European Identity in Times of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 2,0, University of Hamburg (Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft), language: English, abstract: In these difficult times of the European sovereign debt crisis, this project aims at exploring the effect of this unprecedented crisis situation onto the sense of a European identity. For this purpose, the research Question has been formulated as follows: How has a sense of European identity been affected by the European sovereign debt crisis?
The notion of a European identity which lies at the heart of this study is everything but new to the policy makers in Brussels, to social theorists and to political scientists from around the globe. As elusive as the concept of a European identity might first appear, the sheer amount of academic publications, research projects, think tanks and media coverage that have contemplated the notion of European identity, indicate its fundamental importance to the future of the European project and its institutions. Given the fundamentally altered circumstances, which Europe has been facing since the onset of the European debt crisis in late 2009, it becomes necessary to reassess the contemporary state of an evolving sense of European identity. As large parts of the Academic community and various EU lead polls have suggested, the interplay between national and supra-national "imagined communities" and the European institutions will ultimately determine the support for a European polity amongst its citizens which , as many scholars suggest, is vital for the continuation of the "unfinished adventure" that is the European Union.
The present monetary crisis, which undoubtedly has affected some European states worse than others, has received a great deal of attention by politicians, international media outlets and economists. Aside all the measures of strategic and financial nature which have been undertaken to counteract the instability of the Eurozone and the European economic area, comparably little attention has been paid to the "other side of the coin", that is, the sentiment of the European citizens. This project aims at providing an insight into public sentiment on the European identity, focusing on the two European member states of Greece and Germany which have received a particular amount of attention due to the integral role they assume in the European struggle of the past years. In order to achieve this goal, the concept of European identity and the existing literature on the topic provide an essential tool and framework for the analysis of public sentiment on European integration.