When Culture Becomes Politics. Thomas Pedersen

in political science partly as a bi-product of growing interaction between the humanities and social science and the new popularity of some humanities disciplines. Some area-related concepts are too culturally “loaded” to allow transfer to other area cases. Others have transfer potential. I think it is fair to say that history with its symbolic richness can play a helpful role in conceptual innovation. It would be wrong to think of metaphors and science as belonging to two different worlds. Great scientists such as Darwin and Einstein believed that the use of metaphors is vital to the development of scientific ideas,²⁴

Of course most, if not all, theoretical concepts reflect to varying extents the particular reality of a specific context or mind. Methodological concepts on the other hand would appear to possess a higher “universality content”. Against these odds, how is one to develop universal theory? Sartre once, ironically paraphrasing the artist Wols, quipped that in order to speak universally one ought to behave as half Marsian, half human and (in a characteristic Sartrean phrase) to look at the world with inhuman eyes. Kant and Adam Smith similarly believed in the need for human beings to practice self-detachment. The perspective of this book is more grounded. Although in other respects impressed by Sartre, I prefer to lean mainly on the dictum of the science historian, Stephen Jay Gould, who says that … “creative science is always a mixture of facts and ideas. Great thinkers are not those who can free their mind from cultural baggage and think and observe objectively (for such a thing is impossible), but people who use their milieu creatively rather than as a constraint”.²⁵

      European identity is a “frontier topic” located at the margins of political science. It is also a topic that has forced me to move beyond my “home ground” of international relations and into the domains of comparative politics, sociology and the humanities. I have regarded this as an exciting challenge. It is my firm belief that the most interesting problems relating to European integration, indeed to political science, can best be studied using an inter-disciplinary approach combining notably international relations, comparative politics and sociology, but also at times including disciplines such as philosophy and parts of the humanities. In my view the topic of European identity cannot be analyzed in a satisfactory way without gathering insights from i.a. philosophy, anthropology and literature.

      Some will undoubtedly find this book slightly oceanic in its reach and somewhat weak on facts if not speculative. To those critics I have three answers: First of all, social science being an on-going process, the ability to ask new important questions and introduce new perspectives, is as important if not more important than testing existing theories or uncovering new facts. Secondly, facts do not speak for themselves. All too often scholars marshal an impressive army of new facts, but fail when it comes to offering an interpretation of how all these facts, often derived from different fields of research, fit together. In other words, there is a need for scholars to also produce a synthesis. Obviously, problems that involve inter-disciplinary research put a particular premium on the ability to produce an interpretative synthesis. Thirdly, some topics are easier than others to study empirically. As soon as the researcher takes up questions relating to say culture, identity or mentality, the ground under his feet gets notoriously shaky. But should this lead us to give up asking these questions? I think not. In some contemporary social science research, one detects a problematic tendency to let methodological or technical concerns determine the topic of research. It is easy to produce elegant banalities.

      Finally, analyzing aggregate phenomena at the European level is exceedingly difficult. However, scholars should not let themselves be intimidated by complexity.

This book posits a new, existentialist view of Political Man focusing upon personal – but not necessarily rational – choice. I challenge holistic accounts, which emphasize structural determination. Holism is not only an analytical concept but also a normative stance. In my view no one has critizised it with greater perspicacity than the Spanish writer, Ortega y Gasset. When he talks about the “masses” he is in actual fact referring to a normative aspect of holistic thinking. As he points out, the “mass” is a psychological fact. In his own words … “in the presence of one individual we can decide, whether he is mass or not”.²⁶ The contrast to the mass in Ortega y Gasset’s thinking is the “select minorities”, whose members demand more of themselves than does the rest (even though they may not themselves fulfil these higher exigencies). One may – as this author – find the concept of “select minorities” unhelpful and still sympathize with Ortega y Gasset’s attack on “mass society” and by implication holistic, political thinking.

      Thus the book is in part about choices and attitudes. But whose choices and whose attitudes, and attitudes to what one may ask? Putting it a bit sharply: It may well be that the nation is an imagined community as argued by sociologists – but who then is doing the imagining? Europeans can be defined either as the elite (political or economic) or as the broader public. In my view European identity has to be studied from both perspectives. The days are long since gone, when one could study the EU solely from the perspective of the elite. Glenda Rosenthal’s The Men behind the decisions from 1976 retains a certain value given the continuing democratic limitations of the EU, but it would be unhelpful to study European identity solely from an elite perspective.

We already have a certain amount of knowledge about the attitudes of the broader European public to questions of identity. Not only has Eurobarometer carried out a number of polls on the subject, a body of data is also available through the so called European Values Study.²⁷ Though valuable and sophisticated in methodological terms, the study was purely quantitative and failed to examine theoretical problems. The study concluded that cultural diversity is very considerable in the EU-area at the level of citizens. Prima facie, it would therefore seem that the scope for a common European identity is limited. Eastern enlargement is likely to have further reinforced value diversity. Yet, this assessment rests upon the premise that a European identity needs to display more or less the same density or “thickness” as known national identities. It also departs from the simplified assumption that there is only one important source of common identity in Europe.

      This book takes a critical look at opinion polls on European identity. The problem with much of the Commission (and some of the other) polling is that the dependent variable is rather vague: Too often either the wrong questions are being asked, or the questions are too broad. When people say they feel they belong to Europe, they may mean many different things. Do they feel an attachment to common symbols in use? Or to the European territory? Or do they feel they share a history with other EU member countries?

      Significantly, we may underestimate the degree of common identity. Europeans may not be aware of the extent to which they are part of a European cultural community. How many West Europeans know that Riga was founded in 1201 by German aristocrats and clerics?

      Identity is linked to culture. Cultural identity is one dimension of national and personal identity and in my view a very important one. Culture is a notoriously contested concept. It has to do with meaning, with form and aesthetic phenomena and with customs and ways of life. Some anthropologists even regard culture as a kind of steering system for human beings. The emphasis is placed differently in the literature. I tend to place the emphasis upon meaning and aesthetic phenomena rather than upon custom. Meaning like aesthetic pleasure is compatible with an individualist and voluntarist ontology. Traditionally, culture has been defined rather narrowly as acquired learning. The word culture itself derives from the Latin word for cultivating. The modern debate about the concept tends to focus more on culture as customs, habits, a way of life or forms of meaning. The problem with a very broad definition of culture is that it overlaps with the concept of civilization. I shall come back to the difference between culture and civilization later.

Political culture has been defined as … “the manifestation in aggregate form of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics. A political culture is the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the members of that system,