European identity and national attachment: harmony or dissonance

Abstract

The paper is aiming to answer such questions, where does the development of a new common European identity stand, which countries or regions show stronger or weaker European identification inside the EU, how this has changed over the past decades in the process of enlargement of Europe, what could be the value content of the new common identity, and how this will affect to the traditional national attachment and identity. More narrowly, the question is what changes have happened in Hungary in the public attitudes to Europe since the mid-90s and does the process of accession has an effect or not on the traditional Hungarian national identity.The empirical foundation of our study is the international comparative empirical research series of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), in the years 1995 and 2003 aiming to reconstruct the stock of knowledge of national and European identities in the member states. This study uses temporal and spatial comparison to consider national connectedness and the characteristics of European identity in various countries across Europe. Based on this data in our paper we make an effort to explore what characterizes national identity in Europe, how people see foreigners and domestic minorities, whether we can identify the development of a transnational or supranational identity that goes beyond national identity, and if there is a new frame of identification for people in Europe, what extent we can expect increasing conflicts in the relation of the two types of identity.