European Identity and Cultural Plurality
By Monika Mokre

The overall aim of this paper is a critical scrutiny of the concept of European identity and the role of cultural politics in developing it.

1.	Collective identity is not a value in itself but a highly ambiguous concept: To define who belongs to us, i.e. with whom we share a collective identity, always means to define at the same time, who does not belong, who is excluded. To define a collective identity always means to draw a boundary between us and them.

2.	Collective identity is necessary for a democratic polity.  Democracy is the rule of the people, the demos. But who or what is the demos? Who belongs to it and who does not? This is the question for collective identity. A democratically organised political community needs per definitionem a demos who is the sovereign. And a precondition for a demos is some form of loyalty with a political entity, i.e. a collective political identity. This is not only a problem of definitions but also a practical political one: Only if I understand myself as belonging to a society I will be prepared to engage for it and to accept collective decisions that do not correlate with my individual interests. 

3.	Collective identities are not clear-cut entities but flexible, shifting and contradictory concepts. People identify with different groups, values, and ideas in different periods of their lives. Parts of collective and individual identities can also conflict with each other as can be perceived when second generation immigrants struggle with their loyalties towards "original" and "host" culture.

4.	Cultural identities are only one of several possibilities to "identify" oneself; other possibilities of identification are e.g. gender or class. Which identity is adopted and represented at a certain time depends on contexts, emotional set-ups, intentions etc. Thus, it would probably be better to speak of "identifications" that change over time than to use the static term of identity.

5.	Cultural identity building was part of the process of national political identity building and devolved from the necessity to build up loyalty in a fragmented society.: "(…) the role of culture in human life was totally transformed by that cluster of economic and scientific changes which have transformed the world since the seventeenth century. The prime role of culture in agrarian society was to underwrite people's status and people's identity. Its role was really to embed their position in a complex, usually hierarchical and relatively stable structure. The world as it is now is one where people have no stable position or structure. They are members of ephemeral professional bureaucracies which are not deeply internalised and which are temporary. They are members of increasingly loose family associations. What really matters is their incorporation and their mastery of high culture; I mean a literate codified culture which permits context-free communication. Their membership of such a community and their acceptability in it, that is a nation." (Ernest Gellner 1995)

6.	Due to the experience of nation state building, collective identities in Europe are traditionally understood as cultural identities. This puts European cultural politics at the centre of the question for a European identity. This relation was firstly mentioned in the Treaty of Amsterdam and described more precisely in the programme "Culture 2000". "The aim of the Culture 2000 programme, (…), is to encourage creative activity and the knowledge and dissemination of the culture of the European peoples, notably in the field of music, literature, the performing arts, the fixed and movable heritage, and the new realms of culture, by fostering co-operation between cultural organisations and operators and the cultural institutions of the Member States, and by supporting measures which, by their European scope and character, promote the spread of European culture both inside and outside the Union."(Culture 2000, 1)  

7.	It seems thus obvious that the aim of Culture 2000 lies in creating a European identity. Another quotation of the "Culture 2000" programme shows that democracy lies at the heart of the European identity as conceived of by the Commission:  "If citizens  give their full support to, and participate fully in, European integration, greater emphasis should be placed on their common cultural values and roots as a key element of their identity and their membership of a society founded on freedom, democracy, tolerance and solidarity; a better balance should be achieved between the economic and cultural aspects of the Community, so that these aspects can complement and sustain each other." (Decision establishing Culture 2002, 1)

8.	Summarising, it can be stated that it is an important aim of  European cultural politics to contribute to the emergence of a European collective identity and that a European collective identity should be based on the values of freedom, democracy, tolerance, and solidarity.

9.	Thus, the European Commission develops an interesting, not essentialist and open concept of a cultural identity by defining common political values as basic of a common culture. It has, however, a major drawback: By defining political values – freedom, democracy, tolerance and solidarity - as the fundamentals of a common European identity those political values are not understood as dynamic concepts, continually developing and changing according to conflicting interests but as a kind of static quality a political community has or does not have. In this understanding, freedom, democracy, tolerance and solidarity are not political values of a community (or a community to-be like the EU) which are defined and re-defined in constant political struggles but clearly defined qualities you need to be part of this community, a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion instead of a field of discourse.

10.	In opposition to this understanding a concept of democracy as a special way of dealing with conflicts shall be developed here. A polity that has solved all conflicts can never be expected to arise; democracy has thus to be understood as a process of dealing with conflicts in a way that complies with the values of freedom and equality. Democratic politics has to provide equal opportunities for different conflicting parties. This means, among other things, that politics has to balance political inequalities resulting from economic inequalities. It also means that politics has to create equality of opportunities for people of different cultures, whereas culture is not understood as a stable quality but as a form of identification an individual or a group chooses at a certain time. A cultural politics understood as a means to further democracy in this sense is thus a politics creating equal opportunities for different cultures – opportunities to present and represent themselves and their concepts, to create publicity and to contest differing cultural concepts.

11.	A democracy in this sense needs a public sphere where political issues are dealt with. The public sphere in modern, large and multiply structured societies is the sum of differentiated partial public spheres. This is why the European diversity of languages or the impossibility of simultaneous communication are not a real impediment of a European public sphere – national public spheres do not work directly, either. The creation of a European public sphere thus means first and foremost the creation of different fora to negotiate conflicts.  

12.	European Cultural Politics should be understood as a means to enhance democracy in Europe by developing European public spheres. In order to do so, cultural politics has to strive for cultural plurality. Cultural plurality, however, is not another form of biodiversity that has to be preserved but an open concept developing spaces for re-definitions and contestations of cultures. In a globalised world of numerous migration movements cultural identities are in constant flux and it is this flux that enables people to preserve what is necessary for them while, at the same time, adapting to their environment. The ability of people to live under contemporary conditions should thus be supported by cultural politics, not the preservation of "cultures as such".

13.	Thus, cultural diversity based on equal opportunities for all cultures should be the base for a collective European identity. The assumption of a common European heritage is not apt for this purpose; the focus of European identity building has therefore to be a common present and future rather than an imagined common past.

14.	This means, among other things, that not the cultural heritage should be in the centre of attention but contemporary cultural utterances, representations and works. It furthermore means to critically scrutinize all individual or collective claims of talking for or in the name of a "whole culture" and to be especially sensitive for critical and dissenting voices.

15.	Concrete political measures to reach the aim of a dynamic democracy based on various forms of diversity, among them cultural diversity, will have to be flexible enough to meet the challenges of the fast developing European polity. The following measures that have been taken out of a position paper on "Post Culture 2000" by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics (eipcp) are thus rather examples than a real action plan for European cultural policy. Initiatives that should be supported according to this paper are:

•	"cultural initiatives that contribute to the production of critical public spheres, activate and pluralise public debates,
•	cultural initiatives that actively deal with issues of democratic politics such as equality, gender, migration and citizenship,
•	cultural initiatives experimenting with new forms of public access and models of participation in the cultural field, also, but not only, in the field of emerging technologies,
•	emerging projects of non-mainstream cultural initiatives that operate beyond and against traditional modes of production and distribution,
•	contemporary transversal research and theory production in the cultural field beyond the
•	conventional academic schemes and divided specialisms,
•	experimental practices in dealing with multilingual editing and publishing in the cultural field." (eipcp 2003, 3)

According to the paper, these measures are to be complemented by a positive-action clause for the (pre-) accession countries.

A European cultural policy shaped according to those principles would mean a rather radical break with the hitherto practice of financing flagship projects and giving high sums to the European heritage. But it would also mean a European cultural policy adapted to the rich cultural diversity of contemporary Europe.

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