Old, New and Future Europe

Abstract

When at the end of the 1980s the EU launched a number of policies aimed to creating a European identity, the member states responded by incorporating into the Maastricht Treaty a clause stating that the European Union should respect the member states’ respective national identities (article F, point1). This reaction, along with the introduction of principle of subsidiary and the rejection of the word “federal”, revealed that many member states considered the creation of a European identity as a potential threat to their own national identities and their citizen’s national loyalties (Hojelid, 2001).