are europeans made in america? identity, alterity and the united states as europe's ‘other’
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Are Europeans made in America?Identity, alterity and the United Statesas Europe's ‘Other’David Michael Green aa Department of Political Science , Hofstra University , NY , USAPublished online: 09 Mar 2012.
To cite this article: David Michael Green (2012) Are Europeans made in America? Identity, alterityand the United States as Europe's ‘Other’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 10:1, 1-25, DOI:10.1080/14794012.2012.651353
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Are Europeans made in America? Identity, alterity and the United Statesas Europe’s ‘Other’
David Michael Green*
Department of Political Science, Hofstra University, NY, USA
Theorists of political identity have long argued that such sentiments are oftenforged through the mechanics of alterity. The intersection of these theoreticalideas with the historical contingency of the George W. Bush administration andthe availability of mass behaviour data measuring identity and related conceptscreates a unique opportunity to put this notion to an empirical test in theimportant context of European polity-building. Did the transatlantic breachcaused by the Iraq war and other US policies of the past decade create an ‘Other’for Europe in the form of the USA, driving European Union citizens towards aEuropean identity? This study examines both qualitative and quantitative data totest the hypothesis that US policy during the Bush administration served to fostera more robust European identity, ultimately uncovering mixed empirical evidenceboth supporting and negating the proposed relationship.
Keywords: European integration; European identity; political identity; transatlanticrelations; American foreign policy; mass behaviour; political psychology
More than a decade ago, a student of European political identity mused about the
timing, trajectory and causal factors associated with the phenomenon, and about its
potential for further growth, and concluded:
All of this will take time; states may be born overnight, but identities grow more slowly.Notwithstanding this general pace of development, the capacity of events todramatically alter a situation should not be discounted. Conflict, and its requiredreification of an ‘Other’, has shown itself to be an especially potent facilitator ofidentity-formation. Particularly if Europe were to successfully present a common frontto a common problem or threat, this accretionary timetable could be dramaticallyaccelerated. Moreover, for maximum effect in articulating identity borders, the ‘Other’should probably be as close in shared characteristics as possible to those whose commonidentity is being built, since distinctions vis-a-vis other communities will be inherentlyclearer. Thus, the ‘best’ case scenario for a European Mazzini would probably be amajor (though not necessarily militarized) rift in the Atlantic community.1
No one at the time, of course, could foresee that the ensuing decade would provide a
unique set of circumstances that would permit at least a partial test of this
proposition. For, whatever else one might say about the George W. Bush
administration in the USA during this era, it certainly was kind to any social
scientist looking to explore the ramifications of a transatlantic rift. This study
*Email: [email protected]
Journal of Transatlantic Studies
Vol. 10, No. 1, March 2012, 1�25
ISSN 1479-4012 print/ISSN 1754-1018 online
# 2012 Board of Transatlantic Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2012.651353
http://www.tandfonline.com
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mounts just such an analysis, seeking to explore the possibility of a causal
relationship between Bush era policies and growth in European political identity.2
Bush came into office in 2001 and immediately began taking steps that unravelled
the long-standing consensus in the West over various issues, as well as the favoured
multilateral approach to those issues. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, of course,
represented both the apogee of discontent in the European�US relationship andits single biggest contributing factor, but this was hardly the only item on the list of
grievances, and hardly the first either. Even prior to the events of 11 September 2001,
the Bush administration had already served notice of withdrawal from the Anti-
Ballistic Missile Treaty, and had withdrawn its signatures from both the Kyoto and
International Criminal Court treaties as well. Through nearly six decades of post-war
relations, certain conventions had underscored relations within the Western alliance,
regardless of Republican or Democratic administrations in Washington. And a
certain commonality of vision had held that alliance together, even through rough
patches such as Suez or Vietnam.
But this was something different. By the time Bush was laying the groundwork
for war in Iraq, he had signalled clearly a new US foreign policy disposition that
struck Europeans as arrogant, militarist and unilateral. Moreover, conservative
pundits close to the administration were mocking the citizens of a leading European
state as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ by virtue of their opposition to a war that
struck most Europeans as completely unnecessary, justified by lies, and which in any
case would turn out disastrously. Even some academics in the USA took up the
banner, with one scholar distinguishing between Americans, who were ‘from Mars’,and Europeans, who were ‘from Venus’.3 The US Secretary of Defense went so far as
to make a crass distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe, based on those who
would play ball with the Bush agenda, versus those who would not. Europeans � old
and new alike � responded by marching in the streets in record numbers to protest
the Bush agenda.
This substantial transatlantic divide of the past decade seems now largely healed.
More important for purposes of this study, however, is that this window of time �during which the rift between Europe and the USA both became rather pronounced
and was coincident with a moment in which a nascent European political identity
might be seen as ripe for expansion � allows us to consider the impact of alterity, or
the ‘Other’, in the formulation of political identity. In short, it allows us to address
the question of whether Europeans are made in America.4
This study seeks to test that theoretical question empirically. I begin by reviewing
what is known about the phenomenon of European identity. Next we turn to a
theoretical discussion of the concept of identity and its relationship to alterity,
followed by a brief discussion of the methods and sources employed in this analysis.Finally, before concluding, I analyse the available qualitative and quantitative data
that speak to the question at the core of this study.
Ultimately, the study produces somewhat mixed evidence for the hypothesised
relationship. Commentary from certain opinion leaders evidences strong support for
the notion of a transatlantic breach, while interview data underscore the concept of
America as Europe’s ‘Other’, against which a common identity might be forged.
These are rather anecdotal sources, but correlations revealed in an analysis of
extensive poll data confirm the possibility that the hypothesised causal relationship
between Bush administration policy and European identification might indeed have
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existed during the period in question. However, some contradictory survey data
findings, along with the standard problem of determining causality even where
correlation exists, make claims for such an argument necessarily somewhat tenuous.
Understanding European identity
A rather extensive body of empirical research on the question of public support for
integration has now been amassed over the 40 years in which regular public opinion
surveying has been conducted in Western Europe. This is less true, however, for
empirical research on identity. Still, there have been a few key studies over the years
whose findings provide insight into the phenomenon.
Miles Hewstone’s work, for example, offered a good overview of some of theearlier findings concerning attitudes and identities in Europe, though he sometimes
limits his analysis to the four cases of his study: Germany, Italy, France and the UK.
At least two of his survey questions tapped the degree of ‘Europeanness’ among his
respondents. Besides noting the existence of national differences in levels of
European identity among his sample, Hewstone suggests that the data are more
generally indicative of the failure of such an identity to materialise.5
One of the most pervasive (though not completely unchallenged) findings
concerning the attitudes of Europeans towards the integration project is the effectof nationality on support. The British, for example, are consistently less enthusiastic
than other countries, and Italians consistently more so. The more interesting finding,
however, is the apparent correlation of popular national attitudes on Europe to the
date of entry to the union or its predecessors. The basic relationship was perhaps first
articulated by Ronald Inglehart, who worked extensively with Eurobarometer data.
His analysis strongly suggests that public opinion among countries of The Six
(France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) � who at the
time had lived under supranational European institutions for over two decades � hadconverged around a consensus backing European integration, while in The Three
(Britain, Ireland and Denmark) support was less widespread. This greater level of
support among the longer term members was not always present, and is probably
instrumentally driven, he argued, with the perceived benefits of European Commu-
nity (EC) membership producing the stronger sense of supranational identity in these
countries.6
Inglehart presents a number of other relevant findings in his ‘Parochialism,
Nationalism and Supra-Nationalism’ chapter in The Silent Revolution.7 First, henotes that supranational identity is positively associated with the idea of cognitive
mobilisation, and specifically with the powerful predictors of political involvement
and efficacy, and educational and informational levels.8 Second, of course, he locates
European integration within his broader construct of post-materialism, identifying
greater support among those within that group than among materialists.9 Overall, he
notes that the three most powerful predictors of supranational identity are (in
descending order): nationality (i.e. citizenship in The Six), postmaterialist values and
cognitive mobilisation (a constructed index combining political involvement, level ofeducation and informational cognizance). Other variables are relatively unimportant
when these three are controlled for.10 Ultimately, though, Inglehart argues that the
real divide is not between national and supranational identities, but rather between
parochial versus cosmopolitan identities. Those who say they belong to the nation
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first, that is, are actually more likely to identify with Europe or the world than those
who feel closest to their town, province or region.11
Another prominent study of the phenomenon is offered by Duchesne and
Frognier, who address the question posed by their title, ‘Is There a European
Identity?’12 The authors used responses to a particular Eurobarometer question
(asked in 1975, 1978 and 1979) on political/geographical units of identity:
To which one of the following geographical units would you say you belong to first ofall: the locality or town where you live; the region or county where you live; [name ofcountry] as a whole; Europe; the world as a whole?
They found that responses to this question were rather similar across national
boundaries: country and town were the first or second choice among two-thirds or
more of respondents (with town leading country by considerable margins everywhere
but in Britain, Italy, The Netherlands and France); European and world identities
were consistently marginal and, there was a fairly consistent ordering of choices
(in descending order of preference): town, country, region, Europe and the world.
Between 1 and 9% of respondents in the polled countries selected Europe as their
first identity choice, with between 6 and 26% selecting it either first or second.13
For 1982 and 1992 data, the authors relied upon a different question, in which
respondents were asked if they sometimes, never or often think of themselves as
Europeans, in addition to nationals of their own country. From these data, they
conclude that the responses vary considerably by country (but � significantly � not
according to length of community membership), with France, Italy, Greece, Spain
and Portugal ‘the most ‘‘European’’ countries’, Britain and Ireland the least (with
The Netherlands close behind), and Belgium and Denmark in-between. Duchesne
and Frognier describe three distinct periods in this latter data-set. In the first, 1982�1986, ‘Europeanness’ increases, with the exception of in Germany, then from 1986 to
1990 European identity declines, while, finally, in the 1990�1992 period European
identity again increases, only to fall once more.14 The authors also find a
supranational versus local competition in identities, rather than supranational
versus national.15 These findings are congruent with Inglehart’s parochial versus
cosmopolitan distinction, as well as his conjecture that national identity is indicative
of the individual possessing the same cognitive tools (i.e. the ability to receive and
interpret information regarding remote political communities) necessary to suprana-
tional identification as well.
Duchesne and Frognier next turn their attention to socio-demographic correlates
of European identity, where they find that education level is the strongest predictor
among these variables. Income is found to be the second most influential variable,
though less predictably than education. Gender also seems to play a role, with men
possessing a greater sense of Europeanness than women, though they see that gap as
narrowing. Geographical location appears to have little impact, but urban residents
are found to have greater levels of European identity than those in rural areas. Age
also seems to have little bearing on European identity, contra Inglehart’s post-
materialism theory. Finally, the authors note that socio-demographic factors
influence attitudes towards European identity in such countries as Greece, Portugal,
Spain and, to a lesser extent, Ireland and Italy, while in those such as Denmark,
Britain, Germany and France they have little effect. As they point out, this line-up
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matches a ranking of European Union (EU) countries in terms of economic
development; European identity in more developed countries thus appears rather
diffuse, while in less developed EU member states it depends more on education and
income. With respect to the political correlates of European identity, Duchesne and
Frognier validate Inglehart’s findings on the substantial relationship between
cognitive mobilisation and European identity, as well as post-materialism and
European identity. Party identification, meanwhile, is found to have a more variable
and weaker effect on identities, while ideological self-placement has little significant
impact.16 The ultimate conclusion of Duchesne and Frognier’s analysis is that there
is now in Europe little ‘real community of belonging of the kind experienced in
nation states’. ‘For the present, a European identity is a vanguard phenomenon’.17
In The Europeans, Green considers a range of questions related to the
phenomenon of European identity, and brings to bear extensive quantitative and
qualitative data in an effort to address those.18 He looks first to measure the extent of
European identification, examining data from a variety of survey sources ranging
from 1971 to 2002. Green finds different answers to the question, depending on the
format of survey question employed, but ultimately suggests that roughly 15% of
Europeans strongly identify as such, another 35% also do but less strongly and the
remaining 50% of the population does not possess a European identity. He also notes
that these figures have remained relatively static over the course of about three
decades worth of survey polling.19
Turning to the correlates of European identification, Green examines a plethora
of measures, divided into four categories of explanatory factors: attributional,
attitudinal, social-psychological and political cultural hypotheses, with the first two
demonstrating the most efficacy in explaining the phenomenon:
Specifically, European identifiers may be said with relatively high levels of confidence tobe over-represented among elites (as measured by class and education, and to a lesserextent by occupation and income), the more cosmopolitan, men, post-materialists,centrists and leftists, those who perceive instrumental benefits accruing from EUmembership, those who possess a normative belief in the idea of European integration,and those from both richer, more Catholic and southern member countries (notwith-standing certain contradictions inherent in these categories). With somewhat lessassurance, we may also say that such European identifiers are high in political efficacy,and are members of a religious and/or regional minority in a country which is also arelatively recent member of the EU. Conversely, the respondent’s age and degree of non-traditionalist attitudes do not affect levels of European identity, nor does the size of hisor her country or its historical legacy from World War II. There is also little evidencethat European identifiers tend to be the products of socialization processes or leadershipeffects, though the latter remains a theoretical possibility.20
Among other findings in his book, Green also determines that the meaning of
European identity for those who subscribe to it invokes themes of peace most
predominantly, along with shared cultural attributes and important normative
commitments such as to democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, tolerance and
socio-economic solidarity, along with an appreciation of the instrumental benefits of
the integration process.21 Finally, he finds that there is a substantial degree of depth
to European identification, largely measured in terms of willingness to make
sacrifices for the polity or for other member states � about the same levels of
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willingness, at least among the identifiers, as is held for their respective countries and
fellow nationals.22
Fligstein has also reported on the correlates of European identity, and comes to
some similar conclusions (albeit utilising only a single instance of an dependentvariable measure of identity, and one that reflects respondents’ expectations about
the future of their European/national identity mix, rather than their current
disposition).23 He finds that slightly more than half the population possesses the
identity, and concludes that factors associated with class and cosmopolitanism �such as occupation, language ability and travel patterns � are key determinants of
individuals’ disposition on this issue. He also notes that age, sex and ideology are
determinants of European identity, or its absence.
Identity and alterity
In addition to the specific correlates of European identity surveyed above, there are
several major theoretical traditions in the broader field of political identity that have
been applied to nationalism and other manifestations of the phenomenon. Young,
for example, identifies three of these grand thematic paradigms, which he labels
primordialism, instrumentalism and constructivism.24 But there are others, as well,
including Inglehart’s aforementioned post-materialism, the psycho-emotional-driven
explanations for nationalism exemplified in Greenfeld’s work,25 for example, or the
reliance on technological developments in understanding identity, as famouslyexemplified by Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism rooted in the advent of
print capitalism.26
Another rather common theme concerns the presence or necessity of the ‘Other’ as
the oppositional characteristic around which identities may be defined. Among the
earliest, most prominent, and most relevant articulations of this notion is one
provided by Edward Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’, which has been characterised as ‘a
collective notion identifying ‘‘us’’ Europeans against all ‘‘those’’ non-Europeans’,27
and as facilitating the dominance of the former over the latter. As Said himself put it:
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest andrichest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its culturalcontestant and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition,the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea,personality, experience. (2). . . European culture gained in strength and identity bysetting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.(3). . . On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are Arab-Orientals;the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable ofholding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things.28
A similar understanding of the causal factors at work in identity-building emerges
from Linda Colley’s study of Britons.29 Like many contemporary approaches to the
topic, Colley’s begins with the premise that identity is essentially contingent and
constructed. In Britain’s case, she argues, the invention of the British nation from itscomponent pieces was forged primarily by joint participation in the struggles of war �during the 130 years of her study (1707�1837), Britain and France were almost
continually at war with one another. The product of an obviously hostile ‘Other’
during this period encouraged Britons to define themselves (as Britons) in defensive
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opposition against the ‘militarist’, ‘decadent’ and Catholic French threat. It was in the
context of this ongoing war effort, according to Colley, that Britons forged their
collective identity as such:
It was an invention forged above all by war. Time and time again, war with Francebrought Britons, whether they hailed from Wales or Scotland or England, intoconfrontations with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged them to definethemselves collectively against it. They defined themselves as Protestants strugglingfor survival against the world’s foremost Catholic power. They defined themselvesagainst the French as they imagined them to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent andunfree. And, increasingly as the wars went on, they defined themselves in contrast to thecolonial people they conquered, peoples who were manifestly alien in terms of culture,religion and colour. . . in other words, men and women decide who they are by referenceto who and what they are not. Once confronted with an obviously alien ‘Them’, anotherwise diverse community can become a reassuring or merely desperate ‘Us’. This ishow it was with the British after 1707. They came to define themselves as a single peoplenot because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to theOther beyond their shores.30
Said and Colley are far from alone in their ideas about how identities are craftedthrough opposition to an external actor. Quite a number of other studies have echoed
the same point about the significance of the ‘Other’ in the forging of political
identities, including opposition to the USA as a possible basis for European identity
formation. Two early and prominent examples include remarks made about the
transatlantic relationship in the 1950s by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt,31
and similar notions articulated by EU founder Jean Monnet32 with respect to the
similar role played by the seminal anti-colonialist figure Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Among other scholarly articulations of such ‘Other’-based identity-formationprocesses are those promulgated by Garcıa,33 Hobsbawm,34 Delanty,35 Papcke,36
Sahlins,37 Neumann,38 Neumann and Welsh,39 Green,40 Mueller,41 Heins,42 Marko-
vits,43 Checkel and Katzenstein44 and Wilterdink.45 Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia put
the argument most bluntly for this identity paradigm, arguing ‘There is no identity
without alterity’.46
Following in this tradition, the question explored in this study asks whether the
Europe that once defined itself against the ‘Other’ of the Orient has recently again
been doing the same thing with reference to the USA that significantly departed froman extant Western consensus over the past decade.
Methods and sources
The foregoing premise, along with a confluence of historical circumstances, allows us
to both pose and test the question of whether Europeans are made in America. That
is, did the USA, with policies and behaviours during the Bush era that were noxious
to most Europeans, play the role of Europe’s ‘Other’, and thereby provide an
organizing nucleus around which European identification could expand? Said and
Colley and others gave us the theoretical concept, while the policies of the Bushadministration provided the set of historical circumstances that social scientists can
never create, but must always await the semi-random developments of history to
provide (or, more typically, not). All that is missing for this to become a compelling
social science study is data.
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For that, I have drawn from three sources. First, I take stock of the rhetoric of
intellectuals and other opinion-making elites with respect to the USA, and the
implications of those tropes for European identity. Second, I also make reference to
information gleaned from about 200 interviews with Europeans, specifically abouttheir political identities, conducted over the past decade. But, since identity is chiefly
a mass phenomenon, and because the above-referenced qualitative sources are
necessarily somewhat anecdotal in nature, the primary emphasis of the study is on
analysing indicators of broad public sentiment. Towards that end, I have examined
an extensive volume of survey data-sets ranging over the past four decades, looking
for measures of European identity. Of particular interest were any that allowed for a
‘controlled’ or longitudinal analysis, and any that incorporated other valuable
measures of public sentiment (especially regarding the USA) which could bejuxtaposed against identity measures. I reviewed every Eurobarometer, International
Social Survey Program (ISSP), World Values Survey, European Values Survey and
European Community Studies Survey fielded from 1970 to the present, looking for
those which included such measures. In the end, a number of Eurobarometer47 and
ISSP48 studies were found to possess the data required for the present analysis.
Real measures of European identity show up in four basic formats within these
survey data-sets. (Other scholars have employed, but I reject as proper measures of
identity, questions regarding future sentiments, citizenship or support for Europeanintegration.) Format 1 identity questions ask respondents to select the geographical/
political entity with which they most closely identify. In each survey in which it was
employed, this question was then immediately followed by another which asked
respondents for their second choice. In Format 2 formulations, respondents were
asked ‘Does the thought ever occur to you that you are not only [nationality] but also
a European? Does this happen often, sometimes, or never?’ For Format 3, the same
question is asked, but respondents are called upon to rank their identity sentiment on
a scale of 1�10, instead of employing the ordinal response choices. Finally, Format 4asks respondents how attached they feel to Europe, requiring them to pick from
among four choices, ranging from ‘not at all attached’ to ‘very attached’.
Unfortunately, surveys containing Formats 1 and 3 European identity measures
are not relevant to this project, because they only appear in the pre-Bush era, and
thus offer no help in measuring any change witnessed over the past decade, let alone
its causal source. However, we are fortunate that there are several surveys deploying
Formats 2 and 4 questions in both the Bush and pre-Bush periods, and they are thus
examined in this study. Statistical techniques include measures of cross-tabularpercentages, bivariate relationship summary statistics and comparative means
analysis. These allow us for the first time to begin to answer empirically the question
at the heart of this study.
Analysis
‘America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I
can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the longterm potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War’. So wrote John le Carre49 at
the height of the transatlantic breach, as the Bush administration was hurling itself
headlong towards war in Iraq, and running over any and all obstacles to get there,
including long-time European alliance partners. In penning those words, le Carre
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spoke for much of Europe, both elites and masses, for whom polls showed massive
antipathy to the war among the public.
The breach was clear enough (though, in retrospect, perhaps temporary), even
before it was articulated at the highest levels of the US Government. But does a
policy difference � or even a series of profound ones over matters of the highest
politics � necessarily become a causal factor in the production of European
identification? The first question that must be addressed in order to assess the
hypothesis that US behaviour, attitudes and policies might have driven Europeans
towards a European identity, is whether we have seen movement in the direction of
increased European identification during the years of the Bush administration.There is certainly powerful evidence for this at the level of discourse by public
intellectuals. Markovits devotes a chapter in his book to this question, and is explicit
in his findings:
. . . the Bush administrations’ policies have produced a convergence between elite andmass opinion in Europe and elicited the mobilization of anti-American countervalues inthe name of Europe. Hence, anti-Americanism has become an emotional, potent, andvery real aspect of European identity formation.50
He goes on to argue that, should there be an EU centennial in 2057, celebrated in
some ‘Europe Square’ in Brussels that features statues of the European nation’s
giants like Monnet, Schuman, Spaak, Delors and others, ‘I really believe that a
statue of George W. Bush also deserves its honoured place in this ornamental setting,
thus giving proper tribute to the man who brought Europeans together like nobody
before (and perhaps after) him’.51
For Markovits and many others, the day of continent-wide protests against the
Iraq war marks a seminal moment for the development anti-Americanism-cum-
European-nationalism. As former French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-
Kahn wrote, ‘On Saturday, February 15, 2003, a nation was born on the streets. This
nation is the European nation’.52 They are not alone in seeing Europe through the
lens of opposition to the USA. For novelist Margaret Drabble, ‘my anti-American-
ism has become almost incontrollable. It has possessed me like a disease. It rises in
my throat like acid reflux’.53 German author Matthias Politycki decries the
Americanisation of his homeland and calls for Europe to reject US values in favour
of ‘European aesthetics’.54 And, from an earlier moment, Eliseo Alvarez-Arenas
summarises the sentiment by arguing that an ‘Americanized Europe is not Europe
but an alienated Europe. . . If Europe, in body and soul, wants to reach its unity, it
must ‘‘de-Americanize’’ on every level’.55
In European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush,
Peter O’Brien summarises nicely the opposition and indeed rage engendered among
many of Europe’s elites in reaction to US policy at this time, and how that also led to
calls for European renewal and unity.56 O’Brien recounts how European intellectuals,
political figures and other elites deployed in no uncertain terms the tropes of US
‘Otherism’ in an effort to forge a revived Europe through a common European
identity:
Europe’s leaders. . . stoically refuse to abandon efforts to revive the Old Continent.Chirac, for instance, has advanced that ‘we need a means to struggle against American
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hegemony.’ Prodi has expressed the desire to fashion the EU into ‘a superpower. . . thatstands equal to the United States.’ And Barroso has pledged to work against American‘arrogance.’ Prominent European intellectuals have joined the revivalist chorus. Led byJurgen Habermas and inspired by the massive demonstrations against the Iraq War thattook place in every major European city on February 15, 2003, Umberto Eco, JacquesDerrida, Gianni Vattimo, Fernando Savater, and other luminaries simultaneouslypublished in their respective land’s leading newspapers epistles calling for the ‘rebirth ofEurope’ as a sorely needed counterweight to the American Leviathan.57
Of course, not all European elites were on the same page. Not only did governments
largely refrain from openly criticising the USA during this period, but many of them
even participated in what the European public and its intellectuals saw as the most
egregious single foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration, the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Indeed, of Europe’s six major states, four of them (Britain, Italy,
Spain and Poland) were part of the invading coalition, while only two (France and
Germany) opted out.
Yet this rending of would-be European common foreign and security policy, real
as it was, actually masks a near uniformity of sentiment outside of the select
governments following the USA to war. Markovits captures it well:
. . . as of October 2001, six to eight weeks after 9/11 and just before the impendingAmerican war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a massive Europe-wideresentment of America commenced that reached well beyond American policies,American politics, and the American government and proliferated in virtually allsegments of Western Europe’s publics. From grandmothers who vote for thearchconservative Bavarian CSU to thirty-year-old socialist PASOK activists in Greece,from Finnish Social Democrats to French Gaullists, from globalization opponents tobusiness managers � all are joining in the ever louder chorus of anti-Americans. The‘European street’ has been more hostile to America than ever before. For the first time,anti-Americanism has entered the European mainstream. [It has been marked by] therise of a hitherto unprecedented, wholly voluntary, and uncoordinated conformity inWestern European public opinion regarding America and American politics. . .Especially leading up to and during the Iraq War, there appeared an almost perfectconcordance among a vast majority of European public opinion, the European ‘street’by way of the largest demonstrations in European history, the media, most politicalparties, and many � if certainly not all � European governments. Western Europe spokeloudly and passionately with a unified voice that one rarely, if ever, encountered in suchopenly contested pluralist democracies.58
Without question, then, there was widespread animosity towards the USA among
European elites and masses during this period, and some informed belief suggesting
that such sentiments were acting as building blocks for an expanded European
identity. But whatever public intellectuals and governments there were doing,
thinking or feeling, the seminal scholarly question regarding political identity
revolves around the measurable disposition of the mass public. Did US behaviour
lead to a US role as the ‘Other’, around which European identification empirically
grew during this period?Of course, even the uncovering of such a finding would not be determinative, in
the sense that correlation cannot prove a causal relationship. (It is also worth noting
that the reverse is also true, however, improbable. That is, neither the absence of
correlation nor even an inverse pattern would necessarily demonstrate the absence of
the hypothesised relationship, if only because there might be other factors at work
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compensating for and masking just such a causal relationship.) All that said,
however, the plausible case for the hypothesis is certainly enhanced if we find
temporal correlation in the data.
One problem for doing so is that European identity based on alterity to the US
‘Other’ preexisted the advent of the Bush administration and its behaviours, attitudes
and policies that Europeans found so offensive. In interviews I have conducted with
Europeans on the question of identity, I frequently asked informants what content
defined European identity for them, and I often heard back � even prior to 2001 �that ‘Europe is defined as being not America’. Lyall encountered the same sentiment
in her examination of the subject:
If one can even speak about a construct called ‘‘Europe,’’ with a recognizable identity,culture, and view of the world, then most European � especially among the young �would not be able to characterize this except along one very decisive dimension of whatEurope is not: America.59
Thus, one problem with testing this study’s hypothesis is that the phenomenon of
European identity based in opposition to the USA was hardly new when George W.
Bush took office in January of 2001. Thus in examining survey data we must be
looking for an acceleration of European identification in response to the Bush
administration, rather than its advent.
Table 1 begins the process of addressing this question using quantitative data.
Here, we see a range of administrations of the Format 2 European identity question,
in surveys fielded from 1987 (Eurobarometer 27) through 2005 (Eurobarometer 64.2).
The latter survey is analysed in three forms � using all countries in the survey, using
just the 15 countries forming the EU up until 2004 and using just the 25 forming the
organisation up until 2007. (As the table data indicate, there is little meaningful
difference between these three samples of the Eurobarometer 64.2 survey data.)
The key question is whether there is more evidence of European identification in
2005 than in previous, pre-Bush years when the question format was first fielded. The
answer appears rather clearly affirmative. With the partial exception of the 1988
Eurobarometer 30 (something of an aberration from the remaining pre-Bush era
surveys), the other surveys � from 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1992 � all return mean
responses in the range of about 1.64 (part-way between ‘Never’ thinking of oneself as
European, and ‘Sometimes’ doing so). For Eurobarometer 64.2 (2005), however,
European identity responses are substantially elevated, to a mean of 1.74 for the
comparable club of 15 EU member states.
In short, Table 1 suggests that at least correlation exists in the data, offering initial
and preliminary support for the hypothesis. In other words, levels of European
identification seem to rise in quantity during the George W. Bush years, compared
with the those preceding this era. This finding is further confirmed by an analysis of
the respective survey means, using Mann�Whitney�Wilcoxan test statistics, which
shows that for each survey pairing, the difference between the mean value for
Eurobarometer 64.2 and the mean from the respective other surveys is highly
significant (0.000). These results are presented in Table 2, where six other surveys with
Format 2 identity questions are individually juxtaposed against Eurobarometer 64.2
to test for the statistical significance of the difference between each pair of means.
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There are multiple caveats that one might note with respect to conclusions based
on this data alone, but certainly one prominent issue is the fact that only a single
survey exists for this question format during the George W. Bush era, as against six
surveys for the pre-Bush period. This single identity measure fielding must therefore
be considered carefully, since it represents only one snapshot of the phenomenon in
question.
On the other hand, an interesting aspect of the data is that all of the pre-George
W. Bush era data come from the time of the Ronald Reagan/George H. W. Bush
presidencies. If the hypothesis tested in this study is valid, the same phenomenon
presumably would have been true during this earlier time as well, though to a
somewhat lesser extent. Reagan, in particular, tended not to engender warm feelings
from the less militarist Western European bodies politic, who objected to what they
saw as his ‘cowboy’ style of foreign policy. Thus, one might assume that if we had
data from the era of Bill Clinton � a presidency better received in Europe � an even
more pronounced correlation might show up.We are able to partially explore that notion by turning to Format 4 identity
questions, the data from which are summarised in Table 3. Here, we have
Eurobarometer and ISSP data ranging from 1991 to 2006, with a number of years �particularly the recent ones � represented. Prior to the Bush era, there are
Table 2. Comparison of mean European identity levels�Mann�Whitney�Wilcoxan test
(Format 2 identity question).
Survey compared to
Eurobarometer 64.2
(mean �1.74; N�28,805) Mean
Mann�Whitney
U
Wilcoxan
W Z
Significance
(two-tailed) N
EB-27 1.64 1.469E8 2.100E8 �15.602 0.000 11,233
EB-30 1.71 1.554E8 2.197E8 �8.322 0.000 11,344
EB-31 1.65 1.502E8 2.133E8 �12.085 0.000 11,232
EB-33 1.63 1.497E8 2.149E8 �15.315 0.000 11,421
EB-36.0 1.65 1.825E8 2.743E8 �11.728 0.000 13,550
EB-37.0 1.62 9.103E8 1.142E8 �10.048 0.000 6811
Table 1. Frequency with which respondent thinks of self as European (in addition to
national identity) (Format 2 identity question) 1987�2005.
EB27
1987
EB30
1988
EB31
1989
EB33
1990
EB36.0
1991
EB37.0
1992
EB64.2 2005
All
EU-
15 EU-25
Often (3) 14.2 16.2 14.8 15.8 15.9 14.4 17.4 17.8 17.7
Sometimes
(2)
35.3 38.3 35.6 31.4 33.6 33.0 39.0 38.3 39.1
Never (1) 50.4 45.4 49.6 52.7 50.5 52.6 43.6 43.9 43.1
Mean
response
1.64 1.71 1.65 1.63 1.65 1.62 1.74 1.74 1.75
N 11,256 11,379 11,281 11,248 12,368 6136 28,805 15,228 24,377
Note: ‘All’ � unweighted; ‘EU-15’ � 15 country weight; ‘EU-25’ � 25 country weight.
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Table 3. Degree of attachment to Europe (Format 4 identity question) 1991�2006.
EB36.0
1991
ISSPa
1995
EB51.0
1999
EB54.1
2000
EB56.3x
2002
EB57.2y
2002
EB58.1x
2002
EB60.1
2003
ISSPa
2003
EB62.0 2004 EB63.4 2005 EB65.2 2006
EU15 EU25 EU25 EU15 EU15 EU25
Very attached/close
(4)
13.1 14.2 19.0 17.3 9.9 4.3 10.6 14.5 16.4 18.2 20.0 20.1 22.3 17.2 18.8
Fairly attached/
close (3)
37.7 40.7 39.6 43.1 31.7 28.3 36.0 45.3 38.2 48.2 48.8 44.4 44.8 44.3 45.5
Not very attached/
close (2)
30.2 32.4 29.8 28.2 36.6 44.8 36.7 30.0 33.3 25.3 23.9 27.0 25.2 28.0 26.2
Not at all attached/
close (1)
18.9 12.7 11.6 11.4 21.8 22.5 16.7 10.1 12.2 8.2 7.4 8.5 7.8 10.5 9.6
Mean response 2.55 2.56 2.66 2.66 2.30 2.14 2.41 2.64 2.59 2.77 2.81 2.76 2.82 2.68 2.73
N 11,928 8730 15,225 15,321 15,155 10,531 15,629 15,745 13,573 15,188 24,330 15,238 24,305 7655 12,234
Note: x �attachment to ‘European Union’ (not ‘‘Europe’’).y �attachment to ‘European Union citizens’ (not ‘‘Europe’’).aEU member state respondents only in the sample.
Jou
rna
lo
fT
ran
satla
ntic
Stu
dies
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Eurobarometer surveys in 1991 (36.0), 1999 (51.0) and 2000 (54.1) using this question
format. There is also an ISSP survey (which could be expected to be somewhat
inconsistent in administration relative to the Eurobarometer surveys) in 1995. Turning
to the Bush era, there are Eurobarometer surveys from 2003 (60.1), 2004 (62.0), 2005
(63.4) and 2006 (65.2) using the Format 4 identity question, as well as an ISSP survey in
2003. Eurobarometers 62.0, 63.4 and 65.2 are shown in the table representing both the
EU-15 and the EU-25 member state collections of countries. In each case, the latter
group returns a substantially higher identity mean compared to the former.
The table also shows the results from Eurobarometer surveys fielded in 2002
(56.3), and twice again later the same year (57.2 and 58.1). However, these three data-
sets are shown here for reference, and are not comparable to the others because the
questions asked of respondents, though similar to the identity prompt, is
significantly different in meaning. Eurobarometers 56.3 and 58.1 asked how attached
or close they felt to the ‘EU’ (as opposed to ‘Europe’ in the identity questions).
Similarly, Eurobarometer 57.2 asked respondents how attached or close they felt
towards ‘EU citizens’ (again, as opposed to ‘Europe’, per se).
Do the Format 4 identity question data presented in Table 3 also support the
hypothesis, at least insofar as demonstrating a temporal correlation between
alienating changes in US politics and growth in European identity? The answer is
somewhat mixed, albeit intriguing. What we observe, looking at the means for each
of these surveys, is identity levels in the range of 2.55�2.66 across the three surveys
ranging from 1991 to 2000. There is some evidence here that European identification
was already rising during this period, but the effect is not large.
A great jump can be observed in comparing these figures with those of the later
administrations of the survey question, however. In the two 2003 applications, the
mean is still within the same range (2.64 and 2.59, respectively), but then it jumps up
substantially, to 2.77 in 2004 (2.81 using the EU-25 sample), and about the same
value in 2005 (2.76), returning a bit to somewhat lower figures in 2006 (2.68). What
makes these data especially interesting is their timing. Given the antagonism in
Europe caused by the Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq, if the hypothesis
about European identity being affected by US behaviour was true, we might expect
to see this spike in attitude more or less exactly where it does indeed fall temporally.
Figure 1 presents this development graphically.
To test that the differences between the means from the various surveys utilising
the Format 4 identity question are statistically significant, each Pre-Bush era survey
was paired with each Bush era survey, and the resulting dyads were subjected to the
Mann�Whitney�Wilcoxan test. The results, shown in Table 4, indicate that the
difference between every pair of means is statistically significant (0.000), except for
the respective juxtapositions of Eurobarometers 51.0 (0.382) and 54.1 (0.824), both
against Eurobarometer 65.2. In both cases, this lack of statistical significance is
presumably accounted for by the numerical closeness of the two compared survey
mean values and the relatively small sample size (N�7614) in Eurobarometer 65.2.
To sum up what the quantitative data analysis has demonstrated so far, there does
seem to be fairly clear evidence of a temporal correlation between, on the one hand,
US policy and attitudinal changes � both of which were poorly received in Europe at
the time � and, on the other, the growth of European identification. But, again, this
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correlation does not necessarily prove the existence of a causal relationship, let alone
the one specified by the hypothesis. It would be useful if deeper excavations of the
data could help to further illuminate the existence of that relationship, or the lack
thereof.Towards that end, I have juxtaposed measures of European identity against a key
measure regarding perceptions of the USA, and against a question tapping
respondents’ ideological commitments. Table 5 arrays the Format 2 identity measure
against respondent perceptions of the role of US foreign policy in the world, both
questions appearing in Eurobarometer 64.2 (2005). Specifically, the question prompt
asks: ‘In your opinion, would you say that the United States tend to play a positive
role, a negative role or neither a positive nor a negative role regarding peace in the
world?’ Percentage breakouts are given for both the EU-15 sample and (in
parentheses) the EU-25 countries.
The data presented in Table 5 suggest that there is little of the expected
relationship between the variables. The tau-b summary statistic is negative, as
hypothesised, but the measure itself is very low (�0.010) and not statistically
significant (0.169). For the EU-25 sample, this is even more the case. In other words,it would appear that those who see the USA as having a negative role for bringing
peace to the world have about the same inclination to think of themselves as
European as do those who believe the USA has a positive role in international
politics. For example, 18.5% of those who view the US role in bringing peace to the
world negatively also often think of themselves as European. Amongst those who
view the US role positively, on the other hand, 19.9% often think of themselves as
European. If the hypothesised relationship is true, we would expect that latter
number to be smaller, not larger. More importantly, we would expect it to be
substantially different from those who view the US role in the world negatively. As
Figure 1. Degree of attachment to Europe (Format 4 identity question) 1991�2006.
Journal of Transatlantic Studies 15
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Table 4. Comparison of mean European identity levels�Mann�Whitney�Wilcoxan test
(Format 4 identity question).
Compared
surveys
First
survey
mean
Second
survey
mean
Mann�Whitney
U
Wilcoxan
W Z
Significance
(two-tailed)
First
survey
(N)
Second
survey
(N)
EB-36.0
vs. EB-
60.1
2.55 2.64 8.692�E7 1.735�E8 �24.363 0.000 13,155 15,683
EB-36.0
vs. ISSP-
2003
2.55 2.59 8.076�E7 1.673�E8 �14.278 0.000 13,155 13,582
EB-36.0
vs. EB-
62.0
2.55 2.77 7.718�E7 1.637�E8 �34.885 0.000 13,155 15,175
EB-36.0
vs. EB-
63.4
2.55 2.76 7.854�E7 1.651�E8 �33.440 0.000 13,155 15,270
EB-36.0
vs. EB-
65.2
2.56 2.68 4.148�E7 1.280�E8 �21.712 0.000 13,155 7614
ISSP-1995
vs. EB-
60.1
2.56 2.64 1.401�E8 3.336�E8 �15.683 0.000 19,670 15,683
ISSP-1995
vs. ISSP-
2003
2.56 2.59 1.299�E8 3.233�E8 �4.553 0.000 19,670 13,582
ISSP-1995
vs. EB-
62.0
2.56 2.77 1.247�E8 3.181�E8 �28.031 0.000 19,670 15,175
ISSP-1995
vs. EB-
63.4
2.56 2.76 1.268�E8 3.202�E8 �26.471 0.000 19,670 15,270
ISSP-1995
vs. EB-
65.2
2.56 2.68 6.687�E7 2.603�E8 �14.534 0.000 19,670 7614
EB-51.0
vs. EB-
60.1
2.66 2.64 1.191�E8 2.421�E8 �3.892 0.000 15,565 15,683
EB-51.0
vs. ISSP-
2003
2.66 2.59 9.702�E7 1.893�E8 �12.757 0.000 15,565 13,582
EB-51.0
vs. EB-
62.0
2.66 2.77 1.125�E8 2.337�E8 �7.611 0.000 15,565 15,175
EB-51.0
vs. EB-
63.4
2.66 2.76 1.139�E8 2.351�E8 �6.666 0.000 15,565 15,270
EB-51.0
vs. EB-
65.2
2.66 2.68 5.886�E7 8.785�E7 �0.874 0.382 15,565 7614
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the tau-b statistic indicates, though, this non-relationship to the US role for peace
variable among those who often think of themselves as European extends as well to
those who sometimes do, and those who never do. In short, there is no statistically
significant relationship between the two variables.
In Table 6, a relationship between ideology and European identity is explored, on
the premise that conservatives in Europe would have been less likely to object to the
conservative US Government of this era, and therefore less likely to be driven into a
European identity by US policies. The hypothetical relationship is somewhat
tenuous, given that it does not measure a direct relationship, and given that those
on the left might simultaneously oppose both US foreign policy and European
Table 4 (Continued )
Compared
surveys
First
survey
mean
Second
survey
mean
Mann�Whitney
U
Wilcoxan
W Z
Significance
(two-tailed)
First
survey
(N)
Second
survey
(N)
EB-54.1
vs. EB-
60.1
2.66 2.64 1.197�E8 2.427�E8 �2.614 0.009 15,515 15,683
EB-54.1
vs. ISSP-
2003
2.66 2.59 9.735�E7 1.896�E8 �11.850 0.000 15,515 13,582
EB-54.1
vs. EB-
62.0
2.66 2.77 1.110�E8 2.313�E8 �9.282 0.000 15,515 15,175
EB-54.1
vs. EB-
63.4
2.66 2.76 1.124�E8 2.328�E8 �8.236 0.000 15,515 15,270
EB-54.1
vs. EB-
65.2
2.66 2.68 5.897�E7 1.793�E8 �0.223 0.824 15,515 7614
Note: EU-15 data-set samples used for this table in all cases where the survey contained other countrysamples as well.
Table 5. Cross-tabulation of European identity level (Format 2 identity question) with view
of US role for peace in the world�Eurobarometer 64.2-2005�percentages (EU-25 in
parentheses).
Think of self as European
US role peace
in the world Never Sometimes Often Total All
Negative 42.5 (42.2) 39.0 (39.2) 18.5 (18.6) 100.0 (100.0) 59.1 (55.8)
Neither/nor 46.0 (45.4) 39.5 (40.5) 14.5 (14.1) 100.0 (100.0) 18.4 (19.4)
Positive 43.2 (41.2) 36.9 (39.4) 19.9 (19.5) 100.0 (100.0) 22.5 (24.8)
All 43.3 (42.5) 38.6 (39.5) 18.1 (18.0) 100.0 (100.0) 100.0 (100.0)
Note: tau-b��0.010 (0.169)(�0.003 (0.674)).N�14,695 (23,462).
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integration (and, therefore, by extension, possibly European identity as well). But
there is nevertheless some mild evidence for the existence of a relationship between
the variables. The tau-b overall measure of the relationship is negative, as predicted,
and statistically significant (0.000), but not large in scale (�0.056), and slightly
smaller yet for the EU-25 sample (�0.038). Nevertheless, the tendencies can be seen
in the table. Only 41.2% of those on the far left, for example, never think of
themselves as European, compared with 52.5% of those on the far right. Meanwhile,
23.3% of those on the left often do, while only 14.0% of those on the right often think
of themselves as European.
To test whether the relationship between ideology and European identity might
have been different in 2005 (Eurobarometer 64.2) than during the pre-Bush era, I ran
the same analyses for the earlier surveys also employing the Format 2 identity
question as is shown for the Eurobarometer 64.2 survey in Table 6. The tau-b statistics
for these were as follows: EB27 (1987) ��0.035, EB30 (1988) ��0.081, EB31
(1989) ��0.081, EB33 (1990) ��0.073, EB36-0 (1991) ��0.067 and EB37-0
(1992) ��0.108. All tau-b measures were statistically significant (0.000). Compared
to the tau-b value from Eurobarometer 64.2 (2005) ��0.056, these values
unexpectedly suggest a bit of diminishment in the relationship between European
identity and ideology, moving from the late-Reagan/Bush I era to the Bush II era.
That is not always the case, though, and the values also oscillate enough within a
relatively narrow band as to suggest that perhaps the differences from survey to survey
represent little beyond the sort of statistical noise that is common to public opinion
measurement.
The US role perception and ideology variable juxtapositions against European
identity are repeated in Tables 7 and 8, this time using the Format 4 identity
measures found in Eurobarometers 60.1 (2003), 62.0 (2004) and 63.4 (2005). Table
7 looks at the relationship between perceptions of the USA and levels of European
identification. Here, the results are contrary to those found in Table 4 (which were,
in any case, not statistically significant), and contrary to the hypothesised
relationship. All the tau-b values are positive, and all but the one for Euro-
barometer 60.1 is statistically significant. Moreover, the values grow, moving from
Table 6. Cross-tabulation of European identity level (Format 2 identity question) with
grouped ideological self-placement�Eurobarometer 64.2-2005�percentages (EU-25 in par-
entheses).
Think of self as European
Ideology Never Sometimes Often Total All
1�2 (Left) 41.2 (41.4) 35.6 (35.6) 23.3 (23.0) 100.0 (100.0) 8.8 (8.8)
3�4 37.5 (37.4) 43.2 (43.6) 19.3 (19.0) 100.0 (100.0) 27.4 (25.8)
5�6 (Centre) 45.6 (44.2) 37.7 (39.3) 16.7 (16.5) 100.0 (100.0) 42.6 (42.2)
7�8 43.1 (41.1) 40.3 (41.8) 16.7 (17.2) 100.0 (100.0) 16.7 (17.4)
9�10 (Right) 52.5 (46.7) 33.5 (36.4) 14.0 (16.9) 100.0 (100.0) 4.4 (5.9)
All 42.9 (41.8) 39.2 (40.3) 17.9 (17.9) 100.0 (100.0) 100.0 (100.0)
Note: tau-b��0.056 (0.000)(�0.038 (0.000)).N�12,773 (20,062).
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Eurobarometer 62.0 (tau-b�0.041 for the EB-15 sample) to Eurobarometer 63.4
(tau-b�0.063). (As expected, given the generally more favourable perspective on
the USA in Eastern European countries, expanding the sample to the EU-25 group
increases the positive relationship between the two variables in Eurobarometers
62.0 and 63.4.)
The data in the table suggest that the relationship grows stronger and clearer
moving from Eurobarometers 60.1 to 62.0 and then 63.4 � that is, from 2003 to 2004
to 2005, and that the relationship is the opposite of the one hypothesised. Thus, for
example, in 2005 (Eurobarometer 63.4, EU-15 sample), 6.6% of those who saw the
USA as playing a positive role in world affairs had no attachment to Europe,
compared to 9.0% of those who saw the US role as negative. Conversely, 25.9% of
those who saw the USA as playing a positive role in world affairs were very attached
to Europe, compared with 18.6% of those who saw the US role as negative. These are
not strong relationships, but they are relatively robust, they are mostly statistically
significant and they grow over time. Most importantly, they are opposite to what the
hypothesis predicts.
Table 7. Cross-tabulation of European identity level (Format 4 identity question) with view
of US role for peace in the world�Eurobarometers 60.1 (2003), 62.0 (2004) and 63.4 (2005)�percentages.
US role peace
in the world
Attachment to Europe
Not at all Not very Fairly Very Total All tau-b (significance) N
60.1 (EU-15) 0.011 (0.136) 15,000
Negative 9.6 30.9 45.0 14.5 100.0 55.7
Neither/nor 9.3 30.3 46.8 13.6 100.0 16.4
Positive 11.0 27.7 45.6 15.8 100.0 28.0
All 9.9 29.9 45.4 14.7 100.0 100.0
62.0 (EU-15) 0.041 (0.000) 14,608
Negative 8.4 25.7 48 17.1 100.0 64.1
Neither/nor 8.7 25.9 48.2 17.2 100.0 14.4
Positive 6.3 23.6 47.8 22.4 100.0 21.5
All 8.0 25.3 48.5 18.2 100.0 100.0
62.0 (EU-25) 0.056 (0.000) 23,291
Negative 7.9 24.5 49.3 18.3 100.0 61.1
Neither/nor 7.3 24.1 49.3 19.3 100.0 15.7
Positive 5.4 21.6 48.7 24.3 100.0 23.3
All 7.2 23.8 49.1 19.9 100.0 100.0
63.4 (EU-15) 0.063 (0.000) 15,671
Negative 9.0 28.0 44.4 18.6 100.0 60.6
Neither/nor 8.2 26.6 47.2 18.0 100.0 15.7
Positive 6.6 24.0 43.5 25.9 100.0 23.7
All 8.3 26.8 44.6 20.2 100.0 100.0
63.4 (EU-25) 0.074 (0.000) 23,359
Negative 8.5 26.6 44.7 20.2 100.0 57.6
Neither/nor 7.4 24.9 46.9 20.9 100.0 16.6
Positive 5.8 21.8 44.4 28.0 100.0 25.7
All 7.6 25.1 45.0 22.3 100.0 100.0
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Table 8. Cross-tabulation of European identity level (Format 4 identity question) with
grouped ideological self-placement�Eurobarometers 60.1 (2003), 62.0 (2004), 63.4 (2005) and
65.2 (2006)�percentages.
Attachment to Europe
Ideology Not at all Not very Fairly Very Total All tau-b (significance) N
60.1 (EU-15) �0.032 (0.000) 12,532
1�2 (left) 12.0 28.8 41.3 17.9 100.0 9.1
3�4 8.3 27.0 50.1 14.6 100.0 23.9
5�6 (centre) 9.1 29.6 46.7 14.7 100.0 42.4
7�8 10.0 32.1 44.6 13.3 100.0 19.3
9�10 (right) 15.6 28.7 38.6 17.1 100.0 5.3
All 9.7 29.3 46.2 14.8 100.0 100.0
62.0 (EU-15) �0.017 (0.035) 12,770
1�2 (left) 10.2 24.7 44.4 20.7 100.0 9.3
3�4 6.0 23.3 52.6 18.1 100.0 26.3
5�6 (centre) 6.9 25.7 49.5 17.8 100.0 43.4
7�8 8.1 25.8 46.9 19.2 100.0 16.6
9�10 (right) 16.6 23.2 35.7 24.5 100.0 4.3
All 7.6 24.9 48 18.7 100.0 100.0
62.0 (EU-25) 0.002 (0.724) 20,261
1�2 (left) 9.8 23.4 44.9 21.8 100.0 9.0
3�4 5.7 22.7 52.1 19.5 100.0 24.8
5�6 (centre) 6.2 24.2 50.2 19.4 100.0 44.3
7�8 7.1 23.6 48.1 21.1 100.0 16.8
9�10 (right) 12.5 20.4 39.4 27.7 100.0 5.2
All 6.9 23.5 49.3 20.4 100.0 100.0
63.4 (EU-15) �0.043 (0.000) 12,937
1�2 (left) 9.2 23.8 40.2 26.8 100.0 9.5
3�4 6.1 24.7 47.6 21.6 100.0 27.7
5�6 (centre) 8.2 29.5 44.4 17.9 100.0 41.4
7�8 8.4 25.4 45.4 20.8 100.0 17.2
9�10 (right) 15.0 28.0 33.7 23.3 100.0 4.2
All 8.0 26.9 44.6 20.5 100.0 100.0
63.4 (EU-25) �0.016 (0.011) 20,308
1�2 (left) 8.9 22.4 40.3 28.4 100.0 9.4
3�4 6.1 24.1 47.1 22.7 100.0 25.6
5�6 (centre) 7.3 27.0 45.2 20.5 100.0 42.0
7�8 7.4 23.9 46.0 22.7 100.0 17.5
9�10 (right) 10.9 22.4 37.6 29.1 100.0 5.5
All 7.4 25.0 44.9 22.7 100.0 100.0
65.24 (EU-15) �0.030 (0.006) 6344
1�2 (left) 10.0 19.5 49.6 20.8 100.0 8.8
3�4 8.2 29.3 45.5 16.9 100.0 27.3
5�6 (centre) 9.4 27.1 46.3 17.2 100.0 43.2
7�8 10.4 26.7 44.3 18.6 100.0 16.1
9�10 (right) 18.9 30.4 33.2 17.5 100.0 4.5
All 9.7 27.1 45.5 17.7 100.0 100.0
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Finally, Table 8 lays out the relationship between the European identity and
ideology variables in the same three survey data-sets shown in Table 7, plus
Eurobarometer 65.2 (2006). Here, the outcome is more as predicted, however, withthe same caveats described above regarding the indirect linkage between ideology,
perceptions of the USA, and identity. Of the seven tau-b summary measures in the
table, all are statistically significant except for the Eurobarometer 62.0 EU-25 sample
(significance �0.724) and the Eurobarometer 65.2 EU-25 sample (0.424). In each of
the other five cases, the negative relationship is as predicted, though the tau-b
relationship measurement values are quite low. A glance at the percentages shown in
the table explains why. The relationships are non-linear, and suggest that those either
to the left or the right of centre are more likely to be simultaneously both not at allattached to Europe and very attached to Europe compared to those in the ideological
middle.
Again, to determine if there is a different relationship between ideology and
identity in the Bush era than prior to it, the earlier surveys deploying the Format 4
identity question were similarly examined (except the 1995 ISSP fielding, which did
not have an identity measure). The tau-b summary statistics of the cross-tabulations
of these two variables were as follows: EB36.0 (1991) ��0.038, EB51.0
(1999) ��0.031 and EB54.1 (2000) ��0.040. All tau-b values were statisticallysignificant (0.000). These are nearly identical to those from the Bush era, presented
in Table 8, again suggesting both little overall linear relationship between the
variables, and little change over time.
Conclusion
The years following the turn of the millennium provided a relatively rare opportunity
for those who seek to understand the mechanics of political identity. In that period,
there was evidence of a significant departure by the people of Europe from an
‘Other’. Moreover, it was not just any Other, but a strategically well-located one for
purposes of identity differentiation.
That is, Europe already knew that it was different than the Near East and the FarEast, to choose two historically relevant examples. The greater palpability and
overtness of those divergences make them less viable for purposes of heightening a
unique sense of Europeanness (as opposed to, say, a Western identity). But was
Europe different, fundamentally, from the USA? And could this difference be the
Table 8 (Continued )
Attachment to Europe
Ideology Not at all Not very Fairly Very Total All tau-b (significance) N
65.2 (EU-25) �0.007 (0.424) 9984
1�2 (left) 9.4 19.5 48.7 22.4 100.0 8.8
3�4 7.7 28.5 46.1 17.7 100.0 25.6
5�6 (centre) 8.6 25.2 47.4 18.8 100.0 43.2
7�8 9.2 24.7 46.3 19.9 100.0 16.6
9�10 (right) 13.3 14.6 40.7 21.5 100.0 5.8
All 8.8 25.4 46.6 19.2 100.0 100.0
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source of Europe deepening and widening its identity through the process of
juxtaposition against a proximate Other, just as Colley argues the British did vis-a-vis
the French, and Said argues the West did with respect to the East?
George W. Bush took the USA in a direction that departed substantially from a
long-standing former transatlantic consensus. This was not the first time this had
happened, but it was arguably the deepest, most willful and cavalier divide, perhaps the
most protracted, and it occurred in a different geopolitical context than had the earlier
ones. It began before the events of 11 September 2001, and continued in amplified form
afterwards. Europeans, by and large, were dismayed at this turn of events.
But did driving Europe apart from the USA necessarily also drive Europeans into
each others’ arms? Did it turn Germans or Bavarians into Europeans instead? That is
the question this study has sought to address.
If, as in debate, the burden is on the affirmative to make the case, it cannot be
said that the hypothesis that Europeans are made in America has been fully proved,
or that it has even fully survived a falsification test. In fact, the findings resulting
from the foregoing examination of data from multiple sources are mixed.
On the one hand, European identification is seen to have risen during the era of
George W. Bush’s presidency, though the leaps are not always large, and the
causation behind the correlation cannot be determined. The timing of some of these
increases in European identity does, however, suggest a reaction to the Bush
administration’s policies.
On the other hand, far more discouraging to acceptance of the hypothesis is the
more specific data which might be useful in pinning down the causal factor(s) driving
these increases in European identification. Here, the relationship between such
identification and perceptions of the USA’s role in the world for promoting peace
mostly produced the opposite of the expected effect, to the moderate extent that the
findings were clear. In other words, those who were troubled by US foreign policy
behaviours were actually less likely to be European identifiers, not more. At the same
time, there is some evidence from the intersection of ideological and identity
measures which might offer a bit of tenuous support for the hypothesis.
We do not have survey data from the era of Edward Said’s West or Linda Colley’s
Britons. And perhaps those cases are not analogous to Europe’s relationship with the
USA over the brief interval of the controversial Bush administration, anyhow.
But if the present data tell us anything � and they may not � about the general
proposition that political identities are forged in relationship to an ‘Other’, then the
empirical evidence for this otherwise elegant theoretical notion can only be said to be
moderate.
Notes
1. David Michael Green, ‘Who Are ‘the Europeans’?: European Political Identity in theContext of the Post-War Integration Project’ (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1999), 59.
2. By political identity I refer to the constellation of cognitive and emotive affinitiesindividuals possess with relation to geopolitical communities of which they are a part.Nationalism is, of course, the most prominent historical manifestation of political identity,but both sub- and supra-national political identities also exist in the form of feelings,attitudes and loyalties toward towns, regions and continents (among other ways, this isconfirmed by considerable quantities of poll data, and not just for Europeans). Politicalidentity, for the most part, is exclusive of other forms of identity, such as perhaps class or
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religion, but there can be enormous overlaps as well, as in the role language plays, forexample, in defining British or French nationalism. Nevertheless, by use of the termpolitical identity, I seek to describe a specific kind of identity, and one which is typicallymore narrow than broad societal concepts such as Edward Said’s notion of ‘The West’,which I employ herein chiefly to establish the significance of alterity as a mechanism inidentity formation.
3. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); and Robert Kagan, ‘Power and Weakness: Why the UnitedStates and Europe See the World Differently’, Hoover Institution � Policy Review(2002), June and July, 113, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7107(accessed 21 June 2009).
4. The ‘made in America’ construction requires two important clarifications. First, withrespect to the objections of many that the USA is not the same thing as America, I havetried to avoid the latter usage as much as possible, with the exception of quotations,locations where overly awkward phrasing would result, and in the catchphase that formsthe title of the study, which is an allusion to a common expression in the USA concerningthe origins of manufactured goods. Second, for purposes of this study, what is actually,literally meant by this phrase is ‘George W. Bush’s America’. It is an interesting an openquestion, for example, whether the replacement of the Bush presidency with the Obamaadministration has shifted identity sentiment in Europe. But it is also a complicated one.Many Europeans perceive the Obama administration to be less conservative and militaristthan Bush’s, but arguably the opposite is a more accurate apprehension, stylisticdifferences between the two administrations notwithstanding. For instance, while Bushfought a generalised war on terror and two more specific wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,Obama has maintained all three commitments, tripled American forces in the latter, andadded engagements of significant scale (though perhaps not rising to the level ofwarranting the appellation ‘war’) in Yemen, Pakistan and Libya. Likewise, Obama’spolicies on the International Criminal Court (ICC), Guantanamo and global warming, forexample, are not substantially different than Bush’s. This means that any identitydifferences in Europe, should they appear, would be driven by largely false perceptions ofchanged policies in the USA. Thus, while a subsequent analysis examining this questionwith the addition of Obama era data would be an interesting supplement to the presentstudy, it would pose some complicated questions of interpretation.
5. Miles Hewstone, Understanding Attitudes to the European Community: A Social-Psychological Study in Four Member States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1986), 140, 199�201.
6. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles AmongWestern Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 329�32, 356�7.
7. Ibid.8. Ibid., 338�9.9. Post-materialism in this context refers to Inglehart’s idea that Western societies have been
undergoing a ‘silent revolution’ in broad value constructions, moving from older‘materialist’ generations who were more oriented towards the pursuit of economic andphysical security, to younger postmaterialists who instead tend to place more emphasis onhigher order values in Maslow’s hierarchy of human goals.
10. Ibid., 340�1.11. Ibid., 337.12. Sophie Duchesne and Andre-Paul Frognier, ‘Is There a European Identity?’, in Public
Opinion and Internationalized Governance, ed. Oskar Niedermayer and Richard Sinnott(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 193�226.
13. Ibid., 195.14. Ibid., 197�201.15. Ibid., 202�9.16. Ibid., 209�17.17. Ibid., 223.18. David Michael Green, The Europeans: Political Identity in an Emerging Polity (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007).
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19. Ibid., 51�70.20. Ibid., 104�5.21. Ibid., 109�30.22. Ibid., 131�46.23. Neil Fligstein, ‘Who Are the Europeans and How Does This Matter for Politics?’, in
European Identity, ed. Jeffrey Checkel and Peter Katzenstein (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009), 132�66.
24. Primordialism refers to the idea of identities being grounded in relatively immutableattributes, such as race, sex, religion or language. Instrumentalism’s basic notion is thatidentities can be rooted in a quid pro quo arrangement, in which the identifier receivessomething from the polity in exchange for his or her loyalties. Constructivism refers to aninterdisciplinary school emphasising the artifactual and human-made qualities ofphenomena like identity. Crawford Young, ‘The Dialectics of Cultural Pluralism: Conceptand Reality’, in The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay?,ed. Crawford Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 3�35.
25. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1992).
26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso Editions/NLB, 1983).
27. Heikki Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea and an Identity (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), 230�1.28. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books), 49.29. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707�1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992).30. Ibid., 5�6.31. Hannah Arendt, ‘Essays in Understanding 1930�1954’, in Essays In Understanding, ed.
Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994).32. Jean Monnet, Memoires (Paris: Fayard, 1976), 495.33. Soledad Garcıa, ‘Europe’s Fragmented Identities and the Frontiers of Citizenship’, in
European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy, ed. Soledad Garcıa (London: Pinter,1993), 1�29, 13�14.
34. E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘An Afterword: European Union at the End of the Century’, in EuropeanIntegration in Social and Historical Perspective: 1850 to the Present, ed. Jytte Klausen andLouise A. Tilly (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 267�75, 271.
35. Gerard Delanty, ‘Redefining Political Culture in Europe Today: From Ideology to thePolitics of Identity and Beyond’, in Political Symbols, Symbolic Politics: EuropeanIdentities in Transformation, ed. Ulf Hedetoft (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 23�43, 33�4.
36. Sven Papcke, ‘Who Needs European Identity and What Could It Be?’, in The Idea ofEurope: Problems of National and Transnational Identity, ed. Brian Nelson, David Roberts,and Walter Veit (New York: Berg, 1992), 61�74, 62.
37. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 271.
38. Iver Neumann, Uses of the Other: The East in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Iver Neumann, ‘Self and Other in InternationalRelations’, European Journal of International Relations 2 (1996): 139�74.
39. Iver Neumann and Jennifer Welsh, ‘The Other in European Self-Determination: AnAddendum to the Literature on International Society’, Review of International Studies 17(1991): 327�48.
40. Green, ‘Who Are ‘the Europeans’?’; and David Michael Green, ‘Are Europeans Made inAmerica? The United States as the New ‘Other’ in European Identity Formation’(research presented at the Transatlantic Studies Conference, Dundee, Scotland, 12�15 July2004).
41. Jan-Werner Mueller, quoted in ‘Anti-Americanism Is One ‘ism’ That Thrives’, by RogerCohen, International Herald Tribune, 28 November 2005.
42. Volker Heins, ‘Orientalising America? Continental Intellectuals and the Search forEurope’s Identity’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 2 (2006): 433�48, 434.
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43. Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007), 217.
44. Jeffrey Checkel and Peter Katzenstein, ‘The Politicization of European Identities’, inEuropean Identity, ed. Jeffrey Checkel and Peter Katzenstein (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009), 1�25, 3, 15.
45. Nico Wilterdink, ‘The European Ideal: An Examination of European and NationalIdentity’, Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 34, no. 1 (1993): 119�36, 129.
46. Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, ‘National and European Identities Between Myths andRealities’, in Political Symbols, Symbolic Politics: European Identities in Transformation,ed. Ulf Hedetoft (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 65�79.
47. Eurobarometer, Various Authors, Eurobarometer Numbers 27, 30, 31, 33, 36.0, 37.0, 51.0,54.1, 56.3, 57.2, 58.1, 60.1, 62.0, 63.4, 64.2, 65.2, ICPSRVersion [Ann Arbor, MI: Institutefor Social Research (producer), Inter-university Consortium for Political and SocialResearch (distributor), 1975�2002].
48. International Social Survey Program (ISSP), International Social Survey Program:National Identity, 1995 and 2003 (Computer file), ICPSR release [Koeln, Germany:Zentralarchiv fuer Empirische Sozialforschung (Koeln, Germany: Zentralarchiv fuerEmpirische Sozialforschung/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Politicaland Social Research (distributors), 1998].
49. John le Carre, ‘The United States of America Has Gone Mad’, The Times of London, 15January 2003, Features, 20.
50. Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 201.51. Ibid., 222.52. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, ‘Die Geburt einer Nation’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 March
2003.53. Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 25.54. Matthias Politycki, ‘The American Dead End of German Literature’, in German Pop
Culture: How ‘American’ Is It?, ed. Agnes Mueller (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 2002), 133�140.
55. Eliseo Alvarez-Arenas, ‘La Europa Americana’, El Pais, 3 March 1992.56. Peter O’Brien, European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W.
Bush (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).57. Ibid., 5.58. Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 3�4.59. Sarah Lyall, ‘Newest ‘Europeans’ Struggle to Define That Label’, New York Times, 1 May
2004.
Notes on contributor
David Green is Professor of Political Science at Hofstra University, where he teachesEuropean, American and international politics. He is author of The Europeans: SupranationalIdentity in an Emerging Polity (Green, Europeans).
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