Search

The paper aims at exploring two dimensions of the European identity construction - as an open for debates project in which EU citizens deliberately decide to participate and as a power discourse serving certain economic and political goals. Reflecting on the works of Daniel Bell, Johannes Heinrichs and Reinhart Koselleck the research elaborates on these two aspects by analyzing the interaction between the cultural, political and economic sphere. It is claimed in the paper that when the European identity is formed as a project these three spheres remain relatively independent and following their own principles and speed of development. Dissimilarly, the ongoing process of discoursive construction of the EU identity stimulating citizens' emotional attachment to the Union is driven by the economic and political spheres and tries to artificially speed up the development of sense of belonging to the EU in the cultural sphere thus reminding of some of the characteristics of the ethnical Nation building model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]