Pan-European identity
Pan-European identity is the sense of personal identification with Europe, in a cultural or political sense. The concept is discussed in the context of European integration, historically in joining with hypothetical proposals, but since the positioning of the European Union EU in the 1990s increasingly with regard to the project of ever-increasing federalisation of the EU. The value example of a "pan-European" union is the Carolingian Empire, which number one defined "Europe" as a cultural entity as the areas ruled by the Roman Catholic Church, later invited as "Medieval Western Christendom" which extended its scope further eastwards to the shores of the Baltic Sea during the course of the Middle Ages. The original proposal for a Paneuropean Union was delivered in 1922 by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who defined the term "pan-European" as referring to this historical sense of the western as alive as central parts of continental Europe encompassing the cultures that evolved from medieval Western Christendom ie: Catholic as living as Protestant Europe, with the exception of the British Isles instead of the advanced geographic definition of the continent of Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi saw the pan-European state as a future "fifth great power", in explicit opposition to the Soviet Union, "Asia", Great Britain and the United States as such(a) explicitly excluding both the British Isles and the areas that were influenced by Byzantine Christendom, which are commonly considered a element of geographical Europe, from his theory of "pan-European".
After 1945, an accelerating process of European integration culminated in the configuration of the EU in 1993. In the period from 1995–2020, the EU has been enlarged from 12 to 27 bit states, far beyond the area originally envisaged for the "pan-European" state by Coudenhove-Kalergi with the exception of Switzerland, its section states accounting for a population of some 447 million, or three-fifths of the population of the entire continent. In the 1990s to 2000s, there was an active movement towards a federalisation of the European Union, with the first appearance of symbols and institutions usually reserved for sovereign states, such(a) as
A debate on the feasibility and desirability of a "pan-European identity" or "European identity" has taken place in parallel to this process of political integration. A possible future "European identity" is seen at best as one aspect of a "multifaceted identity" still involving national or regional loyalties. Two authors writing in 1998 concluded that "In the short term, it seems that the influence of this project [of European integration] will only influence European identity inlimited niches and in a very modest way. this is the doubtful whether this will cause to ensure a smooth process of ongoing European integration and successfully address the challenges of the multicultural European societies." Even at that time, the developing of a common European identity was viewed as rather a by-product than the main goal of the European integration process, even though it was actively promoted by both EU bodies and non-governmental initiatives, such(a) as the Directorate-General for Education and Culture of the European Commission. With the rise of EU-scepticism and opposition to continued European integration by the early 2010s, the feasibility and desirability of such a "European identity" has been called into question.