European Identity: Things Better Left Unsaid?

Review by Samantha Arnold

Politics Department, University of Winnipeg

The Europeans: Political Identity in an Emerging Polity. By David Michael Green. CO: LynneRienner, 2007. 215 pp., $49.95 hardcover (ISBN: 9781588263551).

There is such a thing, offers David Michael Green, as a ‘‘European iden-tity’’—and it matters. In fact, according to Green, it matters quite a bit. Not onlydoes he link its existence to the ongoing success of the European integrationproject, Green also asserts that the study of European identity is vital to a con-ceptual refinement of integration studies. Green further insists that Europeanidentity matters because ‘‘it is, at the end of the day, the only true preventativefor war,’’ arguing that the existence of a collective ‘‘we’’ makes it impossible toidentify ‘‘others’’ against whom wars can be waged. And, provocatively, Greenclaims that European identity ‘‘represents something substantially different fromthat which has heretofore been observed in the world’’ (p. 6), and positionsEuropean identity as a having the ‘‘potential to be to postmodernity what nation-alism was to modernity’’ (p. 16).

These claims are, to varying degrees, amplified throughout the text andestablish the rationale for the basic purpose of this book—to examine Euro-pean identity. This Green sets out to do in the hope of offering a contributionto the ‘‘great stream of contemporary political inquiry.’’ In navigating thatstream, he states his intention to steer ‘‘slightly more in the direction of solidempiricism and slightly away from improbable grasps at theory, slightly moretoward real-world relevance and slightly away from…the discipline’s current‘instinct for the capillary’’ (p. xiii). Green is skilled at the rudder; indeed, hemanages to avoid an explicit engagement with theory—improbable or otherwi-se—almost entirely.

In a contribution in which a concept as contested and contestable as‘‘identity’’ is given pride of place as the subject of inquiry, it is remarkable thatthere is virtually no acknowledgement, beyond summary references in the textor brief mentions in the notes, of the burgeoning literature on identity in inter-national relations. In a footnote (1, p. 29), Green makes it clear that his refer-ence to European identity as ‘‘postmodern’’ is to be understood as an historical ⁄temporal descriptor, and is not to be confused with postmodernism as ‘‘an epis-temology, agenda, or style of analysis.’’ This, in the same footnote, he explicitlydisavows. Fair enough, but there are rich and influential debates within the‘‘postmodern’’ or poststructural literature on identity which reasonably could beengaged. This is particularly so given that Green explicitly (and I believe, inaccu-rately) invokes poststructural insights, via Edward Said, to make one of the coreassertions informing this text, i.e., that the existence of a European identitywould prevent war insofar as it prevents the identification of European ‘‘others’’against whom to wage war. Similarly, Green also notes that the process offorming a European identity might be accelerated if an external ‘‘other’’ wasperceived as posing a threat to Europe (pp. 44, 160).

Aside from the poststructural literature, the question of identity is treated verybroadly within international relations; in laying out some of the challenges

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International Studies Review (2008) 10, 354–356

involved in a study of identity, Green does refer to an important debate betweenthe ‘‘primordialists’’ and the ‘‘constructivists,’’ but offers very little in the way ofconceptual or theoretical insights beyond an acknowledgment that it is histori-cally the case that states have at times actively created national identities (p. 41).Green’s skepticism of the poststructural literature has been noted. However,given his acknowledgement that identities are somehow made rather than pre-given (although the reader is offered no indication of how this is done inGreen’s view), an engagement with the constructivist literature in particular, andmoreover an explicit positioning of Green’s analysis within or opposed to that lit-erature, would have added much to the reader’s ability to evaluate the claimsmade in this text. Most notably, without a sustained indication of the theoreticalcommitments informing this study, it is not clear what Green means when hetalks about ‘‘identity,’’ and thus his claim that European identity representssomething unique cannot be sustained.

Indeed, there is virtually no discussion of the key concept which informsGreen’s study. This is not to suggest that Green overlooks entirely the need totell the reader something about identity; however, this takes the form of asser-tions and implications rather than transparent theoretical arguments or demon-strations. As is clear from the empirical work which forms the core of this text,Green understands identity in terms of ‘‘attachment,’’ in this case to Europe; itis presented as an achieved state (‘‘war will be eliminated when a European iden-tity is [finally] formed’’), and the presence of conflict or tension within Europeis positioned as evidence of the presently incomplete nature of European iden-tity rather than an acknowledgment that identity is always contested and in-pro-gress. Identity seems to be monolithic in Green’s account insofar as when it isestablished (‘‘finished’’), there will be no possibility of Europeans differentiatingthemselves from each other (p. 16), even while ‘‘diversity’’ and ‘‘pluralism’’ arenoted as hallmarks of the European identity. A European identity is described assomething which EU leaders can actively cultivate through institutional strategies(p. 45–48), and as something which already exists ‘‘out there’’ for rational actorsto choose as a result of their appreciation of its benefits (p. 149). It is definedthrough objectively given markers (p. 158), and is ‘‘chosen’’ largely by people(p. 163) with statistically observable qualities—men, elites, the wealthy, peoplewith postmaterialist and cosmopolitan leanings, among others. Seeming to runcounter to these characterizations, identities are also seen by Green to be ‘‘amor-phous, contextually influenced, and sometimes fluid’’ (p. 17), as ‘‘multiple andsimultaneous…moving targets’’ (p. 21). However he notes too that while we mayhave multiple identities, there is ‘‘probably’’ a ‘‘zero-sum calculus, so that thegain of one means a loss to others’’ (p. 38). Identities, then, are things whichcan be built by elites and then chosen if we perceive a particular identity to beuseful. However, the reader is provided with no indication of how these claimshave been derived, or of how they are operating within this analysis.

What of the specific content of European identity? On this point, drawingfrom his original and secondary qualitative and quantitative analyses, Green ismuch more explicit. European identity, he says, reflects a ‘‘grown up polity’’(p. 8) and is very much a creature of the postmodern period, which he charac-terizes as defined by the various pressures and challenges faced by the state—because the state is a focal point for ‘‘mass affect’’ (p. 153), it follows, saysGreen, that the kinds of identities which are associated with states are also chang-ing. These ‘‘postmodern’’ identities, of which he claims a European identityis the first (with no consideration of Canada or the US beyond mention in afootnote), are marked by their appreciation of diversity, the fact that they arecontextually driven, civic rather than primordial, pluralistic, and instrumental(pp. 157–159). People who share (or adopt?) this identity value human rights,democracy, and peace (p. 4). This ‘‘dispassionate’’ (p. 4) and ‘‘emotionally

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vacated’’ (p. 163) postmodern identity is juxtaposed to the ‘‘emotionallycharged’’ (p. 2) nationalism of modernity; moreover, Green suggests thatEuropean identity ‘‘previews the future of postmodern political societies every-where, or at least everywhere in the developed world’’ (p. 153). Green worriesthat this ‘‘stripped down’’ postmodern European identity may make it difficultto mobilize Europeans around the further entrenchment of the integrationistproject, but notes that if the transition away from nationalism ‘‘saves Europefrom a repeat of the scourge of world war, imperialism, and mass murder, thatseems a small price to pay’’ (p. 164).

There is no doubt that Green’s extended empirical analysis will be of interestto many; however, it is my view that, in the absence of a clear theoretical or con-ceptual discussion, this empirical work does not move much beyond the level ofdescription, however rich and interesting.

Finally, it bears stressing that Green’s undefended decision to ‘‘steer awayfrom theory’’ is itself a theoretical (and political) move which carries its owndangers. In doing so, Green implicitly and presumably unknowingly illustrates awell-acknowledged insight from the theoretical literature which he sought toavoid—that is, that the ‘‘self’’ is constituted by the construction of an ‘‘other’’which reflects back (to varying degrees) that which the ‘‘self’’ seeks to deny. Thisis not a neutral undertaking, as identity as a practice rather than a thing worksdiscursively to arrange the ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘other’’ hierarchically. As such, the discon-nect Green establishes in his final comments between nationalism and ‘‘thedeveloped world,’’ and the further joining, both implicitly and implicitly,throughout the text of nationalism with war and mass murder, with irrationality,emotionalism, and dogma draws on and reproduces a series of binaries all toofamiliar to scholars of identity. In this operation, it seems that Green’s ‘‘unique’’European identity is not so unique after all.

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