European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE MEANING OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY: PAST, PRESENT OR FUTURE PROJECT 197evolutionary conceptions. There is written evidence that, at the beginningof the Enlightenment, the meaning of Europe started evolvingtowards meaning the most advanced area of the world. Before thisperiod, Europeanness was associated with some form of domination;afterwards it became associated with the idea of belonging to the mostadvanced continent. In both cases, the other continents are regarded asinferior.This way of understanding the relationships between European andnon-European identities is what undoubtedly gave a meaning to thestatement of the 18 th century French ambassador who asserted thatEurope ended in the Pyrenees, and also to the expression according towhich Ortega would have been “Europeic acid on Spain´s flesh”. Manyunderstood European identity this way, and those who now believethat the average Spaniard who prides himself on identifying himself asEuropean and of being considered European actually associates beingEuropean with being a member of the elitist group of advancedcountries, is not far from the truth. I timidly confess that, maybe due tomy current dedication to research on migrations, I am concerned withthe possibility of this being the hidden semiotics of Europeanness thatwe may be transmitting. This semiotics carries the seeds of unfair andunfounded discrimination against people from other continents.Let us return to the semiotic or cultural evolution of the meaning ofEuropeanness. Whilst in Spain we worried about whether othersregarded us as advanced or not, in other countries such as France orItaly other concerns with respect to the continent started being felt.Saint Simon, for example, at the beginning of the 19 th century, wasworried about the injustice created by the industrial revolution inEurope and claimed that the overcoming of such injustice had to betackled at continental level, thus seeing the geographical partition ofthe world in terms of task spaces and not of domination or superiority.However, Saint Simon´s approach fell on deaf ears, as did theconferences for “The European Union” (sic) fostered in the last third ofthe 19 th century by the Austrian Richard von Koudenhove, who wasmainly concerned with the elimination of the political and militaryconflicts which had been devastating Europe, more than any otherterritory, since the 16 th century. He also saw Europe mainly as a spacefor different tasks, not from the standpoint of superiority over otherpeoples.Finally, it was after World War II when seeing Europe as a unitaryspace of problems to be solved became inevitable. A space of problemsbecause war and the world´s economic development had violentlybrought them to light. A unitary space to face those problems because