From National Identity to European Identity

Since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and especially in the past few years, the European Union has been going through a mixed process of expansion and consolidation. In the last ten years alone there were two new waves of accession, the EU launched the single currency and failed attempts have been made to introduce a constitution. With all these transformations taking place, attention is more and more centred on the question whether a European identity is emerging. This article investigates this issue examining comparativelythe patterns of national identity and of European identity formation and focusing on whether the relationship between the two is a zero-sum type. The aim is to show that although national identity is not necessarily an obstacle for the development of European identity, nationalism is.