Proposing a fresh theoretical approach to the study of European identity, the material presented in this paper forms the basis of a proposed empirical study of discursive tools used in different forms of political communication of the European Union’s supranational institutions and their potential as political technologies or cultural artefacts that facilitate such identification. European identification – a term preferred over identity as it is here understood as a process rather than a state or characteristic qua possession – has become a central theme of studies of the EU. While the theory of neofunctionalism, claiming that by a process of ‘spillover’ (Haas, 1958) integration in one policy area will lead to integration in others (from the economic, to the political, then the cultural realm (as outlined by Eder, 2007, and Shore, 2000)), is often taken for granted by EU officials and scholars, it needs to be remembered that validity in one area does not guarantee validity in another; particularly in a context in which instead of political-legal action of elites, large-scale shifts in individuals’ attitudes and behaviour – be they spontaneous or socially engineered – are required. Therefore, while incomprehension and lamentation of the apparent lack of a European identity are unsurprising, the argument here is that this interpretation of current European reality is premised on mistaken assumptions. It is argued that most studies of European identity lack understanding of processes of identification and/or, in their reliance on the national level as a model, privilege an unnecessarily limiting set of forms of expression and empirical evidence. Rather than basing processes of collective identification on a European public sphere (Habermas, 1974) and demos, yet nevertheless committed to the understanding that communication plays a central role in these processes, I draw on Deutsch’s (1953) concept of the communication space which identifies the structure and closure of discourses as its identity-endowing functions. The former, customary, approach assigns the identity-endowing function to the organisational level of the demos while understanding the public sphere as the expression of this identity. In the understanding of the communication space, instead, the identity-endowing function is assigned to the level of activity, namely communication processes, while the society in which it takes place is understood as its expression or product. In this way, the latter avoids the pitfalls of elitist top-down or ethnocultural understandings of identity along the lines of national forms, the former of which has led to serious practical problems while the latter has encountered problems of applicability in the context of the EU. It also enables empirical rather than normative engagement. As mentioned above, this engagement will inform the study of different forms of political communication and the discursive tools used therein. In combining social theory on the discursive construction of identity, extending Habermas’s (2007) notion of civic patriotism, and the function of power, including Bourdieu’s (1991) concepts of symbolic and political capital, with political science approaches, the main focus will be on ideology (as conceptualised by Freeden, 1996) and political myth (Flood, 1996).

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