DANIEL COJANU, Citizenship and Identity across Europe. Global Vision, New Perspectives

From the European research reports on the Future of Europe to the newest fundamental White Paper on a European Communication Policy, a new perception of a transnational identity is crystallized across Europe, as a different multicultural challenge that is no more national and not yet European. That is what we intend to analyze in this study. In this context, the representatives of the European Union have come up with the initiative of some policy and strategy documents with the aim to strengthen communication between EU institutions and EU citizens, in order to clarify the perceptions on citizenship and identity issues across Europe. Thus, the White Paper on a European communication policy issued on 1 February 2006 was the natural sequel to another document published in July 2005 - an Action Plan to Improve Communicating Europe - but also to the involvement of the Commission in the debate regarding the future of Europe, materialised in what would be later called Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate, a plan launched on 13 October 2005. The link between all these debates and initiatives was the Eurobarometer, an unbiased tool of sociological measurement, which fully confirms the communication breakdown between European citizens and the institutions which represent them, but also the legitimacy of some new perspectives which were opened by those programmatic European documents.