European identity as a contrast or an extension of national identity? on the meaning of European identity

Abstract

For a long time questions of identity have primarily been a topic of sociology and social psychology, but meanwhile they dispersed into political science as well. Moreover, in Germany, the topic of national identity has long been marginalized in science as a result of shame about the nationalistic excesses of World War II and of the feeling that the ongoing processes of modernization, Europeanization, and globalization will undermine the nation's importance as a frame of societal integration as well as the central political community. Germany's unification, the fall of the iron curtain, and the processes of nation (re-) building in the successor states of the Soviet Empire on the one hand and the enforced process of European integration in the first years of the 21th century on the other hand have brought the topic of collective political identity back to the minds of politicians, citizens, and researchers.