European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

28 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYIdentity is no longer determined by factors of adhesion or belongingto a clan, country or lineage. We live in an age in which identity isincreasingly built by people through their interaction with groups withwhich they are associated in one way or another and through whichthey find their places in the society they belong to. These groups areshaped by new generations in multicultural, multiethnic and multireligiousways. Encounters take place through any means of transport,including the various types of navigation and walks on cyberspace.The development of these processes demands educational notionsthat make possible the integration of so many differences andpluralities in both individual identities and referents of collectiveidentity. Identity and citizenship being interdependent realities, in aworld of great migratory movements such as our own, the way inwhich these dimensions are shaped constitutes the greatest challengein the construction of an open Europe in an interdependent world.Such are the concerns which have led us to organize this Seminar.We have received the Declaration of Laeken about the Future of theEuropean Union with great interest and we have made its aims ourown: “We have to resolve three basic challenges: how to bring citizens,and primarily the young, closer to the European design, and theEuropean institutions; how to organize politics and the Europeanpolitical area in an enlarged Europe; how to develop the Union into astabilizing factor and a model in the new, multipolar world”.The programme of this Seminar aims at facing the challenge posedby the objectives of Laeken: how to bring citizens, and particularly theyoung, closer to the European design and to the enlargement process;how to promote real knowledge about European institutions and toanticipate the role that Europe is called to play at the beginning of thethird millennium. In short, we would like to strengthen the value ofEurope, from the institutional referent to the personal referent whichmeans being European, feeling European, considering oneselfEuropean, understanding oneself as European and living European inan interdependent world in which the areas subdued by poverty showtheir face to Europe through the permanent migratory waves whichreach our countries.Surely, one of the greatest tasks the European Union has to face is thatof encouraging new and comprehensible reflection upon what we callEuropean Identity, a new and committed definition of our responsibility asEuropeans, an increasing interest in the very meaning of Europeanintegration in the modern world and the creation of a European ethos.The fundamental values of this ethos are alterity and plurality asplurality nowadays refers not only to regional diversities developed