European identity, post-Western Europe, and complex cultural diversity

In this chapter, we will argue that while European identity was arguably safely ‘locked up’ in a Cold War binary vision of the world, divided between East and West, in which Europe was mostly presented as an immanent part of a wider entity referred to as ‘the West’ or the ‘free world’, since the events of 1989, and in particular since the inclusion of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the European integration project, such an unproblematised equation of Europe with a wider notion of the West is less and less accepted or adhered to. Rather, it is clear that since the end of the Cold War, European identity is in flux, while different narratives of Europe display different attachments to notions of the West.