Europeans: Foreigners in Their Own Land

Abstract

Julia Kristeva addresses the issue of foreignness and national identity from two angles: historical and psychoanalytic.² She offers a summary of the subjective position of foreigners in Europe, extracting the history³ of foreigners from History with a capital H. Beyond our traditional apprehension of that History, she also questions the definition of ‘foreigner’ and writes a more subjective history: that of the foreigner, as the one who is doubly bound between the memory of a lost past and the beckoning of an elusive future. In the gap that separates past and future lies the difficult reality of a European identity. Discussions⁴ on ‘Europe’ often analyse and define the limits which draw the contours of Europe’s emerging identity. In this effort, Europeans are gathered under a common geographical, political and economic banner. Allowances are made to preserve a certain sense of national control; some borders are open, some are not… Europeans are foreigners in their own land, caught between an identity they are losing and the identity of an other⁵ that invites at the same time as it frightens them. Their foreignness is above all a collective reminiscence of a strangeness that they individually encountered. It is precisely this strangeness that the foreigner remembers, whatever his/her nationality, and whose history Kristeva writes.⁶

I would like to acknowledge the help I received from Tracy Davis and Professor Roy Boyne.