What identity for Europe? : communication, memory, and citizenship

• Autor(a) principal: Baptista Ferreira, Gil
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/47601
• topic: European identity; national identity; ethnicity; constitutional patriotism; communication

The purpose of this article is the debate around the European identity. Two types of political identification are taken into account, sustaining the idea of the nation from a cultural and ethnic point of view or from a civic and political perspective. From here, the discussion will center on the possibility of a European identity and to what extent that identity will be shared by citizens from different nationalities. As will be demonstrated, communication plays a crucial role: as a form of participating and asserting the difference, and associating the universalism of the normative principles to the particularism of the concrete forms of identification. Finally, we suggest the conception of a European identity that reflects, simultaneously, a historical and cultural ballast in which people can trust, and on its own civic culture that, respecting the identities recognizes sensibilities, interests, the arguments.