegas, cafés, beer cellars, bars and pubs, people talk about Europe. Newspaper and television commentators have opinions; parties and politicians have policies and rhetorics. Europe is a topic for school curricula and university degree courses. There are hundreds of books about ‘Europe’. A Google search for web-sites with ‘European Union’ in their title – just for example – generates more than 700,000 hits. So yes, there is a great deal of talk about Europe. But what do people actually mean when they talk about ‘Europe’, or about ‘being European’?

This question has been a live issue since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It appears to have become increasingly urgent since successive European Union (EU) enlargements, during the ongoing disarray over the EU Constitution, and, not least, because Turkey's candidature is firmly on the EU enlargement agenda. The question matters because people can appear to be talking to each other in the same terms about Europe and the EU but, actually, be talking about different things. It matters because public attitudes to the contemporary EU project – whether support, indifference or hostility – are likely to be entangled in the many different concepts or meanings of Europe. Maps and meanings – conceptual overlaps and attitudinal ambiguities – cannot easily be disentangled. Surveys such as Eurobarometer or local opinion polls, which are our primary sources of knowledge about support for the EU, do not capture this. They can only offer a very simple view of what is actually a complex situation that is probably in perpetual motion.

Finally, the question of what Europe means matters because, if the public words of politicians are to be taken at face value, a ‘legitimation crisis’ – even an ‘identity crisis’ – has developed within, and with respect to, the European Union (Weiss 2002). A sense of this, even if it is not always explicit, can be discerned in much recent academic writing about the EU project (Kevin 2000; af Malmborg and Stråth 2002; Stråth 2002; Delanty 2003; Ifversen 2003). Although the main reason for this ‘crisis’ appears to be EU enlargements towards the east, it arguably dates back at least to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the re-unification of Germany (Balibar 1991: 7).

It is, however, worth considering the possibility that there has always been something of an issue, if not actually a crisis, about the identity of Europe and the legitimacy of the European political project. Given the size of that project, recent and more distant history, and uneven economic prosperity, how could it be otherwise? More to the point, perhaps, instability and uncertainty may simply be intrinsic to the EU, because ‘it must work with materials destined for the very projects which it seeks to supersede – the national identities which are ultimately to be eradicated’ (Smith 1992: 67; see also Abélès 2000). Perhaps ‘Europe’ is generically complex, ambiguous, and difficult to grasp; likely to be defined differently by different people and institutions from their own distinct points of view.

Exploring the implications of this view is the main thrust of this paper. The point is to query the political view that the EU is faced by new uncertainty about its legitimacy or identity – sufficient to amount to a crisis – by suggesting that uncertainty is not actually particularly surprising. I offer this alternative view for two reasons:

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  first, Europe is not, and never has been, a precise notion or entity, however it is viewed; and

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  second, anthropology and sociology tell us that identity is never clear-cut or precisely defined and bounded.

I shall begin with the first of these reasons, outlining briefly a number of different ways in which ‘Europe’ can be imagined and understood; these are models and meanings that depend on point of view and context. Point of view, is, in fact, deeply died in the wool of my account. Europe can only be considered, or seen, from specific historical–geographical–cultural positions. Both as a citizen and a social scientist with an area specialism, my position is north-western Europe. Someone from southern Europe or the Balkans, for example, would, as like as not, come up with a different set of models and meanings of Europe. Far from suggesting a weakness of this account, or that the enterprise is misconceived, this is further support for the argument that I am putting forward.

There are at least two main approaches to the polysemy that is ‘Europe’. The first is realist description, which looks at the meanings of Europe that are current ‘out there’. Norman Davies, for example, perhaps the pre-eminent contemporary Anglophone historian of Europe, suggests that there are five different ways to ‘see’ Europe (2006: 5–21): from within it can be understood as geographical Europe, civilizational Europe, political Europe, and ‘racial’ Europe; then there is the Europe that is seen from outside. Ifversen's model of Europe (2002), as a multi-facetted concept that draws on geography, culture, history, politics and economics, is similar in some respects.

The second approach leans on historical narratives to look at the shifting anchorage in time and place of ‘Europe’. Leontidou (2004) shows how, over millennia, an idea of Europe was first centred in the Eastern Mediterranean of antiquity (and included North Africa), emerged later in medieval Christendom, and subsequently found another expression in the post-1945 drive to European integration. Delanty's ‘civilizational’ approach (2003) is broadly comparable, even if it offers if a somewhat different narrative: he identifies three modernities, or civilizational constellations – Western Christendom, Eastern Christian Orthodoxy, and Ottoman Islam – the historical interplay of which has created modern Europe.

Each of these approaches has its merits; each contributes to the critical ‘de-naturalization’ of the notion of Europe that is necessary if we are to write the sociology of Europe. In what follows I will adopt a realist approach that follows the spirit, if not the exact letter, of Davies’ scheme, in a brief exploration of the meanings and materials out of which contemporary working notions of Europe are constructed. I hope to avoid the recent unfortunate resonances of the notion of ‘civilization’ (Huntington 1996) by talking about ‘culture’ instead,¹ and I shall expand Davies’ five categories to six, dividing his ‘political Europe’ into two distinct versions of the project. Thus, the six Europes that I will explore in this paper are: territorial Europe, ‘racial’ Europe, cultural Europe, the outsiders’ Europe, Union Europe, and economic Europe.

What follows is not in any sense offered as a last word on the subject. It might make a great deal of sense, for example, to identify ‘military Europe’ as a distinctive imagining of geo-political space: a battlefield stretching on land from the Urals to the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, possibly including colonies, dominions and other spheres of influence around the globe, and the high seas too. This strategic concept is at least as old as the French Republican ideal – and probably a good deal older – and definitely includes Turkey. Given the space available, however, I have had to draw a line somewhere. In addition, each version of ‘Europe’ that I discuss below encompasses its own internal diversity of meanings and models. I do not claim to have captured them all: it is, in fact, extremely unlikely. So this exercise is limited in its scope. Nonetheless, the main bases are covered.

Today, the territory of Europe is conventionally defined as the land mass bounded by the western Atlantic seaboard, the Mediterranean to the south, the Ural Mountains in the east, and the northern Arctic seaboard. This peninsula is the ‘continent’ of Europe and, defined in this way, it looks a fairly straightforward matter. However, no less than any of the other Europes that I shall discuss, it is an invention. Europe's present eastern extension as far as the Urals, for example, only became widely accepted during the nineteenth century, the eighteenth-century result of Catherine the Great's ambition to reposition Muscovy out of the geo-political periphery, the suggestion of a Swede in her service (Davies 1996: 8, 2006: 7). Before that, however, the River Don had been the conventionally recognized eastern boundary of Europe.

The definition and boundaries of this particular invention are neither self-evident nor wholly clear. One obvious question, for example, is what about the offshore islands, especially Britain, Ireland, Malta, and the most easterly of the Aegean Islands? And this is before we consider the more far-flung candidates for inclusion, such as Iceland, the Faeroes, Svalbard and the Azores. Another question, also fairly obvious, concerns Asia Minor – not an innocent naming by anyone's reckoning – which is a good bit west of the Urals and somewhat north of southern Spain. Finally, to exhaust the immediately obvious areas of gross uncertainty, the eastern boundary is only ‘geographically’ definite in some respects. To define that boundary as the Urals, and then draw a line down their middle, only deals with part of the problem. The continental locations of some of the south-eastern Russian and ex-Soviet republics remain unclear.

If nothing else, the discussion above suggests that geographical images of Europe are unlikely to be untouched by the demands of political and/or cultural interests. The bigger picture also points us in roughly the same direction: vagueness and disagreement about what constitutes a continent in general allows for enough uncertainty to encourage all kinds of agendas. Although ‘Europe’ is conventionally one of the seven continents to which we were introduced in primary school, its status as such is not ‘naturally’ self-evident. The same applies to most, if not all, the other continents: they are imagined. Europe's definition as a continent in its own right – rather than as the western end of the greater continent of Eurasia, as some twentieth-century Soviet geographers insisted – finds its legitimation in antiquity, in the thoroughly political Greek distinction between Europe and Asia along an aquatic fault line from the Aegean to the Black Sea.² Whatever its roots might be, the notion of Europe as a definable place informs the next concept of Europe.

This reflects or expresses the crude ‘racial’ category ‘European’. The word ‘race’ must remain firmly within scare quotes in order to emphasize that, although ‘races’ are no more natural or self-evident than continents, the notion that the human species is divided into definite, real ‘races’ has been responsible for a great deal more human misery than the geographers’ categorizations of global terra firma.

This image of Europe, as the home of ‘racial’ Europeans, whatever they might be, has at least six different, and overlapping, historical roots: a long history of successive ‘barbarian’ invasions and settlements, from the east; an equally long history of relationships with North Africa, culminating in the Moorish occupation of Iberia and their eventual expulsion; anti-Semitism, beginning at least as early as the seventh or eight centuries of the Christian era (Cohn 1967: 21–2); the Crusades, first against the Islamic Saracens in the Holy Land, but subsequently against the pagans of northern central Europe and the eastern Baltic; imperial and colonial expansion, beginning with the new worlds of the Americas and eventually assuming a truly global sweep; and, finally, scientific ‘racial’ theories, from the first formulations of the seventeenth century to the elaborations of Eugenics and the euthanasia and genocide of the twentieth-century National Socialist ‘racial state’ in Germany (Burleigh and Wippermannn 1991; Banton 1998). Once again we are dealing with something that is thoroughly imagined, within a long and complex political history.

Given that history, it comes as no surprise to find that there is neither consensus nor clarity. Instead we find a series of distinctions, marking inclusion and exclusion, within which something called ‘European’ – which can crudely, but accurately, be glossed as ‘white’ – may be contrasted with a range of Others: Asiatics, Africans, Arabs, Jews, and generic ‘non-whites’. The category ‘European’ itself is not, however, clearly defined. There are, for example, hierarchical ‘racial’ distinctions within Europe: Nordic versus Mediterranean, Aryan versus Slav, Anglo-Saxon versus Celt, the sedentary versus the Gypsy, and so on. There is also a further source of ambiguity in that what counts as ‘European’ – and perhaps more to the point what does not – probably came into clearest focus when seen from outside Europe, particularly in the colonies.

Scientific ‘racial’ theorizing may be out of fashion and blunt ‘racial’ talk may no longer be a polite public discourse in most parts of Europe, but ‘race’ has not gone away. It has been acceptably re-coded in alternative discourses about ‘ethnic minorities’, ‘immigrants’, ‘asylum seekers’, etc., it is implicit within those models of citizenship that emphasize descent rather than birth, blood rather than soil (Bauman 1992), it remains current in everyday vernacular speech, and the category ‘European’ is polysemic and carries with it a great deal of implicit semantic freight. ‘Racial’ Europe may be imagined but it is very far from imaginary.

Not least in discourses about ‘heritage’, ‘racial’ Europe is systematically entangled with culture. In the notion of European culture, we encounter a complex sedimentary palimpsest of classical antiquity, Christendom, paganism, and post-Renaissance secularism; this Europe is a historical narrative that begins in Greece and Rome, and moves on, through Christianization and the institution of hereditary monarchy, to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the nineteenth-century democratic revolutions, and twentieth century modernism. It finds ready expression in notions such as ‘European literature’, ‘European anthropology’, and, yes, ‘European civilization’.

The latter, in particular, is a matter of high culture, with a capital ‘C’: literature, drama, classical music and opera, the visual arts, architecture, haute cuisine, and couture. In a word, it is canonical culture and art. But it is also, inter alia, a matter of state élites, class hierarchies, pecuniary styles, administrative ethics, manners, education, standards of service, professions, holiday destinations and much else besides. It is a matter, at least in part, of exclusive civility, patronage, and distinction. Nor, as the notion of the canon might imply, is it uncontested. At the bars and tables of Steiner's ‘Europe of the café’ (cited in Delanty 1995: 128), in the squabbling self-regard of self-styled modernists and postmodernists, on the political right and left, behind the bunker walls of canonical national chauvinism, and, not least, in the ressentiment that warms itself around the dining tables of the commercial middle classes, oppositional currents that well out of the local bog holes of nationalism, class conflict, and social ambition wash backwards and forwards over the imagined landscape of European culture.

Against this – or perhaps in harmony with it – there is also a powerful image of a demotic European culture, which is largely a Europe of peasants and small farmers. Reflecting the fact that, in much of Europe, mass urbanization and nation-state formation coincided historically, ‘the urban’ is also, in some respects at least, ‘the national’: nations are symbolized by and in their capital cities, for example. London is not Paris is not Rome is not Copenhagen. However, despite the sturdy peasantries that populate some European nations’ romantic self-imaginings, rural Europe transcends, in important historical senses, state boundaries. The Märchen collected by the brothers Grimm in Germany, for example, mirror in important respects Evald Tang Kristensen's Danish eventyr and sagn, and both overlap significantly with the English tales classified by Katharine Briggs and the Italian stories eventually assembled by Italo Calvino. The image of a distinctively European peasant culture, which appears to have at least some basis in a shared vernacular imagination of some antiquity, lingers in European historical, ethnological and anthropological traditions. There is no embarrassment in describing oneself as a ‘Europeanist’ anthropologist or reading about The European Peasantry (Franklin 1969).

Other complexities crowd around us. Cultural Europe also necessarily invokes and feeds off images of the Other, in relations with the east (Orientalism and fear), the African south (missionary enlightenment and aid), America (envy and condescension), and the global ex-imperium in general (strategic ‘realism’ and pragmatic exploitation). All of which is rendered even more complex and ambiguous by the significance of the near east to European ‘civilization’ – as the source of agriculture, urbanism and writing, Christianity, and medieval Arab medicine and science – the foundational importance of Europe to the modern Americas, Australia and Africa, and the global dominance of the English language.

Christianity is a looming presence in all of this. Europe, as we presently know it, is unthinkable without the Judaeo-Christian tradition (as, indeed, is the umma, the world of Islam). Indeed, as Davies points out, ‘“Europe” is a relatively modern idea, which gradually replaced the earlier concept of Christendom in a complex intellectual process lasting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries’ (1996: 7). But to acknowledge this raises the question of the eastern borderlands, and the still resonant geo-political legacies of the great Christian schism: is the Orthodox tradition ‘European’? Are Greece, Russia, Serbia and Bulgaria ‘European’? Might this lead us to ask, further, whether there is something – or somewhere – that lies between Europe and Asia? This line of inquiry also demands that we think about European Jews, and their, arguably disproportionate, contribution to ‘European culture’ (not least, recently, in the participation of Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest). Modern ideological politics might also come into that discussion, as might secularization, neither of which can be understood outside a Christian history. Whichever way we look at it, ‘European culture’ is also revealed as a matter of ‘European identity’, a para-ethnic identification, most visible in contestations at its boundaries.

To talk about boundaries, identity and ethnicity – even ‘para-ethnicity’ – immediately points to the importance of interaction with Others, because it is in those interactions, at least in part, that identification happens (and in the specific case of Europe, see Delanty 1995: 84–99; Cederman 2000; Stråth 2002: 391–7). In this case, given Europe's size, there is a whole host of Others, and hence a whole host of Europes-as-seen-from-outside. There would be little profit in attempting to summaries even a representative sample (whatever that might look like). Instead, I want to concentrate on three external images of Europe, as seen from the United States, from Russia, and from Africa.

The view from the United States can be summarise as grounded in some significant main themes. First, because of the history of initial colonization and subsequent mass immigration, Europe is, either directly or indirectly, the first and second source of the United States, its culture and its politics; having outstripped Europe economically since makes for a mixture of cultural deference – at its most potent when it is unacknowledged – and materialist condescension. Second, and it is a related point, Europe is seen as a class-ridden ancien regime that the American open frontier of opportunity for all has transcended and revealed as morally bankrupt. Third, Europe was an unparalleled source of foreign conflict, military commitment and disorder for the United States during the twentieth century, beginning and ending in the Balkans. Finally, for a majority of US citizens, Europe is, at best, somewhere they encounter on television and in the movies; at worst, it is terra completely incognita.

From the Russian viewpoint, Europe looks quite different. For a start, and setting the matter of religion aside, the notion of ‘European Russia’ makes sense, certainly from the eighteenth century onwards: Russia played its full part in the defeat of Napoleon and the subsequent European political settlement, the Romanovs belonged to the European web of royal kinship, French was the official language of government, and the Crimean War, although precipitated by conflict with Turkey, was a thoroughly European war. What is more, Russian culture can make as powerful a claim to its place in the European canon as any. However, following the Bolshevik success, Russia found itself marginalized, if not actually excluded from Europe altogether. This changed again, somewhat, after perestroika and the collapse of communism, but it only changed somewhat. Such inclusion as there now is depends on money – investment and consumption – rather than politics or mutual recognition. Finally, Russia sees itself as having saved Europe from fascism, and still counts the cost.

If the United States comes from Europe, and Russia is in some senses part of it, the history of Africa is utterly different in that Europe came to Africa, only to leave it again. British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian colonialism, and complicated local post-colonial relationships with Europe since, make it easy for hostility, suspicion and dependence to co-exist with institutions that are often based on European models and European languages – and not only English – as media of government. On the one hand, Europe has been the source of ‘development’ and emiseration, of fragile nationhood and inter-ethnic strife; on the other, it is a comfort zone to which wealthy members of African élites can retreat, and a land of opportunity sufficiently enticing for the poor to risk their lives in the hands of people smugglers.

So from the perspective of the United States, there is superiority, deference, apprehension and ignorance; for the Russians, Europe evokes inclusion and exclusion, resentment and sacrifice; in Africa we see exploitation, emulation, desire and desperation. Although these are all, of course, gross over-generalizations, which smooth over the cracks and crevices of long, complex histories and ignore a good deal more than they include, they arguably also summarise some truths about some aspects of the outsiders’ Europe. Not least that that, from all three points of view, and even at this degree of abstraction, complexity and ambivalence are more in evidence than clarity of definition.

The development of the EU is rooted in a history of Franco-German conflict and imperial ambition, arguably extending back as far as the Napoleonic response to revolution in France. Following the 1951 creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, its six member states signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, to form the European Economic Community (EEC, the ‘Common Market’). Since the Maastricht and Edinburgh Treaties of 1992 and 1993, transforming the EEC into the EU, the Union's working realities have moved beyond economic co-operation and free trade to the realization of an altogether political project, in which its roots in European conflict avoidance have, if anything, become clearer. Other dimensions of the EU include the fledgling European Defence Agency, Europol, and Euratom. The EU embodies a vision of political cohesion, free trade, open scientific co-operation and a meaningful shared international identity; a convergence, in differing degrees, of culture, politics and economics. From the perspective of Brussels and Strasbourg, the Union aspires to transcend European diversity and the ‘natural’ mutual suspicion of nation-states to create a functioning political pluralism, to preserve and extend the post-1945 western European peace, and to create an international counterweight to the United States, China and India in a globalizing world.

On the face of it, this is the most unambiguous image of Europe: at any point in time, the boundary of the EU is clearly defined. Following successive enlargements, beginning in 1973, with the largest in 2004, the number of member states has increased to 27, with a current direction of travel to the east that is largely a response to the post-1989 transformations of the ex-Soviet bloc. Turkey, Croatia and the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia are currently recognized as candidates for membership of the EU, while Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia are recognized as potential candidates.

When it comes to the practicalities of travel, however, the EU's boundary is not completely consistent: there are borders, and borders. As a federation of nation-states, the EU's border is, at any point, necessarily also the border of a member state; in fact, it only becomes the EU border because of its national status. There is, however, some variation in what happens at those borders. The 1985 Schengen Agreement created an extensive European zone within which travellers are effectively free of border controls. Although all EU member states are signatories, only 15 have implemented it, at the time of writing, and the UK and Ireland signed up to very little of the Agreement in the first place. What is more, the Schengen zone includes non-EU states: Iceland and Norway, as a result of the existing Nordic passport agreement, and Switzerland. So it is possible actually to enter the EU without clearing the border controls of a member state.

Boundaries are not just a matter of border crossings, either. Membership of the EU does not amount to the same package for all member states First, there is a difference in convenience of travel and business within the Euro zone and between the other member states. Second, as part of transitional arrangements attendant upon recent enlargements there is effectively a hierarchical grading of membership, in that the nationals of more recent members have differential access to the labour markets of some more established members.

Nor do membership conditions, currencies and boundaries tell the whole story. The practical political meanings of the Union have yet to be settled. European, as opposed to national, citizenship, for example, remains a largely empty category. The 2004 European Constitution has yet to be ratified by all member states, and the chance of this happening appears to be more than remote; at the time of writing, 2007, the German presidency's proposed treaty solution seems no more likely to clarify the matter. Nor is the shape and direction of future enlargement certain: since its first application to join, in 1987, Turkey has again, 150 years after the Russian Tsar described the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, become a difficult European issue, and the Macedonian candidature is currently resisted by Greece. Finally, there appears to be an intrinsic need for foreword motion: ‘The pursuit of a European common good only makes sense in reference to a future … an indefinite quest whose accomplishment is forever postponed’ (Abélès 2000: 50). From this point of view, the normal state of affairs for the EU is that it is a work in progress, and a somewhat uncertain work, at best.

Other sites of uncertainty and conflict within the Union also muddy the waters. Several issues pose the same, as yet unresolved, question about the relationship between the sovereignty of states and the authority of the Union: the legal and political capacity of the EU to act as a genuinely corporate actor with respect to foreign policy and defence; the theoretically absolute but practically uncertain priority of EU law over national law; the relationship between member nations, the European parliament and the executive (the Commission); and the relationship between member states and the ‘Europe of the regions’. In addition, there are ongoing tensions between the EU's political and economic goals: the Union's symbolic identity – its flag and anthem – remains weak, the gathering dominance of the English language in the Union's affairs, following recent enlargements, is not universally welcomed, and there remain eurosceptical parties in many member states.

Finally the Council of Europe, which was founded in 1949, continues to offer an alternative vision of a united Europe which does not have integrationist aspirations, aiming instead to create a European public space within which certain kinds of political and legal issues can be pursued. Now with 46 members, including Russia, it is the parent organization of the European Commission of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe.

If conflict avoidance is the end towards which the EEC-EU project aims, historically the development of economic co-operation and interdependence has been the prime means of its achievement. Currently, the further economic integration of the EU is stalled because not all member states participate in the Economic and Monetary Union project or have adopted the euro. The problems are partly political – the symbolic value attached to retention of their currency remains high in some member states, such as the UK and Denmark – and partly economic, in that setting interest rates in common that work effectively for all participating states, given the wide range of their economic conditions, has so far proved to be impossible. Given these realities, there is the possibility, if not likelihood, that, contrary to its original goals, the euro zone will drive a wedge into the integration project that will become institutionalized, creating two economic Europes within the EU.

The EU – and the EEC before it – is not the only pan-European economic entity, however, which is why it is necessary to talk about an Economic Europe separate from the Union itself. EFTA, the European Free Trade Area, for example, was established in 1960 with seven member states, and has slowly been shrinking since, as most of its members have joined the EEC–EU. Currently its membership comprises Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. In its origins, EFTA was also a political project of sorts, in that it was intended as a counter-balance to the six-state EEC, but today this has been superseded. In this sense, EFTA must be seen as now a failed project. Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein are also members of the European Economic Area (EEA), which was established in 1994, to give EFTA access to the EU's Single Market. Switzerland stayed outside the EEA, preferring to negotiate bi-lateral trade agreements with the EU.

In the six Europes that I have just described, many different images of Europe can be seen at play. These Europes, as mentioned earlier, do not exhaust the possibilities. In addition to the EU, EFTA and the Council of Europe, many other European organizations, governmental and non-governmental, could have been mentioned: academic societies, private sector trade associations and sporting federations are good examples, as is the European Space Agency. Although the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) includes the United States and Canada, it is headquartered in Brussels and its original raison d’être was post-1945 confrontation with the Soviet bloc in Europe, so it, too, has some claim to inclusion in Europe. Each of these organizations, to a greater or lesser extent, is founded upon its own distinctive imagery of what Europe is and what it should be.

It is also important to remember that organized, and organizing, images of Europe have not been confined to the post-1945 era. It may be flirting with anachronism to say so, but the Roman Empire can be thought of as the earliest historical vision of a functioning pan-European political entity, while the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire – and the notion of Christendom more generally – should also be counted (Smith 1992: 55). Napoleon's ambitions were, in the first instance at least, European, and the same was true for the Third Reich. It is also worth remembering – if only to challenge the western-Eurocentrism which has come to dominate thinking about Europe (Delanty 1995: 30–47, 2003; Davies 1996: 18–31, 2006: 22–60) – that at least one post-1945 European project, the Soviet sphere and the Warsaw Pact, was eventually a failure.

All of the Europes that I have discussed here have been ‘invented’ (Delanty 1995) or ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1983); from another point of view, they are a ‘fiction’ (Stråth 2002). They are all matters of history, process and social construction, and all require and evoke at least some collectively accepted imagery of Europe. That they are imagined does not, however, mean that they are imaginary (Jenkins 2004), or, as Stråth puts it, ‘Identity as a fiction does not undermine but rather helps to explain the power that the concept exercises’ (2002: 387). Even where they are not given shape and substance in institutions, territory, materiel and human agents, they are real enough in that they have consequences for what some people do and for the lives of some other people. What is more, these Europes and images of Europe are not ‘just there’: they have to be produced and reproduced, in institutional policies and procedures, in educational practices, in the representation of politics by the media, in everyday conversations, and in symbols, songs and other expressive forms.

Despite the diversity, there are a number of commonalities. First, the various Europes are not necessarily explicitly articulated; in fact, the implicit may be more the rule than the explicit (and much the more powerful). Second, these images of Europe are rooted in different histories of different lengths and characters, and these histories make a difference. Third, they overlap and agree with each other with greater or lesser degrees of fit; using a cartographic metaphor, we can imagine many more or less different maps of Europe superimposed on each other, with none being a precise fit with any other. What is more each map is in some respects – for some people, in some contexts – uncertain in its precise delineation, and may therefore come in several different versions. There is no one, clear and unambiguous image of Europe.

To say this is probably not to say very much; it is certainly not a new idea (cf. Abélès 2000; Ifversen 2002: 3). However, it is an idea that can bear reiteration as long as politicians and bureaucrats appear to hanker after clarity, order and meaningful integration. That desire is not necessarily problematic, and it is probably not avoidable: on the one hand, as has already been suggested, the EU is always likely to be a work in progress and, as such, needs goals to work towards; on the other, the EU is a large bureaucracy, and such organizations are oriented towards predictable formal rationality (which is not, of course, to suggest that they achieve it). It is, however, a desire that is unlikely to be satisfied: models and meanings of Europe have always, for a variety of reasons, been ambiguous. There is no reason to expect that this will change.

The second reason why I suggested that the ‘Europe’ is generically complex, ambiguous, and difficult to grasp, has to do with how identification works, as a process. In this respect, how can we begin to understand better these complexities and ambiguities? How can we begin to imagine Europe theoretically, rather than taking it for granted as a practical geo-political concept or simply dissolving it into the European Union? One way forward may be along the following lines.

First, it is important to recognize that ‘fuzzy’ boundaries and identifications are simply the norm for human collectivities, of all kinds, small or large. Elsewhere I have made this argument in detail, using as my examples a professional soccer club and a nation-state (Jenkins 2002a: 73–6, 2002b: 23–9), so I will be brief. Suffice it to say that there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about the ambiguity and uncertainty of Europe's contours, boundaries and meanings, or about the fact that Europe can be defined from a number of different points of view, and in a number of different ways that do not necessarily agree with each other.

This is, in fact, no more than to be expected, particularly given the complexities of Europe's long history, and the relative youth and boldness of the EU project itself. We can put the matter into proper context if we look across the Atlantic. The United States – after more than two centuries of nation-state building, founded on a dominant language and a shared set of political institutions, and with experience of collective adversity and external conflicts – is still arguably a political project in the making, with issues outstanding about collective identity, collective mission, membership, and boundaries: ‘All the important stories are still unfolding’ (Brogan 1990: 691). Why should the European Union be different? As already suggested, it is the expectation that Europe should be otherwise, an aspiration to ‘groupness’ that is, of course, part of the project, that is the source of the EU's ‘crisis’ of identity and legitimacy. That expectation is among the things that we need to analyze sociologically. Seen from the ‘reverse angle’ so beloved of television soccer coverage, we should also analyze the ‘cohesion’ and ‘integration’, such as it is, that the EU has so far been able to produce.

Second, the categories of ‘Europe’ and ‘European’, in all of their polysemy and complexity, need to be unpacked in proper detail and from as many different points of view as possible. Unless we are content to regard the somewhat abstract macro-conceptual level as the default position, important as the macro-concepts are, this can only be done locally and contextually. Through detailed empirical investigation – and, although I am an anthropologist, ethnography is not the only option – we need to draw out the meanings for actual people of the experiences, ideologies and cartographies of everyday life and discourse that touch upon ‘Europe’, even though they are not necessarily explicit. There are precedents for this enterprise (e.g., Jenkins 2000; Armbruster et al. 2003; Citrin and Sides 2004). Nor should this only be done within ‘local communities’: the élite worlds of pan-European politics and institutions are no less local and everyday, in their own way, and they are amenable to this kind of research, although access for primary research may be more difficult (e.g., McDonald 1997; Shore 2000; Zabusky 2002; Siapera 2004; Wodak 2004).

In part, this suggests an investigation of what Brubaker et al. (2004; see also Brubaker 2004: 64–87) have called ‘ethnicity as cognition’, approaching ethnic identification as contextually sensitive position-taking. Seen in this light, ethnic categories amount to perspectives on, and knowledge of, the world (see also Levine 1999). Classification alone is not enough, however, and meaning is not merely a matter of what people tell us, or themselves. The interactions, and the frequent distance, between what people say and what they do are no less important, if we hope to arrive at rounded understandings that do at least some justice to the complexities of what is going on. If we turn to the literature on ethnicity, particular that deriving from anthropology, we may begin to see a way to at least grasp the complexities.

Elsewhere I have outlined and explored what I call the ‘basic anthropological model of ethnicity’ (Jenkins 1997, 2002c). Derived immediately from the work of Fredrik Barth and Anthony Cohen and ultimately from Max Weber and Everett Hughes, and rooted in a more comprehensive model of identification in general (Jenkins 2004), it can be summarized briefly as follows:

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  ethnicity is a matter of differentiation, although identification always involves a dialectical interplay between similarity and difference;

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  ethnicity is a matter of shared meanings – what we conventionally call ‘culture’ – produced and reproduced during interaction;

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  ethnicity is no more fixed or unchanging than the way of life of which it is an aspect, or the situations in which it is produced and reproduced; and

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  ethnic identification is collective and individual, externalized in social interaction and the categorization of others, and internalized in personal self-identification.

Some other things need to be added to this understanding of ethnic identification. First, ethnicity is a broadly defined generic concept within which can be included a variety of similar idioms of identification, such as community, locality, region, nation, and ‘race’; the para-ethnic notion of ‘Europe’ certainly fits within this scheme. Using an analogy from chemistry, these can be though of as ‘allotropes of ethnicity’. Second, the interaction of similarity and difference during processes of identification necessarily creates classificatory hierarchies: oppositional categories come together in opposition to something else. Third, the variability and flexibility of ethnicity, and it is not always variable or flexible, is at least in part a matter of context and history. Fourth, ethnicity is as much a matter of external categorization as it is of self-identification. To say which is immediately to bring power into the equation. These points, taken together, amount to a case for applying this understanding of ethnic identification to the ‘question of Europe’, as I am considering it in this article.

A concrete example may begin to illustrate something of what this approach to ethnic identification looks like. Figure 1 summarizes a set of data about local identifications that I collected, in the form of jokes and narratives, during my fieldwork in a Danish town, Skive, in mid-Jutland, between 1996 and 1998 (see Jenkins 2000, 2006, 2008). By way of comparison, similar diagrams, but dealing with identity in Wales and Sicily, respectively, can be found elsewhere (Jenkins 1997: 41, 2002c). These diagrams, and the classificatory model of identification that they presuppose, clearly descends in a direct line from the segmentary models of kinship and corporate identity so dear to earlier generations of anthropologists. Like those models, it makes a claim that this scheme at least approximates to how the locals understand their identities. However, mindful of what Bourdieu called the unavoidable ‘synoptic illusion’ fostered by diagrammatic presentation (1977: 97–109), this scheme is offered in the certainty that it is utterly incomplete, and potentially misleading, in a number of senses.

In the first place, at any ‘level’ other oppositional possibilities might be possible. Denmark could, for example, be contrasted to Sweden or Norway – both locally and historically sensible options – which would have a knock-on consequence for the next ‘level’: shifting the focus of comparison through 180 degrees, instead of ‘Europe’, Scandinavia or Norden (‘the North’) now present themselves as possibilities, each of which can, in some senses, be contrasted to ‘Europe’. And, given that Sweden is a member of the EU and Norway is not, slightly different understandings of Europe would be implied. To further muddy the classificatory waters, Scandinavia or Norden are not exact equivalents for each other. What is more, in local discourses they are also sometimes contrasted with Germany, or southern Europe (Jenkins 2000).

Second, this diagram does not, and in its present form probably cannot, accommodate ‘racial’ categories. And although to do so would require another diagram, it is not to be denied that ‘racial’ categories are heavily implicated in local understandings of Danish and European identification. Northerners, or Scandinavians, can be contrasted ‘racially’ with southern or eastern Europeans. As Europeans these can all be contrasted with a wide range of non-Europeans. And, to add further complexity, it is not impossible to be a ‘non-European’ and count, through adoption or otherwise, as an authentic local.

Lastly, and most important, the notion of orderly ‘levels’ that is in-built in this diagram is fundamentally misleading, in several respects. First, it reduces the practices and contexts of everyday life to classificatory categories. Second, the local, the regional, the national and the supra-national are all present in everyday life. People do not move up or down the identificatory options that are available to them, through classificatory options of differing degrees of generality. Rather, the options presented in a diagram such as this are present and accessible simultaneously, not sequentially. The simultaneity of everyday life is, however, an awkward, if not impossible, reality to represent using language or diagrams, although diagrams may be somewhat better at it. Third, there is no hierarchy of significance: the availability, choice and relevance of identifications are dependent on the situation and personal history. Indeterminacy is fundamental: one can start in one ‘place’ and immediately a number of other options may present themselves, any or all of which may, or may not, map on to each other, or be relevant.

Given these problems, why present such a diagram? In part, precisely because those problems are an important part of the point that I am trying to make. There can be no more eloquent testimony to the overlapping polysemy and complexity of everyday identification and, in our case, of the notion of ‘Europe’. In this context, in order to be European, it is necessary to be Danish; in order to be Danish, however, it is necessary to be a local, from Skive, for example (which is where we might another diagram to accommodate ‘race’). Denmark may be a small place, but it is made up of many even smaller places. This is an obvious point to make about national identification, but it is easily and regularly overlooked. The extensive ‘imagined community’ of the modern nation-state is partly constructed out of, and during, everyday life in communities on a much smaller scale, right down to face-to-face neighbourhood life. The idioms of identification from the neighbourhood to the nation are all expressions of ‘being Danish’, and all necessary to be Danish. This means that they are also necessary to be European, which suggests that ‘being European’ will be different, depending on where one ‘comes from’, for a Dane or a Swede or a German. It even suggests that to be European might be different depending on whether one comes from Copenhagen or Skive.

In the second place, the openness and diversity presented in these classificatory hierarchies are important in their own right, for several reasons. The concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘European’, and whatever it is that they can be contrasted with, are not, for example, closed or determinate. Nor do classificatory hierarchies such as these simply represent formal semantic contrasts of similarity and difference: whatever else they are, and in all their imperfections, these suggest how every‘ local identifications interact with much more abstract identifications. To return to a point just made above, this suggests what others have commented on (e.g., Anderson 1999), that concepts of ‘Europe’ cannot be understood in isolation from regional and national identifications. This is not simply a matter of ‘context’; rather, ‘Europe’ actually cannot make any sense without these other categories and their meanings (and, of course, vice versa); Europe cannot make sense without these other places.

The model also allows us to appreciate, at least in sketchy outline, how personal identification becomes expressed collectively, and collective identification may come to matter to individuals. That context is important to the contrasts that are made and options that are presented, allows for the pursuit of interests, individually or more collectively: people are confronted with choices of identification, which allow for strategizing. A more complex version of the model – and, in truth, the possibilities, although not infinite, are probably more complex than can easily be apprehended – might also be able to accommodate the role in self-identification of external categorization, or perceived categorization, and responses to it, the sense of how one (or we) is (are) seen in the eyes of others.

In closing, I want to return to my earlier observation, that people can talk to each other in the same terms but mean very different things. Anthony Cohen considers this to be one of the foundations of the ‘symbolic construction of community’ (1985), or, in more general terms, the symbolic construction of collectivity and collective identification. For Cohen, a communal or collective identity is a loosely-specified construction – and the vaguer the better in some respects – which is expressed symbolically, and which allows people who do not share a consensus to ‘come together’ in a shared sense of ‘belonging’ without exploring the many things that may divide them. This works axiomatically rather than explicitly, depending as much on what is not said as on what is said.

Useful as it may be in other contexts (Jenkins 2004: 108–23), it is not self-evident that this model of collective identification works for a self-conscious, organized project such the creation and integration of a shared European political space, the EU. Can an institution such as this rely on tacit, axiomatic integration? It is likely to be necessary, but there are plausible reasons to doubt that it is sufficient. In this case, what people say matters: in the axiomatic tacit way of everyday life and political behaviour actors may think they are engaged in one thing, while they are actually caught up in something else quite different, which they do not want. Much resistance to explicit Europeanization may be grounded in tacit models and meanings of Europe, and therefore difficult to articulate but easy to misrepresent. People may view the EU through the ‘wrong’ conceptual lens – this applies, for example, to those who thought that ‘Europe’ was only an economic project – and this may produce disaffection. The EU project may become caught up in other Europes, such as ‘Fortress Europe’, for example. Politicians may think they are saying one thing, but what they say is likely to be understood in another: they may think they are explicitly ‘on message’, but at the same time may be articulating other tacit models of Europe.

All of which suggests that we need to understand the polysemy and complexity of Europe better than we do at present. An approach such as the one that I have tentatively outlined in this paper is arguably one way to do this. We certainly need more detailed local studies of models and meanings of Europe, and how they interact with other identifications. We need more detailed studies of the political discourses and practices of élites, to explore their models and meanings of Europe. And we need a better understanding of how and why models and meanings of Europe have had such major consequences, some of them dire to the point of catastrophe, for the everyday lives of the millions of people who live in their shade and, of course, cultivate them.

To return to the question posed in the title, is the ambiguity of Europe a ‘crisis’ or a ‘normal situation’? At first look, the answer is that it is completely routine. Chronic might be an even better word. On a second look, this conclusion does not necessarily rule out the possibility of crisis. There may be an endemic and ongoing crisis, or recurrent crises (cf. Abélès 2000). If that is even partly true, then the EU project is inherently ambiguous and likely to remain so. If that is true, then the work in progress is likely never to be finished, which may, of course, in the transmutation of recurrent violent strife between nation-states into recurrent crises about the identity and legitimacy of a pan-national and pan-ethnic entity, be the greatest significance of the EU project.

I am grateful to three anonymous referees, to Alan Scott, Rogers Brubaker and Gerard Delanty, and to the original audience at the Jean Monnet Summer School at the University of Trento in September 2005, for their comments. Revising the paper for publication was more than usually difficult due to the contradictory comments of the referees – who wanted different parts of the paper expanded or shortened – but I have done my best to act on every comment that I could. The paper is much better as a result.

Richard Jenkins was trained as an anthropologist at Queen's Belfast and Cambridge, and has done research in Northern Ireland, England, Wales and Denmark. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Among his books are Foundations of Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Pierre Bourdieu (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2002), Social Identity (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2004), and Rethinking Ethnicity (Sage, 2nd edition, 2008).