ABSTRACT
This chapter describes political discourse and the search for European identity within the longue duree of European history and its symbolic borders and considers ancient and medieval periods as forerunners to contemporary forms of discourse. There are four religious and thus four cultural-symbolic borders. Northwestern Europe is Protestant, Southern Europe is Catholic, the East is Orthodox and increasingly nationalist, and the South and Near East are Muslim. The mobilization against the Islamization of Europe has become thus part of a larger quest for European identity. After World War I, this ensemble of dispersed material developed into a fully-fledged ideology. The Bolshevik revolution and the metaphysical crisis of the European way of life served to crystallize the notion of the Abendland into a widely disseminated discourse. After World War II, this German-Catholic Abendland trope proved influential in shaping the vision of Europe promoted in the 1950s by Catholics and Christian Democratic politicians at the start of project of integration.
