‘The Eurocentric fallacy’: the myths that underpin European identity
Many “pro-Europeans” – that is, supporters of European integration or the “European project” in its current form – imagine that the European Union is an expression of cosmopolitanism. They think it stands for diversity, inclusion and openness. It opposes nationalism and racism. It is about people “coming together” and peacefully cooperating. It is a shining example of how enemies can become partners and how diversity can be reconciled with unity.
As the European Commission president José Manuel Barroso put it when the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2012 as it struggled to deal with the Eurozone crisis, the European project has shown “that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders” and “that it is possible to overcome the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’.”
However, there is something rather Eurocentric in thinking of the EU in this way. In particular, by generalising about “peoples and nations” in the way Barroso does, it mistakes Europe for the world. After all, insofar as the European project – that is, the process of European integration since the end of the second world war – has brought people and nations together, it is of course only peoples and nations within Europe. It was a process that began with six western European countries in the immediate postwar period, and subsequently “widened” to include other northern, western and southern European countries and, after the end of the cold war, central and eastern European countries. It has never included the rest of the world – but, of course, the EU has developed policies towards it.
Although internal barriers to the free movement of capital, goods and people have been progressively removed in the last 75 years, external barriers have persisted. In particular, while many barriers to flows of capital and goods from outside the EU have been removed, barriers to the movement of people have remained.
The European tendency to mistake Europe for the world – what might be called “the Eurocentric fallacy” – has obscured our understanding of the EU and its role in the world. It has led to an idealisation of European integration as a kind of cosmopolitan project: what I call the myth of cosmopolitan Europe. A better way to understand the EU is an expression of regionalism – which is analogous to nationalism, rather than the opposite of it, as many “pro-Europeans” imagine it to be. Thinking of the EU in terms of regionalism rather than cosmopolitanism also allows us to understand more clearly the tensions within the European project.
My father was Indian and my mother is Dutch, and I was born and grew up in the UK. My personal relationship with European identity and with the European Union has therefore been shaped by the influence of an upbringing in a country on the geographical periphery of Europe with a notoriously semi-detached relationship to it. In addition to my British identity, there’s a secondary sense of belonging to one country that is an EU member state – one of the original six – and to another that is outside Europe and the EU, but was colonised by Britain. This has meant that although I have always felt European to some extent, I did not feel 100% European, as I have heard some other people proudly describe themselves. While the idea of being European captured part of my identity, it could never capture all of it.
In 2009, I began working at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a European foreign policy thinktank with offices in seven European capital cities. At the time, I considered myself a “pro-European” – that is, someone who supports European integration or the “European project” in its current form. I assumed that the EU was a force for good, both internally within Europe and in the world beyond. But as I learned much more about the EU during the six years that I worked at
ECFR, I began to feel that much of what I had previously thought I knew about its history was actually myth – the product of a kind of self-idealisation of the EU.
At the same time as my own perceptions of the EU were changing, it was itself changing – especially after the Eurozone crisis began around 2010. I became more critical of the EU and found it harder to continue to identify with it. My aim is to try to persuade Europeans that a different Europe from the one we currently have is needed (though since I am a British citizen and the UK has now left the EU, I should perhaps say “they” rather than “we”). ***
Although the EU is not a global