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'We've always had a healthy inferiority complex here about tall, blond people', said Luigi Spaventa, a former Budget Minister [of Italy]. 'For us, it's the euro or Africa.' (1)
It goes without saying that the increasingly vociferous debate, conducted over the last decade, on how to define the geography and culture of Europe is directly and proportionally linked to the growing significance of the European Union. In this, it is no coincidence that the debate should surface with particular urgency whenever the question of EU enlargement comes on the agenda. Put crudely, much of this 'debate' is driven by the quest for a tidy geographical delimitation of Europe's boundaries. As such, it subsequently serves as a vantage point from which to develop an introverted vision that identifies Europe's hard kernel of cultural characteristics and historical roots and achievements in a particular and self-serving way. Within this perspective, concepts from classical antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Christianity and ideas of progress, reason, science, tolerance, liberty and democracy are often brought forward as making up the most prominent features of Europe; these are its defining foundations and characteristics. (From Greece to peace, to cut a long story short.) Often, all these attributes and qualities are construed as the pure and original creation of Europe, springing solely from Europe's 'unique creativity', which, according to historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, constitutes 'Europe's most striking characteristic'. (2) A preoccupation with distinct boundaries and unmixed origins can be said to permeate this conception of Europe.
There is an abundance of statements available that reflect the prevalence of this perspective during the 1990s. The following provide just a small selection from a wealth of similar claims. For example, the view of former EU mediator and British foreign secretary David Owen on the status of Turkey serves as a telling illustration: 'Well, we don't have to let Turkey in. You have to have clarity about where the boundaries of Europe are, and the boundaries of Europe are not on the Turkish-Iranian border.' (3) In a similar vein, on the matter of Russia and the 'Asians', columnist Peter Millar (writing for the now discontinued newspaper The European) declared:
It is on the eastern front that the problem becomes acute. First and foremost, there is the matter of Russia. In purely geophysical terms the only valid continent is Eurasia. The problem is that it is simply too big. Also, ethnically, there is a distinct difference between Europeans and Asians. (4)
But it is not only the boundaries of Europe that have to be delimited; the same process is at work in the quest for Europe's origins. Duroselle's extensive work Europe." a history of its peoples--a book proudly sponsored by the European Commission and promoted as essential reading for all Europeans--merits attention in this respect, engrossed as it is in the concept of a purely European fountainhead. 'All we know is that the original inhabitants of western Europe were white-skinned, barely touched by the Mongol invasions--or by Asian and African immigration until after the end of World War II.' (5)
Given that many of the most prevalent assertions arising out of and informing this debate have fallen on fertile soil within the EU's most prominent institutions and among its most influential actors, and been promoted there, the implications are serious. What is at stake is a definition of current and future citizens of the EU, of 'Europeans', that is premised on ties to a European ancestral state, Christianity and other ethno-cultural markers. To put it differently, such a definition promotes, by default, an understanding of EU citizenship and identity that pertains exclusively to a transnational white ethnicity and hence ostracises the millions of EU inhabitants who cannot lay claim to the ethno-cultural heritage in question. The seriousness and significance of this definitional enterprise are further underscored once we realise that the very same people who fail to pass as 'Europeans' also get stigmatised as 'problems', 'burdens'--even 'threats'--and lumped together, as they increasingly are, in the racialised and criminalised category of (illegal) immigrants.
But the delineations of Europe and Europeans that now prevail do not only impact negatively on the internal situation in the EU proper. As noted above, they are also setting their mark on the whole question of, and debate over, EU enlargement. Iver Neumann, referring to the EU's exclusive and ethno-cultural delineation of Europe, has shown that, during the 1990s, this helped set the stage for a cultural tussle between those eastern European countries aspiring to 'join Europe'. (6) As each applicant country jockeyed for position, it tried to exclude another by portraying itself as more 'EUropean' than the next. Sifting through what he refers to as the 'applicant rhetoric', Neumann demonstrates how, for instance, the Czech Republic endeavoured to assert its status as a truly 'European' nation by assigning 'Asian' qualities to Slovakia, as did the Ukraine in respect of Russia. In the same vein, Slovenian parlance sought to secure Europeanness for Slovenia by stigmatising Croatia and Serbia as 'Balkan', whereas Croatian discourse situated 'Orthodox' Serbia as outside Europe. (7) More recently, and in an echo of the quote ('it's the euro or Africa') that opened this essay, the Hungarian political scientist Elemer Hankiss was reported in the New York Times as saying: 'You can join Ukraine or Kazakhstan or the Union. The Union is not the Garden of Eden, but certainly it's a better option than the other one.' (8)
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