ABSTRACT
The issues of culture and identity have long been marginal aspects of the general scholarship of the European Union (EU). Until recently, most academic studies of the EU have treated the thorny problems of local and national identities, loyalties, traditions, ideologies and affiliations as secondary concerns to the more important projects of creating, sustaining, and understanding the EU as a political and economic entity and system. But the importance of the roles which national and other cultures play in the processes of ‘Europe-building’ (a phrase often used to refer to the strengthening of the institutions of the EU and to the expansion of its membership), and in Europeanization (which is a much wider and perhaps more important process connoting the role of European culture in the integration of disparate European communities and societies), has not gone unnoticed by social scientists. This attention has been generated by what some believe was the shock inflicted on political insiders, government leaders, journalists and academics by the initial Danish rejection of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. Recently a number of sociologists and political scientists have recognized the need for more studies of European culture and identity, as they are related to European integration (Hedetoft 1994: 1-2; see also Landau and Whitman 1997). In fact one leading scholar, in his critique of academic European Studies in North America, has specifically called for more involvement by anthropologists and other social scientists in research in cultural and political integration (Tarrow 1994; see also Hedetoft 1994).
