European Political and Cultural Identities

Abstract

The expression ‘Going to Europe’ launched at around the time the European Union began to expand is, according to the British historian E.P. Thompson, humbug, and for four reasons:

First, we are there already. Second, Europe is not that set of nations but includes also Warsaw, Belgrade, Prague. Thirdly, the Market defines the diversity of Europe cultures at its crassest level as a group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies. Fourth, it defines this introversial white bourgeois nationalism as ‘internationalism’.

(Thompson, 1980: 86)