Идентичност и култура в съвременния европейски контекст
Identity and Culture in the Modern European Context. The European Integration as a Cultural Project

Summary/Abstract: This article has been strongly stimulated by the desire to look at the European integration – something about which all are talking but it seems that we do this mainly through the official idiom of the media suggestions and persuasions -through the glasses of the daily consciousness and the daily stereotypes, approbated not in the years of Europe’s history but in the centuries of turbulence and rivalry. After Maastricht a process of gradual huge transformation has started at all levels and in all spheres of the European relations. Building ‘the European Home for All’ occurs not to be and can not be just a technical and economic issue, a business of only the European elites, where culture is just a touch and where the opinions, the attitudes and thoughts of the different national populations are not respected. Europe, closely embraced, on the one hand, by the globalization, imposed by the technological modernization and economic internationalization, and on the other, by the differentiation, deeply rooted in the traditions of its rather individualized communities and local cultures, is in search for its own specific united identity. The Europeanisation of the daily national culture is becoming an inseparable part of the problem for the social and political legitimacy of this new attempt at unification of the European peoples. As a matter of fact, the paradigm ‘Unity in Diversity’ ratifies the logic of federalism and supranational communication as a step towards the contingent next level in creation of common European consciousness and united European public. In this sense, the issues of identity and culture turn into an inseparable part of the problem for the power. Still, whose culture shall be official and who’s - subordinated? Which culture shall be worthy of being displayed in front of the ‘global’ eye of the others and which should be hidden? Whose history shall be remembered because of inclusion in the new common European memory and becoming ‘fresh’ grounds for the new European consciousness and whose should be marginalized? Whose voices shall be heard while ‘Europe is speaking into one voice’ and whose shall be forced to keep silent? Who shall represent whom and how in the institutions that will govern the future united Europe? The last one-decade or so has shaped the framework of never existing before trends. These trends gradually shifted the problem about ‘culture’ from the periphery to the center of the European integration. Thus, the European integration, itself, has been converted from economic and political into cultural project.

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