There has been a fashionable tendency in some recent scholarship on European history to look for some of the most important roots of European identity formation in the cultural, social and political interaction with the Islamic world. This article argues that this view is an exaggerated and over-simplistic one. In a long historical survey from the era of the Crusades to the nineteenth century, it seeks to show that the theme in European continental identity was frequently subordinated to political and diplomatic rivalries. While cultural themes in IR are important, they do need to be distinguished from realpolitik in the dynamics of international power politics.