Classical Heritage and European Identities. The Imagined Geographies of Danish Classicism (original) (raw)
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n 1998, Theodoros Pangalos, Greece's Foreign Minister attended an EU Conference of otherwise little note in Brussels. He was half asleep during the sessions until the then President of the Dutch Parliament rose to speak about the common European heritage. The Dutchman proclaimed that a common cultural history united Europe: beginning with feudalism, followed by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This history differentiated Europeans from non-Europeans, a category which the unctuous Dutchman obviously deemed unworthy of membership. Pangalos suddenly came awake and leaped to his feet to state, in his normal colorful fashion, that the Dutchman had just insulted Greece. Greece had indeed lived through feudalism. It had come to Greece in the form of the Fourth Crusade, the sacking of Constantinople, and the dismembering of the country that virtually depopulated Greece. Pangalos apparently went on to eviscerate the Dutchman. He described the Renaissance as created by Greek scholars who fled the Turkish conquest. As for the Reformation and Counter Reformation; those were internal civil wars of the Papacy. No one seems to have memorialized Pangalos' comments on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as his Greek diplomats cringed and mostly tried to quiet him down. Pangalos' ranting was more or less on point and, in fact, historically quite accurate. But the EU officials present, locked into the notion that Western civilization (quite narrowly defined) provided the gold standard for the world to try to emulate while the history and culture of others rated only academic interest made fun of
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Despite the wide application of the notion ‘European identity’ in modern political studies, its definition admittedly remains vague (1). The main reason obviously is the lack of agreement over what is to be considered as the basic coordinating factor of this supranational unity. While the intensive process of European unity formation has been underway since the 1980s thanks to the vigorous efforts of European political leaders and the supportive institutional, political and economic frameworks, the sociological survey reveals that the number of citizens placing their European identity before national is rather insignificant and is gradually decreasing not only among the forty-seven states of the Council of Europe, but even among the twenty seven members of the European Union (2).