From Nation-Building to the Construction of Europe: the Lessons and Limitations of the French Example

One of the problems associated with attempts to promote a popular sense of European identity is that there are no obvious historical models to serve as a guide. The most inviting analogy is with the process of nation-building in Europe itself in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this raises a number of problems. Given what one author has called ‘the novelty of our historical circumstances’ (Gray, 1996, p. 19), the drawing of parallels between such different periods is clearly a hazardous undertaking. Furthermore, the very success of the national idea has itself raised obstacles to the development of supranational identities. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.