European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

192 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYsome meaning beyond denoting their abstract belonging to oneof the signatories to the Maastricht Treaty. These citizens thentake some form of representation of what Europe is and of whatconcerns Europe as a reference framework for their social andpolitical life.This presentation aims at considering the aspects of our socioculturalcontext that are relevant in order to promote the assimilation of thislast type of attitudes —the promotion of a social European identity—in the school environment. This is our goal when discussing the past,the present and the future of the European Union. I will not intend,then, to come up with some sort of «true history» of the EU, but tosimply put into order the key elements of the context the teaching of“Europeanness” should refer to, leaving the task of how to materialisethe actual teaching to those who know the educational sphere better.The past, present and future of the Union will not then be consideredhere as real history would. The only past, present and future elementsthat will be dealt with are those which significantly currently determinethe assimilation context of European identity. In the first part of thisnarrative, I will describe how I understand such assimilation and itscontextual determinants in order to justify the filters through which Iwill be looking at these determining factors throughout their history.Next, I will describe the scenario resulting from such screening.Identity assimilation and its determining factorsWe start off in life being “someone”, given the physical andpsychological features with which we are born: one´s own unique traitsintimately merged between themselves. Yet in this early life stage weignore who we are because we have no differentiated awareness ofour characteristics. It is only very soon afterwards (as EvolutionaryPsychology has shown) that we begin to distinctly know ourselvesthrough being identified by our surrounding adults and through selfidentificationand comparison with some of the elementary figures inour environment: child versus adults, a particular gender, a particularposition within the family, etc. When we identified ourselves with someof these figures, we did not only apprehend differentiated selfrepresentationsenabling us to fill in the self-awareness void with whichwe began life. These figures also allowed us to start defining ourselvesin relation to elementary qualifiers which were also absorbed from ourfamily environment, such as loved/unloved, good/bad, strong/weak,skilful/clumsy, etc.