Mirrors of Us: European Political Identity and the Others’ Image of the EU

The idea that the political identity of a group is defined by and dependent on primarily internal elements (language, history, customs and traditions, etc.) is widely shared. Most participants in the debate on European identity largely agree with this view. In theoretical terms, neither ‘neo- nationalist’, culturally- based positions, nor the ‘European culturalist’ position pay much attention to the role of the relationship with external Others in the process of identity formation. As for those who focus attention primarily on political and social rather than cultural dynamics (Habermas and Derrida among others), the relationship with external Others is recognized to be important, but is not fully investigated. Most research focuses attention on the Europeans’ degree of self- recognition as belonging to a group (particularly through analysis based on opinion polls), the process of transformation of European national identities or the shared values embedded in social discourse or in EU policies. In most of this literature, the analysis of the relationship between ‘us’ and external Others is limited to the process of boundary formation around our group. On the contrary, I believe that the construction of difference with respect to outside groups is a fundamental component of a process of identity formation in Europe. These dynamics have mainly been explored in the grey areas between inside and outside represented by the process of European enlargement, migration and discrimination in the EU, or the relationship itself between the European and the (transformed) national identity. These studies, however, do not investigate the role of the interaction with external Others in the process of identity formation in the EU. Such a gap in the literature needs to be filled in both theoretical and empirical terms: this chapter aims to contribute to filling the gap: It first identifies three important functions that external Others perform which, if acknowledged and processed by the political group, feed the process of identity formation within this group: distinctiveness, recognition, and labelling. Then, it shows what types of distinctiveness, recognition and labelling emerge from the external image of the EU as collected in a sample of 16 non- EU (and mainly non- European) countries. Finally, it considers the possible repercussions of such an external image on European identity and proposes possible paths of research to carry on the investigation of a largely unexplored dimension of European identity.