Young Europeans’ Geo-Political Identities: A Poststructural Analysis

This study analyses the way young Europeans, aged between 10 and 20, construct their sense of identity with geo-political entities such as the nation, the state and the European Union; how these are expressed; and how young people manage the potential multiplicity of identities. It re-analyses earlier data, some 224 transcripts of young Europeans discussing their identities and sense of attachment to the geo-political entities of the state and the nation. This study looks specifically at how they discuss affiliations to a country or nation and does so within the historical context of the development of European nations in the 19th and 20th centuries and the ‘strict definition’ of nationality, as based on either birthplace or parentage. The young people’s discussions identify a wide range of reasons for attachment (or not) to one or more states: these include parentage, birthplace, passports, culture, language, residence, etc., many of which are incompatible with each other. Their response to this is often to profess multiple identities, switching to use that is most appropriate to a particular context or contingency. How does this behaviour meet the various models of identity formation, such as the psychosocial, the socio-cultural, and the poststructuralist? These young people also offer a range of qualities or values that they expect a state to uphold and deliver and are sometimes critical of states’ behaviour in this area. The combination of these attributes and qualities leads to a range of attitudes towards a polity or polities, ranging from acceptance of their status to indifference. The explanations suggested in this paper are that globalisation and migration have led to the realisation that the ‘strict definitions’ of nationality are no longer appropriate, and there are new potential attributes for identity, and secondly, that the development of supranational codification and the implementation of human rights are weakening the sovereignty of states. Together, these two factors reduce the perception of the requirement to develop a single overriding national identity. This combination of multiple identities and recognising the importance of human rights values is most commonly found amongst young people who have grown up in multicultural societies, often urban, and the corollary of this is that combination is least likely to be found among the older population in more rural, monocultural settlements.