what is european? (6)

Marseille, 2007

Politicians use religious, linguistic, ethnical or economic elements to imagine limits of national identities. Beside those elements, it is important to imagine an outside member, an enemy of the people, in order to unify the group against a threaten and to increase national identity. The communist threaten during cold war somehow help western Europeans to develop a wide sense of identity. According to some conservator political speeches, an aggressive orthodox muslin world is nowadays the new outside member for the western world. This negative construction of identity is responsible for the exclusion of the Other, and imagines new walls where there was a complex historic relationship: “Who are you? We are not them!”