European Identity and National Attachment: Harmony or Dissonance

Abstract

The paper is designed to answer such questions as where does the development of a new common European identity stand, which countries or regions show stronger or weaker European identification inside the EU, how has this changed over the past decades in the process of the enlargement of Europe, what is the value content of the new common identity, and how is this affecting traditional national attachment and identity. The empirical foundation of our study is the international comparative empirical research series of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), in the years 1995 and 2003, which was designed to reconstruct the stock of knowledge of national and European identities in the member states. This study uses temporal and spatial comparison to consider national connectedness and the characteristics of European identity in various countries across Europe. Based on this data, in our paper we make an effort to explore what characterizes national identity in Europe, how people see foreigners and domestic minorities, whether we can identify the development of a transnational or supranational identity that goes beyond national identity, if there is a new frame of identification for people in Europe and to what extent we can expect increasing conflicts between the two types of identities.