Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

42 John Hutchinson
latter represents major shifts of loyalty away from national to other allegiances,
perhaps to a European identity. Differentiating between the two may be complex,
but such major shifts are usually accompanied by explicit justifications and
controversy. We should look to structural factors to account for such shifts. Whether
there have been major shifts will be addressed in later section.
Nation-states and Europe
Is the increasing integration of Europe bringing about the enmeshing of national
with European identities, so that the nation as a self-contained individuality is
giving way? Most commentators admit that such Pan-European consciousness
as exists is confined to elite political, business, bureaucratic, trade union and media
networks, but claim that as European integration deepens, so a participation in
this project will broaden. These perspectives imply a new cultural basis is being
created of a European pluricentred system of decision-making.
This is doubtful for two reasons. First, there has always been a consciousness,
at the elite level, of belonging to a European as well as to a local culture. Second,
from their very beginning, nations, aware of their part in a multi-actor civilisation,
defined themselves as contributors to a European civilisation, and the modern
history of Europe is the story of a struggle between the great powers over which
nationalist vision of Europe would prevail.
From the early Middle Ages a Europe existed (at least at the elite level) as a family
of cultures (cf. Anthony Smith (1992)), knit by Latin Christianity built on the heritage
of the Roman Empire, dynastic intermarriage, the rise of a system of diplomacy
and later international treaties. In the early modern period a French royal-court
culture defined the codes of the European aristocracy, and later the movements of
the Enlightenment and Romanticism provided a common conceptual language
of European politics and culture, including the emerging nationalisms of the
subcontinent.
Even before this, when ethnic identities crystallised they often defined themselves
by reference to a European mission, as participants against an extra-European
‘other’ or in an intra-European battle of values. The thousand year war against
Islam saw the Spanish, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, and Russians legitimising themselves
as antemurale defenders of Christian Europe, identities that continue to
exert a hold. The wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformations resulted in
English, Dutch, French and Spanish states defining themselves as elect defenders
of Protestantism or Catholicism, but only after civil wars within emerging national
states in which proponents of the rival religious causes looked for support to
European allies. In short the (religious) battles to define the nation and European
civilisation were interlinked. Foreign intervention could effect the triumph of one
side: William of Orange secured the English Glorious (Protestant) Revolution
of 1688.
Modern national identities crystallised round the assault of the French-led
Enlightenment on the European ancien régime. First Republicans, then Napoleon,
evoked France as the modern Rome that would ensure a civilisational zone of peace