Issues of European Identity
Issues of European Identity

Summary/Abstract: The exclusion of the cultural policy from the process of harmonisation nowadays appears to be the weakest part of European integration. Both authority of institutions and states´ soft power has weakened. This paradoxically happened in spite of the fact that the member states´ cultural sovereignty itself has strengthened. Hence, in this paper the hypothesis of the extent to which political or cultural EU institutions use soft power as a tool for strengthening supranationality as to a certain extent higher degree of European citizens´ identity was examined. Two opposing paradigms of the theory of European integration – institutionalism and intergovernmentalism and their advantages and disadvantages were investigated. At the same time it was dealt with the question of institutional participation at the individual and group European citizens´ identity fostering. The results of the analysis were used to show the differences between cultural and civic identity as well as to examine the symptoms of the European cultural identity crisis. The paper proposed conditions which have to be met in order to achieve a basis for multicultural, tolerant European society without xenophobia or ethnocentrism and nationalism in its negative sense.

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