Friday, July 14, 2017
John McIntyre - Teaching Room 208 (University of Glasgow)
In his 2016 State of the Union address, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker pronounced Europe to be in an ‘existential crisis’: ‘Many [Europeans] seem to have forgotten what being European means,’ he said. The statement was made within a contemporary political context that has become not only eurosceptic but increasingly europhobic, in which certain political representatives even from the majority in the European Parliament have begun to openly question the existence of the European Commission and its Community method which has driven the European project and defined the European interest since the Treaty of Rome. Self-consciously structured to promote supranational identities, the EU executive was initially seen as a ‘laboratory’ for the creation of a ‘a new breed of people’ (Monnet 1978). This paper explores iterations of ‘Europeanness’—personal understandings of what it means be European and belong to Europe—among current and former officials of the European Commission. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the EU Quarter in Brussels as well as on the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, it argues for an interpretation of 21st century Europeanness as a political identity based on experience—in an ‘existence precedes essence’ model—one defined in contrast to external polities and ideologies (e.g. to Russia, the United States, Islam). For Europeans in an age of identity politics, belonging to a community that is not coterminous with a state and which derives its content through being defined by what it is not, raises particular challenges for overcoming the felt existential crisis at hand.
