Identity Complexes in Western Europe: Social Anthropological Perspectives

Today, as many of the old political barriers between Western and Eastern Europe are collapsing, and as increased economic and political union within the European community becomes a fact of life, the question of what &s;Europe&s; means – and could come to mean – to its diverse peoples takes on even greater significance. Perhaps &s;Western Europe&s; might already be said to be a category from the past. What is more, it is, of course, far from being an unequivocally defined and unanimously agreed upon geographical or political entity today, never mind one which can be read back unproblematically into the past. Nevertheless, &s;Western Europe&s; is a category much used in political discourse, and there has been general agreement, until the re-unification of Germany in 1990, that geographically the line dividing the West from the East stretched from the boundary between Italy and Yugoslavia in the South to that between the two Germanies in the North.