European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

202 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYthey presented the relevance of European reality. This is obvious anddoes not need further explanation. Educators might, however, finddifficulties selecting such events, useful for the transmission purpose.They run the risk of finding only macroeconomic events or else eventslinked to the international balance of military powers or even to artisticor sport superiority, and almost nothing relevant related to intra-European solidarity and to what has been coined “Social Europe”.However, this is the essence of European identity that, supposedly,ought to be transmitted through education.The future of Europe and the pedagogy of the transmissionof EuropeannessThe previous sections have gone through the elements of the pastand the present of Europe which are nowadays inevitably reflected onthe idea of Europeanness currently manifesting itself in the daily socialand political lives of European adults, which, in turn, affects the student´sassimilation of the same idea. There is a risk that the assimilated idea ofEuropeanness might be very different to the purified vision of Europethat its thinkers have been outlining since last century. Images of adifferent Europe in which the governments and citizens of the variousEuropean countries see the issues concerning the citizens of the otherEuropean nations as their own and which regard the contribution tothe management and resolution of such issues as being in their owninterest. It is clear that this is not the situation we have today and thatreaching that goal would imply a great change in the popular politicalculture in the entire Continent.For this reason, it is not pointless to finish this reflection stressing thatassimilation of identities is not only carried out through identificationwith pre-existing identity patterns. On the contrary, the analyses of theprocesses of identity evolution show that they also often lead toidentification with ideal figures, and especially so in childhood andyouth.This is, in my viewpoint, an important aspect to be considered inthe pedagogy of europeanization, but only insofar as this pedagogyactually highlights what the Europe of the future should be and mean,in contrast with the Europe of wars and rivalries, the Europe of selfcentredcountries, the Europe fighting problems that can be tackled atthe scale of individual States.This contrast between the Europe of the future and the moretruthful and prosaic image of the continent present in the minds of the