Amidst the European sovereign debt crisis and soaring unemployment levels across the European Union, ambitions for European unemployment policies are high on the political agenda. However, it remains unclear what European taxpayers think about these plans and who is most supportive of European unemployment policies. To contribute to this debate, we conducted a survey experiment concerning solidarity towards European and domestic unemployed individuals in the Netherlands and Spain. Our results suggest that (1) Europeans are less inclined to show solidarity towards unemployed Europeans than towards unemployed co-nationals, (2) individuals with higher education, European attachment, and pro-immigration attitudes show more solidarity towards unemployed people from other European countries, but (3) even they discriminate against foreigners, and (4) finally, economic left-right orientations do not structure solidarity with unemployed people from abroad.

Alignment with Europe has been a popular foreign policy objective among post-socialist nations. In the Republic of Georgia, discourse surrounding the country's Euro-Atlantic orientation surged in the decade after the 2003 Rose Revolution. While such discourse has been examined in the context of political reforms and national security goals, this article foregrounds how it was incorporated into alterations of the built environment. Focusing on the urban transformations of the city of Batumi after the rise to power of the United National Movement government, it demonstrates how architecture served as a tool for selectively rewriting Georgia's contemporary European identity. This article concentrates on two parallel initiatives to transform Batumi into a contemporary European city: the reconstruction of portions of the Old City and the new development along the seaside boulevard. Using evidence collected through qualitative methods, it further highlights the contradictions that emerged during this process of redevelopment and rebranding, as the state balanced initiatives for new development with other post-revolutionary state-building objectives, such as political reform and tourism-market production. Accordingly, it unpacks the various national and international politico-economic forces at play in the process of developing Batumi into the image of a contemporary European city.

Research on European identity focuses mainly on majority populations in Western European countries without differentiating among specific population groups and generations, and, above all, disregarding ethnic minority groups living in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the development of European identity among three ethnic minority groups in Lithuania: Belarusians, Poles, and Russians. Theoretically, the project is based on the instrumental approach, which argues that European identity is closely related to perceived benefits from “being European,” and on the cultural approach, which holds a common history, ancestry, and culture responsible for the development of European identity. Existing research has, above all, emphasized the importance of instrumental considerations. Analyzing qualitative interviews collected in the FP7 research project “ENRI-East,” the paper compares how young and adult members of ethnic minority groups construct European identity due to “instrumental” and “cultural” considerations. The results show that both instrumental and cultural considerations are relevant and further development of European identity depends on which age group or ethnic minority group an individual belongs to.

Although there is a considerable amount of talk about transformative power of deliberation on identity, the debate in literature remains highly theoretical in underlying the benefits of deliberative model for EU Integration. So far, little empirical evidence is available on the actual impact of deliberation. Can deliberation enhance European identity? We specifically address this question by using deliberative polling quasi-experiment that involved random sample of 348 European citizens in 2 days deliberation on issues of European concern. The comparison of citizens’ sense of belonging to both EU and nation states before and after deliberation, allowed us to explore the effects of deliberation on identity and further test it against the control group. The analyses show that when European citizens are enabled to deliberate on European issues beyond national borders their exclusive national identity decreases and they become more community minded. The observed transformation of identities is further analyzed in order to explore the relationship between European and national identity. The analyses indicate that even after deliberative treatment in which European identity has been activated the relationship between multiple identities remains compatible.

In the literature, two approaches toward the development of a European identity can be distinguished. Society-based approaches assume that the most important foundation for the development of a European identity is trust toward other European citizens as this allows Europeans to identify with the European Union as a community of citizens and values. The institutional approach, on the other hand, assumes that a shared European identity is predominantly based on trust in political institutions. In this paper, we use the results of the IntUne Mass Survey 2009 (n=16,613 in 16 EU member states) to test the relationship between social and political trust on the one hand, and European identity on the other. The results suggest that trust in other European citizens is positively associated with European identity, but trust in the European political institutions has a stronger relation with European identity. This could imply that efforts to strengthen European identity cannot just rely on a bottom-up approach, but should also pay attention to the effectiveness and the visibility of the EU institutions and the way they are being perceived by European citizens.

This article sheds light on the Euro-Atlantic discourse in Georgia by situating it in a wider frame. It provides an analysis of its Euro-Atlantic orientation by presenting it as a continuation of past efforts to involve European powers in Georgian affairs and highlights changing trends in this aspect of contemporary foreign policy. Far from determining whether or not the Georgians are European, the different arguments that have been used to support Georgian “Europeanness” are evaluated to assess its role in the national identity construction process. Focusing primarily on the United National Movement government led by Mikheil Saakashvili, we demonstrate how the Euro-Atlantic discourse has been employed domestically by the political elite as a legitimacy management strategy and explore its function in seeking Western patronage, a key foreign policy goal.

This paper argues that ethno-nationalist models of state organization encourage and strengthen sectarianism by accentuating differences between respective majority populations and those with non-majority characteristics as problematic, and identifies and explains the impacts of this for intra-state security in the West and for building partnerships with non-Western populations, citing negative implications on how we understand political behavior and for influence in military operations. The paper uses nineteenth-century Russian identity as a case study, considers the conflation between modernization and Westernization occuring at the time and uses Russian Art of the period as an analytical tool to uncover nuances that are relevant to debates concerning security, identity, and political behavior.

Reviewing five recent books in German classical and oriental studies, this essay argues that the question of archaic Greece's debts to the Orient remains a particularly lively one in German-speaking Europe. Like their predecessors in previous generations, iconoclastic classicists like Walter Burkert, oriental archaeologists like Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and maverick outsiders like Raoul Schrott have attacked the enraptured view of ‘the Greek miracle’ familiar to those educated in classical Gymnasien. And yet the question of Greek cultural autonomy is still alive, in part because there are too many uncertainties for it to be answered definitively, and in part because it continues to play a role in attempts to define modern European identity.

The European public debate on Turkey's EU accession either emphasizes Turkey's political (in)competence for EU membership, or marks its cultural difference. Based on the discourse analysis of this debate in the German mass media, this paper questions the dominant European perspective, by placing emphasis on how and where the symbolic borders of an imagined Europe become visible. I will argue that the debate surrounding Turkey's accession to the EU reveals an ambivalent discursive process as it places the construction of the self-definition of Europe at the frontier of its Turkish-Islamic “Other.”