Jeffrey T. Checkel - European Identity [2009] [A]

Why are hopes fading for a single European identity? Economic integration has advanced faster and further than predicted, yet the European sense of 'who we are' is fragmenting. Exploiting decades of permissive consensus, Europe's elites designed and completed the single market, the euro, the Schengen passport-free zone, and, most recently, crafted an extraordinarily successful policy of enlargement. At the same time, these attempts to de-politicize politics, to create Europe by stealth, have produced a political backlash. This ambitious survey of identity in Europe captures the experiences of the winners and losers, optimists and pessimists, movers and stayers in a Europe where spatial and cultural borders are becoming ever more permeable. A full understanding of Europe's ambivalence, refracted through its multiple identities, lies at the intersection of competing European political projects and social processes.

Reviews
"Figuring out what the EU is can be hard - but deciding who the Europeans are can be even harder...Jeffrey Checkel and Peter Katzenstein's edited volume provides a nuanced overview of the processes of political identity formation."
- Kathleen R. McNamara, Georgetown University, Foreign Affairs

"...this book is a welcome corrective to the proliferation of Euro-romantic scholarship and its unrealistic expectations of a United States of Europe, and it contributes significantly to the understanding of the complex relationship between traditional national and European orientations."
Perspectives on Politics, William Safran, University of Colorado- Boulder

"This is the kind of volume that will fascinate scholars of European politics - and beyond. It demonstrates the multiplicity of European identities, the combination of the hopes and fears that have been braided around these identities, and the different kinds of politics that have defined and redefined its possibilities and perils as viewed from different European spaces. European Identity is less a summary of what we think we know and more of a road map for future scholarship."
Michael Barnett, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota

"This timely book advances two significant claims. First, European identity has become inevitably politicized and contested. Second, next to the modern, enlightened vision of Europe, a much more xenophobic and populist identity construction has emerged, with 'Europe to the Europeans' as its rallying cry. Checkel and Katzenstein have collected an impressive group of authors. Their book serves as a huge question mark to the conventional wisdom that the Europeanization of identities is a benign and uncontested process of post-modern nation-building."
Dr Thomas Risse, Co-ordinator, Research Center 'Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood' and Director, Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy, Freie Universität Berlin

"As a whole, the Checkel and Katzenstein volume provides a multilayered exploration of an issue that has been neglected, and that is understandably difficult to study. It also offers a useful working definition of identity that points to the ways in which future researchers can approach the subject" - Mai'a K. Davis Cross, Comparative Politics

Book Description
European economic integration has advanced faster and further than anyone could have predicted, yet hopes are fading for a single European identity. This ambitious study analyses the complex mosaic of competing visions and aspirations, and explores a Europe where concepts of community are multiplying and disintegrating simultaneously.