European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

294 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYindeed an inseparable aspect to it; however, from this viewpoint,Europe is rather a reality which integrates diverse expressions diverselyconnected to human life in a physical-geographical domain of blurredlimits.Let us say, in contrast, lifting ourselves above that physicality andlooking once again for the proximity of those types of complex entities—“nation” and “state”— that the European reality, as a social reality,has more to do with time than with space. I mean to say: it is a type ofreality that more than being in space, is a reality woven by time, and assuch it does not allow itself to be seen entirely as an entity thatappears before one´s eyes —as Heidegger would say; it is reality that isdiscovered as it is being told, related, narrated— to express it using theterminology of Ricoeurian hermeneutics; it is history, or historicalreality 2 . You could argue that this is the case of all human realities orrealities expressive of the human. This is indeed obvious, except thatthe more complex the realities are, the more complex are theirhistorical character and their justification. Their account also becomesmore difficult and complex.Why do I resort to the categories of “state” and “nation” to speakabout European identity from an ethical perspective?Firstly, because saying “Europe” today immediately makes us thinkabout a group of entities concerned with the Project of a EuropeanUnion or Community, a project understood as open. A project whoseconstituent members immediately identify themselves as national statesor Nation-States.Secondly, because when the immense existing sociological,historical, ethical-political, ethical and anthropological literature aboutEurope —telling us about it from within and with regards to itsrelationships with the rest of the world— glimpses the diffuse subjectof social identities, it brings us and takes us around theories whosetheme is interwoven with these concepts (“nation” and “state”) inreference to European modernity.The first point has invited me not to despise the fact that suchconcepts protagonize a situation in which something that is talked2In effect, we integrate a pile of facts from the past in the understanding of thistotality that here and now we call Europe, in such a way that the facts seem toefficiently conform such reality before us. This does not prevent those same past factsfrom having efficiently integrated the comprehension of factic totalities of sense inother arenas or levels of comprehension, in independence from the one we are nowconsidering; because those facts of the past whose neurological points are particularindividuals, are part of history on a diversity of levels.