European identity: An emerging concept

Phe Idea of European Identity has grown In significance and specificity over two millennia. Earlier, the advance was largely generated by opposition to outsiders, in terms of culture and religion. Those who thought in European terms were long a tiny minority of rulers, clerics, financiers, men of teaming and the arts. Only In the late eighteenth century did bourgeois participation broaden consciousness of European community, linked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to social and political progress. In the past half century European identity has gained official sanction as a diplomatic and legislative set of entities. Efforts to underpin existing and to spur new mutuality at the folk-level lag, owing to a host of persisting problems - linguistic diversity, disparities of resources, unforgotten grievances, doubts about the scope of territorial expansion, and a felt imbalance between administrative goals and popular allegiances.