Europeanism as Nationalism: The Liberal and Romantic Foundations of the European Union

This paper revisits the historical relationship between nationalism and European integration, suggesting that Europeanist ideologies have operated both in synergy and in tension with nationalist ideologies. The European project was understood by many of its architects as a nation building project, both in its material and moral aspects. As with earlier national unification efforts, European integration generated a new constitutional supra-structure that perpetuated older economic sub-structures, recasting capitalism and corporatism in new technocratic forms grounded in collective memories, myths and values. The process of economic, legal, and political unification that culminated in the creation of the European Union was modelled on earlier nationalist movements. Echoing liberal nationalists, many Europeanists envisioned the ideals of individual liberty, economic freedom, the rule of law, and citizenship as the moral basis of a pan-European order. As with romantic nationalists, they conceived of Europeans as united by historical ties of culture and kinship. Romantic memory culture thereby fused with liberal constitutionalism to forge a new supra-nationalism that rejected nationalist ideologies at the same time as borrowing from them. The European Union is a projection of a number of older imagined communities – medieval and modern, local and civilizational – onto the transnational plane. Even the most cosmopolitan language of today’s official EU discourse is usually implicitly rooted in a culturally and historically bounded vision of the ‘West’. The thin abstract universalism of contemporary liberal Europeanism has failed to resonate sufficiently with the particular experiences and solidarities of Europeans themselves. The dilemma that confronts Europeanists today is how to give affective power to a multicultural, multi-ethnic, enlarged European Union without reinstating the hierarchies and exclusions of the past or creating new ones in the name of a pan-European ‘community of values’.