European and National Identity

“Where are you from?”

Imagine a student from the Technical University of Moldova who spends a semester at a university in Germany on an Erasmus+ grant. On the first day, her classmates ask her: “Where are you from?”

The answer seems simple, but it is not. She can say “from Moldova”, and some classmates will look the country up on a map. She can say “from Chișinău”, “from Eastern Europe”, “I’m Moldovan”, “I’m a Romanian from Bessarabia”, “I’m Gagauz” or “I speak Russian at home, but I study in Romanian”. Each answer says something true. Each also leaves something out.

“Where are you from?” is really a question about identity: who you are, which group you belong to, what ties you to other people. In Moldova, debates about language, about history, about “East” and “West” are often, at bottom, debates about identity.

In Lecture 9 we talked about “United in diversity”. Today we go further: what is the “diversity” that must be preserved (national identities), and what could the “unity” be (a European identity)?

Two senses of “the same”: idem and ipse

The word “identity” has two senses that are easily mixed up. The first is logical: to be the same thing. “The morning star” and “the evening star” are identical, because they are the same planet, Venus. The second is personal: what makes me myself and not someone else.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), in his book Oneself as Another (1990), gave these senses Latin names.

Idem identity (Lat. “the same”): what stays the same over time: fingerprints, genetic code, the name in your passport, some character traits. Example: the identity the border officer checks.

Ipse identity (Lat. “oneself”): what remains “me” even when I change, as a person answerable for myself. Example: I promise something today and keep my word ten years later, although I have changed in the meantime.

Peoples also change in the idem sense: the language evolves, borders move, customs are lost. Today’s Moldova does not resemble the Moldavia of Stephen the Great, nor the Moldavian SSR. And yet we say “we” across the centuries. What allows us to do so?

Narrative identity: we are a story

Ricoeur’s answer: the two senses are linked by a story. I am the character of the story I tell about myself. It links the past (where I come from), the present (what I do) and the future (what I want to become). It is not invented from nothing, but it is not fixed for ever either: we reinterpret and rewrite it when we live through something new.

Narrative identity: the identity of a person or a people as a story that links past, present and future and can be rewritten. Example: “I grew up in Cahul, I came to Chișinău to study, I want to go back and start a business.”

The idea has three consequences. Identity changes without being lost: someone who moves to the city or learns a new language adds a chapter, but does not lose their story. Identity is formed with others: the title of the book says exactly this, the self understands itself “as another”, through others. The same past can be told in several ways.

Here lies the danger too: whoever tells the history of a people can select, exaggerate or hide. Narrative identity calls for an ethics of memory: an honest story that does not forget the suffering of others.

“Who am I?” and “who are we?”

Personal identity answers the question “who am I?”. Collective identity answers the question “who are we?”: the family, the village, the denomination, the ethnic group, the nation, the generation, the profession.

Part of who I am comes from the groups I belong to. But a collective identity is not a thing, like a mountain or a river. It exists because people recognise themselves in a “we”, tell themselves a common story and act together.

Try it: write five words that answer “Who am I?” (for example “daughter”, “engineer”, “Moldovan”, “Orthodox”, “Zimbru fan”). How many are collective identities? Which would you be willing to change, and which not? Does the word “European” appear?

Two answers: ethnic and civic

To talk about national identity, we need an idea of what a nation is. European thought has produced two broad answers.

The ethnic conception, often associated with German Romanticism (for example with J. G. Herder and J. G. Fichte): the nation is a community of origin, language and culture that exists before the state. You belong to it by birth.

The civic conception, often associated with the French Revolution: the nation is the community of citizens who live under the same laws and want to go on living together.

The distinction is a simplified scheme. In reality, almost all nations combine elements of both. Moldova’s Constitution, for example, speaks both of “the people” with its history and of citizens equal before the law.

Renan: a daily plebiscite

In 1882, the French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892) gave a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “What is a nation?”. He examined the usual criteria one by one: race, language, religion, economic interests, geography. None is enough. Switzerland has four official languages and is a nation. The English and the Americans speak the same language and are different nations.

“The existence of a nation is (if you will pardon the metaphor) a daily plebiscite, just as the existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life.”Ernest Renan, “What is a nation?” (1882), ch. III

For Renan, a nation has two components: a heritage (“a rich legacy of memories”) and a present consent, the wish to live together.

Renan adds an uncomfortable remark: a nation is also formed through forgetting, because people leave behind the violence of their shared past. This is what Ricoeur said too: the common story is always selective.

Anderson: the imagined community

A century later, the political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) called the nation an “imagined community” (Imagined Communities, 1983).

Imagined community: a community whose members will never all know each other personally, but each of whom carries in mind the image of their community. “Imagined” does not mean “false”. Example: you know no one in Soroca, but when the national team scores, you celebrate together with them.

Anderson shows that this image was formed historically, above all through newspapers, books and schooling in the national language. People who had never met read the same news on the same day and felt part of the same “we”.

If nations are imagined communities formed over time, the question becomes legitimate: could Europe become such a community too?

We see ourselves through others’ eyes

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) comes from a country with two language communities: the English-speaking one and the French-speaking one in Quebec. In the essay “The Politics of Recognition” (1992), he starts from a simple observation: identity is not formed in isolation, but in dialogue with others.

“Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” (1992)

Recognition (Taylor’s key term): the confirmation of your identity and worth by others. For Taylor, a basic human need, not a whim. Example: being addressed correctly, in your own language, at a public office.

Equal dignity and respect for difference

Taylor describes two forms of recognition that can come into tension.

The politics of equal dignity: all people are treated alike, with the same rights, whatever their origin. It is the idea we met in Kant and in Lecture 7, on human dignity.

The politics of difference: each person and each group has a unique identity that must be recognised as such: their language, culture and memory. Treating everyone “the same” can mean, in practice, imposing the culture of the majority.

For a speaker of Gagauz or Bulgarian in southern Moldova, recognition means more than equal rights on paper: schools, broadcasts, documents in their language, respect for the community’s history.

How the European Union responds

The Union has tried to respond to both forms of recognition. On the one hand, all its citizens have the same rights: equal dignity. On the other, the EU has 24 official languages, and its main acts are published in all of them. By treaty (Article 3 TEU), the Union commits itself to respect its “rich cultural and linguistic diversity”: the politics of difference.

A citizen of Malta or Estonia can write to the European institutions in their own language and has the right to an answer in the same language. A small language is not treated as second-class.

Germany after 1945: loyalty without “blood and soil”

The expression “constitutional patriotism” (Germ. Verfassungspatriotismus) was proposed in 1979 by the German political scientist Dolf Sternberger. It became widely known through the philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026).

The context is Germany after 1945. After the crimes of Nazi nationalism, many Germans felt they could no longer relate to the nation through “blood and soil”. How, then, can someone still be attached to their country? Habermas’s answer: through attachment to the principles of the democratic constitution.

Constitutional patriotism (Germ. Verfassungspatriotismus): loyalty to a political community founded on the principles of the constitution (human dignity, fundamental rights, the rule of law, democracy), not on a shared ethnic origin. Example: you are proud that your country has free elections and independent judges.

Loyalty is directed not at a “people” understood as an extended family, but at a democratic way of life that citizens build together: they debate, vote and feel responsible for their common institutions.

The postnational constellation

In the book The Postnational Constellation (1998), Habermas applies this idea to Europe. His argument, simplified, has five steps, reconstructed alongside.

Habermas also observes that national identity was itself, historically, a construction. People learned to feel solidarity with strangers from other regions of their country (recall Anderson). There is no reason in principle why a similar process could not happen at European level.

The conclusion is not that European identity replaces national identity. It is that a civic European identity can be added to the national one, just as national identity was once added to regional identity.

Three objections

Habermas’s idea has been strongly criticised.

Too thin. Constitutional principles are abstract and universal. Why would I be more attached to Moldova’s constitution than to Canada’s, if both proclaim the same values? An identity also needs concrete things: language, landscape, history, holidays. People say, ironically, that “nobody dies for a constitution”.

The communitarian objection, raised by thinkers close to Taylor: values do not float in the air; they are lived in concrete cultures. Even a constitution is read through a particular history.

The Eurosceptic objection: a European identity “built from above” would be artificial and would serve the elites in Brussels, not the citizens. We return to it in Lecture 13.

Habermas’s reply: constitutional patriotism does not require you to give up culture. It separates the majority culture from the criterion of citizenship. You can keep your language, traditions and memory, but the state cannot impose them on other citizens as a condition of belonging.

Critical thinking: a quotation without a source

In debates about European identity, a sentence attributed to Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of European integration, often circulates: “If I were to start again, I would start with culture.” Historians of European integration have looked for it in Monnet’s memoirs and speeches and have not found it. The sentence is considered apocryphal.

The lesson: a quotation used in an argument must be checked at the source: who said it, where, when? If the source is missing, the argument can no longer appeal to Monnet’s authority. The idea can still be discussed, but on its own merits.

An authentic formula, which Monnet used in his speeches of the 1950s (for example in Washington, in 1952), is: “We are not forming coalitions of states, we are uniting men.”

Sen: the illusion of a single identity

The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen (b. 1933), a Nobel laureate, wrote the book Identity and Violence in 2006. He observes that the same person can be, without any contradiction, a citizen of a country, a member of a religious community, a woman, an engineer, a vegetarian, a football fan, a jazz lover and an environmental activist (after Sen’s example, paraphrased).

The danger arises when someone tells us that only one of these identities counts and that all the others must yield to it. Sen calls this “the illusion of singular identity”. It lies behind many violent conflicts: people are reduced to a single label (“Muslim”, “Hindu”, “foreigner”) and pushed against each other.

Multiple identities: the fact that every person belongs to several groups at once, without one belonging cancelling the others. Example: you are from Ungheni, Moldovan and European at the same time.

What the treaties say

European citizenship was introduced by the Maastricht Treaty (1992). The Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (Article 20) states that it is additional to national citizenship and does not replace it. It brings concrete rights: to move and reside in another member state, to vote and stand in local and European elections where you live, and consular protection.

What is more, the Treaty on European Union (Article 4(2)) obliges the Union to respect the national identities of the member states, “inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional” (paraphrased). And Article 3 requires respect for cultural and linguistic diversity.

Legally, the European project does not aim to abolish national identities; it commits itself to protecting them. One question remains open: what happens when a European rule conflicts with a national tradition? Such conflicts do exist and reach, for example, constitutional courts.

The case of the Republic of Moldova

For Moldova, multiple identities are not a theoretical topic. Moldovans/Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Gagauz, Bulgarians, Roma and other communities live here. Many citizens speak two languages every day. Many also hold the citizenship of an EU member state, above all Romania, and have worked or studied in Italy, Germany or France.

The debate about the name of the language and about the relationship between “Moldovan” and “Romanian” identity has been one of the most heated of the last 35 years. A few landmarks are shown alongside.

This course does not settle these disputes. What interests us is their form: they are often framed as exclusive choices, “either… or…”. Ricoeur, Taylor, Habermas and Sen show us that identity can be thought of differently.

A case study: Brexit

On 23 June 2016, the citizens of the United Kingdom voted, with 51.9% of the vote, to leave the European Union. The exit took place on 31 January 2020. The main slogan of the Leave campaign was “Take back control”.

The debate was, to a large extent, about identity and sovereignty. Many voters had never felt “European”, but British or English, and saw the Union as a foreign authority. Polls after the referendum showed that the vote was closely linked to the way people described their identity.

Brexit shows that a European identity cannot be taken for granted. If citizens do not recognise themselves in the common project, it loses its legitimacy. We will return to Brexit in Module III, as an example of a debate about truth and manipulation.

Critical thinking: the false dilemma “either national or European”

Analyse the argument: “If Moldova joins the EU, we will lose our identity. Either we remain Moldovans or we become Europeans.”

The second sentence is a false dilemma: it presents two options as if they were the only ones and excluded each other. It ignores the third possibility, supported by the EU treaties themselves: identities that add to one another.

The first sentence is a prediction and must be backed by evidence. Did Poland, Lithuania or Romania lose their national identity after 2004 and 2007? What changed and what did not?

False dilemma: a logical fallacy that presents only two options, as if they were the only possible ones and excluded each other. Example: “Either you are with us or you are against us.”

Mind the principle of charitable interpretation: behind the argument there may be a real worry, such as young people leaving the country, villages emptying or an ever more uniform consumer culture. A good answer does not only take the fallacy apart; it also discusses the worry.

Three answers to the lecture’s question

Back to the question: does European integration threaten or strengthen national identity? We can distinguish three answers, each with its objection.

Threat: national identity requires full sovereignty, and the transfer of powers and open borders erode culture. Strength: small states protect their identity better together than alone. Transformation: identity is a story (Ricoeur), and integration adds a new chapter whose meaning depends on how citizens live it and tell it.

There is no imposed answer. What matters is to argue it well: which position would you choose, and which objection would you find hardest to counter?

How to argue your position

Whatever your position, the lecture gives you some criteria for arguing it well. Distinguish the senses of the word “identity”. Do not reduce people to a single label. Check quotations and predictions. Recognise the dignity of those who identify differently from you.

As an exercise for the argumentative essay, frame your position following the scheme alongside. Lecture 11 will take each step in turn.