ABSTRACT
From the outset of the integration process, European leaders have struggled to justify the creation of supranational institutions in tension with established national identities. In order to legitimate the integration process at home, they have sought, in part, to construct an overarching European identity based on shared historical experience, culture, and political values. More important, and less understood, they have also endeavored to redefine established national identities in ways compatible with membership in the European Union (EU). Through the depiction of integration as an extension of national history, culture, and political values, EU supporters have redescribed the nation state as inextricably embedded within European institutions. Efforts to Europeanize national identity—to construe the nation state as part of an evolving supranational community—have provoked different kinds of resistance at different junctures. A comparison of French and German controversies in the 1950s and the 1990s illuminates the character of those efforts in two key cases, the nature of resistance to them, and their degree of success over time.
