Does European Identity or Unity Exist?

[Jana]

It does exist, but nobody would put if before their own ethnicity.

Only case of European solidarity would happen with external threat to Europe coming from non-Europeans, other than that Europeans always warred with each other.

[Damião de Góis]

It only exists when dealing with non-euros.

[Myanthropologies]

It only exists when dealing with non-euros.

Pretty much, and that is why it is problematic.

[Teutone]

Pretty much, and that is why it is problematic.

What you mean?

[Myanthropologies]

I don't have a problem with European identity at all, and I respect people who identify as European. I just have two issues:


1) Racism:Almost all "European Pride" pages I have seen spout anti-black, anti-refugee, and anti-miscegenation bullshit. If you were against Middle Easterners coming into Europe and intermixing, you're a little too late. Middle Eastern farmers already came during the Neolithic and altered the "European" gene pool. You also have ANE with you, which is significantly shared with Amerindians.
2) "Europeans" as we know them today are a product of the 19th century: There is no "European" gene pool because Europeans aren't genetically monophyletic. You have peripheral European groups like Sicilians, the Maltese, Greeks, Finns, Russians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Cypriots who share significantly more ancestry with some non-Europeans than they do with Northwestern Europeans, Central Europeans, and even some South Europeans (this is only the case for Sicilians vs Spaniards). People need to stop spouting racist bullshit while claiming that these groups are purely European under the same breath, because you know you're going to get dragged by people who are sick of racist bs. If you don't want people de-legitmatizing their identities as "Europeans," then stop putting other groups of people down.

Second of all, the modern "European" identity is a product of the 19th century. "Europe's" borders were even being heavily disputed in the 60s.

While this geographical boundary between Europe and Asia is now seldom questioned and is often assumed to be either wholly natural or too trivial to worry about, the issue still provokes occasional interest. In 1958, for example, a group of Russian geographers argued that the true divide should follow "the eastern slope of the Urals and their prolongation the Mugodzhar hills, the Emba River, the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, the Kumo-manychskaya Vpadina (depression) and the Kerchenski Strait to the Black Sea"--thus placing the Urals firmly within Europe and the Caucasus within Asia. Other writers have elected to ignore formal guidelines altogether, placing the boundary between the two "continents" wherever they see fit. The 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, defines the Swat district of northern Pakistan as "a region bordering on Europe and Asia"--"Europe" perhaps connoting, in this context, all areas traversed by Alexander the Great. Halford Mackinder, on the other hand, selected a "racial" criterion to divide Europe from Africa (although not from Asia), and thus extended its boundaries well to the south: "In fact, the southern boundary of Europe was and is the Sahara rather than the Mediterranean, for it is the desert land that divides the black man from the white."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nyti...myth.html?_r=1

[Myanthropologies]

What you mean?

I mean that it is problematic that an identity pretty much entirely revolves around being racist and keeping migrants out only!

[Gwydion]

Historically there was an identity of Western Christendom and then wider Christendom, which is coincidentally corresponded to what we call Europe. While there were always squabbles and differences between the different groups, there used to be (in the West) a unifying ur-culture which included Roman Catholicism, chivalry, knighthood, common literary and mythological motifs (Arthur, the Grail, etc.), common architectural and artistic trends, etc. While the Eastern European/Byzantine/Orthodox world was outside the aforementioned Western world, still the commonality as Europeans and Christians bonded them together when confronted with more foreign invaders, particularly the Saracens, Turks, etc. Both branches also shared a common heritage of inspiration from Classical Antiquity, figures like Plato and Aristotle, etc.

Later these would secularize but there remained a general commonality between European nations, especially when they understood themselves in relation to non-Europeans. It was actually probably the nationalism and Romanticism of the 19th century which sharpened the divides between various Europeans to a greater extent than what had been seen in earlier history.

So the answer is "partly" I suppose, a mix of yes and no depending on context. That said in our globalized world where European man is often under siege by non-Europeans (with the whole narrative of evil whitey, etc.), I think there should be more pan-European identity and cooperation.

[Teutone]

I mean that it is problematic that an identity pretty much entirely revolves around being racist and keeping migrants out only!

Whats racist or bad about want to preserve Europe a continent for European people? We as Europeans are the smallest populated continent by size and population not consindering Australia which was a "European" colony that is now about the mayority non European, same with the USA and North America.

[8888]

No. European ethnicities and a sense of common belonging always existed since their ethnogenesis, the modern concepts of ''nation'', ''white race'' and ''Europe/West'' are recent. Men in the past identified more as part of their ethnos (what includes culture, identity and religion) than as abstract things like ''White'' or ''European''. Certainly some ethnos can be closer to others and share common things (e.g. Portuguese and Croatians, despite diifferent language groups share some characteristics), but overall abstract identities like ''European'' in the modern sense didn't existed until the beggining of the Romantic Age.

[Myanthropologies]

Whats racist or bad about want to preserve Europe a continent for European people? We as Europeans are the smallest populated continent by size and population not consindering Australia which was a "European" colony that is now about the mayority non European, same with the USA and North America.

There's something wrong with it because it was European countries and Western societies that freely ventured and colonized other countries, but when people from other countries are dying and need help, "Europeans" give them an inhumane hand, and treat them like they're barely human! My cousin was shot and nearly kidnapped by police last week, but she can't get out of the messy life she was born into because you guys believe in separatism and "Europeans first," rather than "humans first." I have a problem with an artificially created identity that only comes out for anti-immigration purposes, yes. The reasoning for that is because other identities have culture and warmth. "European" culture is colonizing half the planet, arguing that other groups of humans are inferior and blaming refugee or Jews on every issue in Europe.