EU Identiteit laat zich goed omschrijven vanuit de Social (elite)-movements. EU Policy kenmerkt zich door elementen uit deze stromingen. De stromingen zijn paarsgewijze, onderdeel van de geschiedenis van Europa.

Van Plato naar Nationalisme en van Beethoven naar Cosmopolitanisme.

Globalisme of Geo-Politiek

zijn manieren van denken die niet op zichzelf staan.

Duidingen als extreem en nationalistisch

worden te pas en te onpas door media gebruikt.

Want omroepen als NOS en ook de ARD in Duitsland willen refereren aan WO II. De vraag is of dit wel klopt met de EU Identiteit. De Europese identiteit omvat verschillende elementen van beide bewegingen of sociale stromingen in de EU.

EU Identiteit : Social (elite)-movements.

Sociale bewegingen zoals:

• de verlichting,
• de romantiek,
• het eurocentrisme,
• het monoculturalisme,

volgen nauwgezet de orde van moderne,

typisch West-Europese instellingen, zoals:

• soevereine staat,
• natievorming,
• het maatschappelijk middenveld,
• markten.

EU Identiteit is te duiden als een politieke: “identity policy that incorporates different elements from both movements”. Dit zijn steeds 2 zijden v.d. medaille.

(Referentie: http://www.zzzptm.com/images/elites.gif op de site: https://bennettjacksonsocialstudiesfinalexam.weebly.com/-picture-citations.html)

Invloed van de bewegingen op de visie van Politiek Analist

Kortom Politiek Analist ziet dat de propaganda van Liberale Westerse Democratieën slechts 1 stroming aanhouden. De door een academische elite bedachte stroming van Romantiek > Postkolonialisme > Multiculturalisme > Globalisme.

Waardoor binnen Europa partijen die als extreem rechts worden betiteld, aan invloed winnen.

Doordat het continu leven in een academisch verzonnen wereldbeeld niet realistisch is. De Contra denkwijze volledig is verdwenen uit media en overheid berichtgeving. Terwijl juist dergelijke zienswijze relevant is voor de EU bevolking.

Europa en EU politici in Brussel hebben zich de afgelopen 5 jaar gericht op de subjectieve ervaring als uitgangspunt.

Dat kan militair gezien “Preferente Werkelijkheid” worden genoemd of door politici “Framing“.

Hyperfocus op slechts 1 quasi imaginair georiënteerde stroming in de westerse cultuur. 

Romantiek is een redelijk onveranderlijke stroming die al begint in de middeleeuwen. Als een tegenreactie op de Verlichting, die eraan vooraf was gegaan, doet Romantiek zich vooral aan het eind van de 18e en in de 19e eeuw sterk gelden in de kunst (beeldende kunst, literatuur en muziek).

Wat opvalt is het feit dat dit met name het intellectuele leven (Elite) betreft in drie Europese landen:

Duitsland

 Frankrijk 

Verenigd Koninkrijk.

De drie landen die in 2025 onder leiding van Engelse machthebber Keir Starmer in London, ten onrechte een Coalition of the Willing rond de propaganda oorlog van Oekraïne afkondigen. Er is immers geen sprake van vredeshandhavings- of conflictstabilisatiedoelen in die afgekondigde samenwerking. De doelen zijn militair gericht en versterken de militaire opbouw in Oekraïne, welke niet dienen ter ondersteuning van doelen die door de Verenigde Naties worden onderschreven.

Om de vraag te kunnen beantwoorden waarom EU zo haatdragend en wraakzuchtig aan het reageren is.

Wat is de reden dat de Coalition of the Warcriminals is opgericht, nadat Voldomar Zelenski uit het Witte Huis is geschopt door President van de USA Donald Trump.

Foto van site: https://www.nytimes.com/es/2025/02/28/espanol/estados-unidos/trump-zelenski-reunion-casa-blanca-ucrania-rusia.html en de video van wat er werkelijk gebeurde op: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6369451601112

Europa heeft extreem eenzijdig verslag gedaan van het moment waarop Voldomar Zelenski over de scheef ging in het Witte Huis. De vraag is waarom geen Nederlander de hele sessie via NOS heeft kunnen zien. Het antwoord ligt in de analyse van de sociale stromingen in die 3 landen.

Politici in Europa verstarren, net als rond Wereldoorlog I en WO II in de imaginare denkbeelden waar de Romantiek > Postkolonialisme > Multiculturalisme > Cosmopolitanism of Globalisme voor staat.

EU Identiteit de Oudheid: Classicisme <-> Romantiek

EU identiteit gevormd door de dialectiek tussen

classicisme en romantiek.

Classicism

• Greece stands for the beginning of EU; the Roman Empire is the follow up and than the Christianization.
• European heritage (c.f., subsidiarity) is constantly made use of in Classicism; this heritage is about all the cultural achievements that are worthwhile to keep them alive. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle are hero’s of this heritage.
• The principle of subsidiarity is typical Classicism because a higher authority is not to interfere in a lower authority. All city states were governed by the subsidiarity principle as is the EU when it adopted this in the Maastricht treaty
• Ultimate classicism wants to develop minds.

Influence of the classicist movement is found in:

• The battle between Sparta and Athens, EU children of ancient Athens and Pericles strongly promoter of EU identity,
• Human dignity is obedience of Human rights as natural rights,
• The role of the rule of law is core in the EU treaties.

A social movement modelling (theoretical aspect) the issue of order by calling it a pre-given (natural) order.

• Natural order sometimes thought of as religious ideas, EU uses them.
  • Public is a copy of a city state
  • City state is an ordainment of natural law (= laws like “One shall not do to others that you do not want to be done to yourself)

A social movement shaping (political aspect) reality. Politics of truth, reality as it is experienced, like natural law. Realism means there is a reality outside of us that is mend to be discovered.

• Socrates said to be discovered by reason.
• Heracles said to be discovered by senses.

A social movement promoting the hierarchy of values, city states in Greece & Rome represented the classicist values:

• Higher values are enhancing the mindfulness for democracy, freedom
• Lower values are:
  • EU values entertainment (in roman republic (being city states) there was no entertainment, whereas in the Roman empire there were gladiator fights)
  • Non EU values are welfare, prosperity, security

Romanticism

Romanticists go back to the Middle-ages and the ancients, which it idealizes. They do not take those periods as it is, but remoulds it to their own idealistic world.

• Romanticism criticizes hierarchy and order; they think it is all arbitrary.

Influence of the romanticist movement is found in:

• The battle for Beethoven, EU anthem is from Beethoven,
• The issue of disenchantment (enzauberung), EU always against the background of WO II
• The creative role of the stranger, EU having great taste for exotic, outsider, erotic etc.

A social movement modelling (theoretical aspect), the issue of order with idealism, historicism, imagination and creation.

• Denying the existence of natural law is starting point of Romanticism. The order is a product of the human imagination; it is dynamic and a “mosaic of tiles”.

A social movement shaping (political aspect) a creation of reality (storytelling).

• Politics of creativeness (“cultur und bildung”), it is a historical nature no natural law. Romanticists imagine the unthinkable; they bend the borders for rules.
• Romanticists are idealists, reality only in the mind. Escaping from society to an inner directed person, because truth is not outside but inside of us.

A social movement promoting key values as imagination, aesthetic, poetic values and beautifulness instead of reason (Socrates), thus reinventing values like autonomy (oppose to hierarchy), individuality, authenticity.

EU Identiteit historisch: Verlichting <-> Romantiek

EU identiteit gevormd door de dialectiek tussen

de verlichting en romantiek.

Enlightenment

• Modelling the EU identity, started
  • in the 17^th century started with Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza,
  • in the 18^th century shaped and put into practise (civil rights like freedom of property and self ownership)
  • in the 19^th century after the French revolution there is political rights (FRANCE: The despot King Louis established 1851 right to vote. GERMANY: Friederich II introduced the enlightenment in Prussia (Hegel, Kant))
• Sovereignty and popular sovereignty has one purpose, to stop violence. Enlightenment was born after the reformation, this violence of civil war threatened the lives of civilians than. Ideologies out of enlightenment are liberalism and socialism.
• Anti: Classical, Socratic, Aristocratism, myth, militarism, charisma, tradition, church authority, religious dogma’s
  • When tradition, religion etc cannot be criticized it is all a farce.
• Pro: democracy, rule of father/king/middle class/bourgeois/reason,
  • Rule of Reason:
    1. via questioning and answering
    2. with a clash of mind
    3. autonomous, calculus and individual (do not have another think for you, think for yourself)
• Natural law without the subsidiarity,
• Progress (‘forschung’):
  • Originally modern physics is the core of Enlightenment
  • Order of progress in ancient Europe was a myth, dare to know -> myth-hunting
  • Modern society has to have progress and constant growth
  • Emancipation from nature, a process of disenchantment via technological science.
  • Technology is mastering of nature (nature in fact is evil) and liberation from cold, discomfort, hunger etc.

Influence of the enlightenment movement is found in:

• Positivism, technology, bureaucracy
• Lisbon Agenda, Bologna process
• 4^th , 5^th and 6^th industrial revolution

Romanticism

• The defeat of the mind, of the thoughtful subject on mass-produced culture like the cultural industry (film, entertainment, liberalism) or celebrity cult destroyed Europe (Radio is the first type of mass media)
• Reality presents itself in fragments, not in statistics
• Enlightenment collapses into mindlessness (facts are stupid and mindless and forgetfulness)
• Authenticity, self-expression, self realization

Influence of the romanticist movement is critique on enlightenment especially the negative/destructive side:

• The predomination of the enlightenment movement is responsible for the destruction of the European values:
  • Despotism in Germany (Friederich II, Bismarck).
  • world wars
    • WO I; Biological warfare & Airplanes
    • WO II; Rise of fascism (Holocaust is an effect of German culture) is a product of Enlightenment, Nuclear bomb (Oppenheimer, Einstein) – diplomacy could have stopped the war in Japan –
  • Science and technology opposes culture and/or art.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung)

(Influential between 1940 – 1960 mostly written in fragments (c.f. Nietzsche))

• The crux of the dialectic between enlightenment and romanticism resolves around the issue of myth.
• Frankfurter Schule, a key institute for sociological research since the 1930s, represents both Enlightenment and Romanticism.

• Max Horkhemer and Theodor Adorno both were exiles in New York during WO II
• No longer capable of expressing negation, because of eclipse of reason in positivism.

Since the collapse of the European empires in the 1950s

EU Identiteit naar binnen gericht: Eurocentrisme <-> Postkolonialisme

EU identiteit gevormd door de dialectiek tussen

eurocentrisme en postkolonialisme.

Eurocentrism

• Influenced by the Enlightenment movement.
• Imperialism and colonialism were first (90 % of the world belonging to Europe), because it had a mission in the world.
• Later on mixed with nationalism Eurocentrism started in the 19^th century (nationalism born in the French Revolution)
• Positivist premises of a superior European civilization/culture (universalist) was due to the positivist spirit, science, technology , bureaucracy and thus the most effective ways of mastering nature.
• Europe at the centre of the world, meaning to rule the world, promoting for instance human rights around the world.

Ethnocentric judgment, not to take the position of the other, but judge the other from your own standpoint because of:

• Race superiority; Whites are better than all other colours of skin
• Technology: The product of the enlightenment movement, all technological development is an offspring of European minds.
• Religion;
• Literature;
• Arts; Leonardo Da-Vinci is a great basis
• Colonialism started in 1492 because Europe otherwise would have been destroyed because of over population and social problems. Poor and criminals could be send to colonies, thus outsourcing the European problems. Peace of Westphalia was only possible because the unwanted were send away.

Influence of the Eurocentrist movement is

• EU leadership role in the world
• Europe as morally superior even to the US (they only have more arms)
• European science and literature

Postcolonialism

• Influenced by Romanticism movement
• Developed in the 1950/1960 on the ‘borders’ in resistance movements of the European colonized world, it is postmodern and is provincializing Europe
• Postcolonialism particularly holding Eurocentrism responsible for the horrific realities of the Holocaust and of the sufferings in the colonies of the European empires.
• National independence of Algeria (1950) vs. French Empire was the kick-off of Postcolonialism.
• An Empire was until 1960 a legitimate form of statehood until UN by law said it wasn’t anymore.
• Key thinkers (Frantz Fanon and Edward Said) are mostly educated in the western world.
• Postcolonialist use words as genocide, massacres, slavery, racism, equality of cultures and they say European culture has to live with these shameful aspects of their society. They ask for compensation of the damage done.
• Knowledge is a manifestation of European culture and but a weapon to rule the other.

• Revolt against Europe, Anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism
• Post-colonial cultures/dynamics (particularist) in the global era as a world of cultural minorities (diaspora).

Influence of the Postcolonialist movement is

• Shoah
• Self-critique of imperial histories, come to the awareness what is capable of in massacres and wars
• Europe as a province of the world, the ‘Frankfurter Schule’ said be aware of the darkness.
  
  

EU Identiteit onder Merkel: Monoculturalisme <-> Multiculturalisme

EU identiteit gevormd door de dialectiek tussen

Monoculturalisme en Multiculturalisme.

Monoculturalism

Since the fall of the European empires and the influx of guest workers in West European societies since the 1950s. Closely related to Enlightenment and Eurocentrism.

• Shapes a European identity in accord with unity and high degrees of cultural assimilation.
• Strengthening EU via assimilation and integration/social cohesion, this is than whipping out the tribal aspects of those immigrants (i.e. inburgeringscursus). Emphasizing how it works in Europe, make them new Europeans
• Migration is a problem; migrants should assimilate to sustain freedom, democracy and reason in Europe. There nations of origin in general are tyrannies and they do not have had freedom.
• Diversity is perhaps the difference between Finland and Italy, so non-European cultures are considered a threat.
• Organizing unity/universalism: European essentialism (Judea/Christian tradition), cultural determinism.

Influence of the Monoculturalist movement is

• Exclusive Europe, myths of origin
• European unity, European integration
• Closing borders

Multiculturalism

Came to flourish when gastarbeiders from Spain, Portugal and Greece came to Northern states, it prevailed from 1950 – 1990.

• Shapes a European identity in accord with cultural diversity and limited degrees of cultural assimilation.
• Organizing different cultures next to each other, diversity/particularism/accommodating differences.
• Struggle for recognition, strengthen the culture of the other: own schools, churches, etc (identity politics)
• Multi-cultural essentialism, values-equality of cultures & encounters
• After the fall of the Iron Curtain and migrants from Africa and Eastern Europe multiculturalism diminished.

Influence of the Multiculturalist movement is

• Pluralist demos
• European diversity
• Open borders

In the past few decades closely tied to debates on a supranational or inter-governmental EU.

Heden: Nationalisme <-> Cosmopolitanisme

EU identiteit gevormd door de dialectiek tussen

Nationalisme en Cosmopolitanisme.

Nationalism

Nations as something good (see Romanticism), originally it was grounded in the resistance against the Empires (Spanish, Habsburger, Ottoman etc.). Colonialism brought wealth that should not end in the pockets of Royalty alone.

• Emphasizing national history as tool for education (Geschiedenis Canon) and national distinctiveness, welfare state is a product of nationalism.
• Society = Nation (the highest community).Nation is a collection of ‘Fatherlands’ and a unity of provinces (‘länder’), not just a country, and a political concept.
• Modern aspect is the self-determination, the struggle for sovereignty, loyalty is sacred to Nationalists.

Influence of the Nationalist movement is

• Inter-governmentalism
• Euroscepticism
• Europe in, of, by and for nations

Cosmopolitanism

Is ancient Stoic in its origin, shapes an identity around stranger hood and unlocks the categories that modern movements like nationalism and multiculturalism had managed to bureaucratically fixate in nation-states.

• Open borders, reconciling national opposites, inclusion of the stranger
• Values are compassion, hospitality, empathy, peace
• Live together and create a new humanity (multiculturalism is living side by side)
• Requires a constantly criticizing ones own idea’s, identity, society
• Promotes a society of strangers, do away with national welfare state and promote global empathy.
• Gevernment by NGO’s, International tribunals, who respond according to cosmopolitan human ideas.

Influence of the Cosmopolitanist movement is

• Supra-nationalism, ‘cosmopolitan Europe’
• Reconciliation of former enemies: France – Germany
• European society of strangers

Referenties per periode

The dialectic between classicism and romanticism:

Harrington, A. (2004) ‘Ernst Troeltsch’ Concept of Europe’, Journal of Social Theory 7 (4): 479-498. At http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/4/479.

Ossewaarde, M. (2007) ‘The Dialectic Between Romanticism and Classicism in Europe’, European Journal of Social Theory 10 (4): 523-542. At http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/10/4/523

The dialectic between enlightenment and romanticism:

Cohen, A. (2010) ‘Myth and Myth Criticism following the Dialectic of Enlightenment’, European Legacy 15 ( 5): 583-599. At http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848770.2010.501660

Habermas, J. (2001) ‘The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment. At http://mfs.uchicago.edu/adorno/readings/habermas.pdf

Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno (1947) Dialectic of Enlightenment. A very short summary. http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-dialectic-of-enlightenment/

Kant, I. (1784) ‘What is Enlightenment.’ At http://www.sapere-aude.at/What%20is%20Enlightenment.pdf

The dialectic between Eurocentrism and postcolonialism:

Bhambra, G.K. (2007) ‘Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another `Missing’ Revolution?’, Sociology 41 (5): 871-844. At http://soc.sagepub.com/content/41/5/871.abstract

Finkielkraut, A. (2010) ‘Remembrance and Resentment’. http://yad-vashem.org.il/yv/en/education/languages/dutch/pdf/finkielkraut.pdf

McLennan, G. (2003) ‘Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory,’ European Journal of Social Theory 6 (1): 69-86. At http://est.sagepub.com/content/6/1/69.short

The dialectic between multiculturalism and monoculturalism:

Amin, A. (2004) ‘Multi-ethnicity and the Idea of Europe’, Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2): 1-24. At http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/2/1.

Hartman, D. and J. Gerteis (2005) ‘Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms,’ Sociological Theory 23 (2) 218-240. At http://www.soc.umn.edu/~hartmann/Publications/mapping_2005st.pdf

The following newspaper articles:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/angela-merkel-german-multiculturalism-failed

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cameron-my-war-on-multiculturalism-2205074.html

http://euweekly.eu/2011/02/11/if-multiculturalism-is-dead-whats-the-point-of-the-eu/

The dialectic between cosmopolitanism and nationalism

Beck, U. and U. Grande (2007), ‘Cosmopolitanism: Europe’s Way Out of Crisis’, European Journal of Social Theory 10: 67-85. At http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/10/1/67

Ossewaarde, M. (2007) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Society of Strangers’, Current Sociology 55 (3): 367-388. At http://csi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/55/3/367.

Bauman, Z. ‘Europe of Strangers’ http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/bauman.pdf