The Conflict And Unification Of The European Collective Identity And The Nation-state Identity

Recently, more and more scholars take the European collective identity as the interior motivity for the European integration. The EU is trying to search the balance between the collective identity and the nation-state identity for years. They try to construct the collective identity which takes the public of the state members to pay their loyalty to the European level. However, as the nation-state identity possessing strong energy, the collective identity inevitably brings conflict with the nation-state identity. The intention of this paper is through analyzing the representation and the causation of the conflict and unification between the identity on the two levels to search the condition for the unification of the two identities, and then to advance the approaches to constructing the European collective identity.The study of the European identity in this paper spreads in the frame of the postnational structure. After the Word Warâ…¡, the public of the Europe felt the catastrophic aftereffect which was brought by the limitation of the traditional nation-state. As the integration developing, the circumscription of the nation-state changed to a new vision which Habermas calls post-national structure. Although this structure haven't established completely, the status of Europe has been different with the traditional structure of the nation-states. Because of the status of Europe, the author choose this view could be close to the reality of Europe, and could reflect the deep-seated causation for the conflict and unification between the European collective identity and nation-state identity, and advance the approaches to constructing the European identity, accordingly.This paper is built with four parts:The first part explains the definition of the nation-state identity and the European collective identity. The nation-state identity refers the ascription of the public to the nation-state, and this identity is transferring as the movement of the history. The analysis of the European collective identity is based the definition of the EU, and spreading along two dimensions, political culture and mass social culture. The second part draws the character and feature of the post-national structure through the analysis of the traditional Europe nation system and the status. Based on this analysis, the author depicts the relations between the post-national structure and the construction of the European collective identity. The post-national structure reflects a direction which indicates the nation-states begin to disaggregate and a supranational community begins to form. The character of the post-national structure leads the conflict and unification between the two identities to continue, and provides a possible elements for the construction of the European collective identity.The third part refers the conflict and unification between the European collective identity and nation-state identity on two dimensions, political culture and mass social culture. This chapter depicts the representations and the causations of the conflict and unification through positive study, and accordingly, we will search the conditions for their transformation. These two identities are independence, but in a sense, they are bound together.The last part advances some approaches to construct the European collective identity along two dimensions through the analysis of the dilemma which is brought by the conflict of the identity on the two levels. These approaches contain paying attention to the normative effect of the law system, constructing the political public sphere through the international media, constructing the European mass social culture through containing others, perfecting the European citizenship institutions. The construction of the European collective identity is similar with the nation-state in a manner. They are both inclined to a man-made choice, and it is a constructed process.