In light of current European integrations and recent proposal of the European Commission that citizens of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro be allowed to travel visa-free to the EU's borderless Schengen area next year, while all Muslim-majority countries are excluded, it is becoming clear that the issue of supposed European identity is increasingly playing a role in political deliberations.

The issue is often presented as a single question that demands a singular definitive answer. However, the question of European identity is actually multifaceted and answers have to be the same. Since it is very hard to explain that identity in positive terms, i.e to say what and who is European, one of the possible avenues could be to look at some of those who were considered as "others," as not-Europeans while living in Europe.

Who was European?

The issue of otherness is a thorny issue for European identity, because this is where "different" image of Europe emerges; one "of the twofaced genesis that has benevolent smile on one hand, and it speaks of tolerance ... (and) objects to discrimination against minorities, and yet, on the other hand, it practices such discrimination (and has done so) for many, many centuries."[1] However prickly this issue is, it is important to consider it because "European civilization has produced wide variety of people... So Hitler is just as much product of German (European) civilization as Goethe is; Mussolini is no less Italian (European) then Garibaldi." [2]

The historical developments of identity on 'the smallest continent' are exceptional in many ways. Europe is the first continent that elevated the religion to the level of ethnicity and even went further by constructing legislations that propped up this racism. The medieval Europe largely adopted the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio (Whose realm, his religion) where religion of the king (sovereign) has to be the religion of the people. Europe never fully moved away from this notion, and some forms of contemporary 'assertive European secularism'[3] still relay on that premise, where secularism is considered as the form of the sovereign's religion. This approach was particularly sharpened in post-Islamic "Spain with the Estatutos de Limpieza de Sangre (purity of the blood/ancestry) which made religion a racial issue and the blood issue, where a person had to prove that he or she was Christian."[4]

This approach created and upheld the notion for differentiation of people who live in Europe. When we look at those who were considered as "others" in various European regions in different times and different political eras, we can observe that otherness is as transient as the Europeanness is -- the latter and the former being brainchildren of the same racist paradigm. One of the periods where the issue of otherness surfaced in most drastic way certainly was the period of 1930s and 1940s with the "final solution" for, the so called, "Jewish question" in Europe. It is interesting to note that some conservative circles in the US propagate the view of European civilization as a Judeo-Christian civilization, yet historically Europeans lose no opportunity to show, sometimes in very drastic ways, how they consider Jews as others, or non-Europeans. This exemplifies how that notion, of some restricted hybrid Judeo-Christian civilization, is weak in the basest of its foundation. Such a notion is unsuccessfully trying to merge two distinct and sometimes mutually exclusive world-views.[5] In fact, Oren Stier notes that the realization of Jewish distinct world-view is the most important reason for a difference to crystallize in the mind of some Christian Europeans. Yet, "they needed Jews around to act as the so called "witness people"-- as the disconfirming other (for "real" Europeans) in order to know what the differences are. And it is the difference that leads to otherness, which leads to anti-Semitism, which leads ultimately, along the long and twisted road, to genocide. "[6]

Light on the Enlightenment

The differentiation of Jews and other minorities in Europe eventually diversified and brought to us the period of "enlightenment" and claims that, with it, Europe has found solution for individual differences among people. But when observed from a Jewish perspective, the proposed emancipation actually only furthered the idea of Cuius regio, eius religio, where the individual is expected to shed his or her parochial identity and adopt some sort of generic standard of the behavior for citizens. The model is of course guided by the expectation of a ruling European class, with aims to create a proper citizen of a society. "But, that doesn't work, because the others are not going to believe you that you really shed that parochial identity, that you still don't have some specific ideologies that are considered threatening to the modern nation state."[7]

Therefore, this impossibility led some Europeans to make a horrible conclusion where "the final solution" for the European Jews emerged as inevitable. The Jews were not alone as others, but for many centuries they were the face of otherness in Europe and since the manifestation towards them were so public, they are fitting example of these European attitudes. This public posture towards the Jews is then, according to Stier, "best described with a famous typology constructed by the late historian of the holocaust Raul Hilberg. The typology starts with the longer sentence and then last two words were removed at every new turn:

You can not live among us as Jews.

You can not live among us.

You can not live.

That brought us to the final solution of genocide."[8]

Deconstruction of this typology can transcend the time and the particular group of Europeans mentioned therein. "You can not live among us as Jews is possibly resolvable with conversion. Then ghettoization as bridge to a second category of you can not live among us, which is another view of ghettoization edging towards the expulsion. This leads to the third which is, when everything else failed, you can not live, and that is genocide of a holocaust."[9]

The design of the immigrant community in Europe

Where does the ghettoization of certain segments of population could lead to, might also be seen in the case of France and its five million strong Muslims population, largest of any Western European country,[10] and the territory that loves to see itself as the face of Europeanness.

Back in 2005, by then only the French minister of interior, Nicolas Sarkozy called the protesting Muslim youth "racaille" (scum or rabble) and proposed to clean their ghettoes. Sarkozy even indicated "pressure cleaning"[11] to underline his intent and during his political campaign, with that statement, he managed to divert the attention of the French nation from their economic woes to social issues. Ultimately this attempt to blame the victim actually succeeded and he got elected to the French presidency.[12] So, because these people live in housing made exclusively in poor neighborhoods, and majority of them being Muslim immigrants or their descendents from North Africa, these places became ghettos that needed to be cleaned.This case in France strikes a startling parallel with Hilberg's typology. Yet there are persisting voices that attempt to further blame the victims and point to out-of-control immigration to be the main problem. But, is that really the case?

The situation of such a large resourceless 'non-integrated' immigrant population is not the result of their uncontrolled immigration; rather it is the result of "short sighted immigration policies of the Western European countries a couple of decades ago when they started to open up their job market to a low skill and unskilled, mainly male, worker population predominantly from Muslim countries." The policy of bringing foreign workers was sold to a local population as impermanent and necessary. Yet "the idea that this was going to be a temporary stay was unrealistic. Europe was in a state of denial about the necessity of the opening of its job market and only after the first decade, they began with family unifications programs for those immigrants and that is how by the design 'the immigrant community' appeared in Europe. The same community is therefore, again by the design, a disabled community. Remember, the backbone of this community is low or unskilled worker that probably don't have any deep knowledge even of his own culture and/or religion. Therefore this is an immigrant community which lacks the fundamental resources, both material and non-material, to be a fully productive segment of the larger community."[13] Yet the blame for the related problems is continuously placed on them.

The predicament of so called "integrations" in France is addressed also by the report of the European Commission on Racism in Europe from 2005.[14] The report indicates two main issues that prevent full 'integration' of the Muslim population:

- Law enforcement officials and numbers of the judiciary services receiving complaints about the racism are not always sufficiently alerted to the racist aspects of the offences. And if we add to this the fact that there is an increase in the racist acts and statements, as well as the rise of anti-Semitism, then the picture gets even grimmer.

- There is a disproportional number of students of immigrant origin, which means mostly Muslims from North Africa, in certain schools which arises from the urban ghetto phenomenon. Muslim pupils are directed to the schools in their neighborhoods and in that way their otherness is further straighten, similarly to the situation of segregation in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.

This issue with segregated education and ghettoization is stemming out of a related problem of discrimination in a housing sector. The discrimination comes from shortages of affordable housing caused by the French government not investing in that sector, and deliberate individual acts, "which means if a person calls for rental add, if he or she has a wrong accent, the apartment is already rented."[15]

Instead of adopting the suggestions to discontinue with these policies of segregation proposed by the above mentioned report, France, as well as many other Western European countries, is considering to adopt ethnic statistics in the country's internal policy making. It should be remembered that "ethnic" is euphemism for "religious" in case of Western Europe, that started in Spain with the Estatuto de Limpieza de Sangre (purity of the blood/ancestry).

What could Muslims do in these circumstances of systemic discrimination and constant othering? Azouz Begag, a French sociologist of the Algerian origin, classified the two groups of those immigrants, based on the choices made by them.

- One: A group that has successfully overcame difficulties in search of integrations by accommodating their values to French society. I as a citizen of French society decide to leave any potential problems in my realm as a private citizen.

o Commentary: Although it may appear that this group is proportionately doing better, it is telling to say that the poster face of that group Azouz Begag himself, resigned in protest from his ministerial position over the governmental policies he perceived as racially inappropriate.

- Second: A category with people who resist integrating because they see the full integration as the betrayal of their own culture and as the result they are being unsuccessful in their integration into French society.

o Commentary: Here we can go back to schooling which does not provide you with enough cultural capital, or worse, provides you probably with a wrong cultural capital

In this atmosphere the question of appropriateness of suffering raises up to the existential point for those segregated communities, especially for their second or third generation. The first generation is usually a silent generation. By the time second or third generation matures with a lot of economic problems, "the question of why do I deserve this, why I am being treated differently," demands an answer. "The immediate and obvious source to seek response for the questions is own immigrant community; and the person goes back to them for answers. But that is a resourceless community and it can't provide individuals with cultural, spiritual and/or economic opportunities needed to make sense of existence, or hope to alleviate pain and suffering. So what happens on the larger scale is that by default next candidate to make sense of own existence will be the traditional Muslim world."[16] Once the external forces start to play role in those ultimate intra-European issues, the situation becomes murkier and often produces violence as indiscernible as the blur from witch it arrose. "One of the reasons why violence seems to be so threatening or dramatic today is perhaps due to the rise of 'antiactors,' protagonists, who are outside any system of action, and in the emergence of forms of violence characterized solely by their force and strength with no possibility of relationship or dialogue between the two."[17] With that violence, otherness of Muslims gets further straightened, feed by self-fulfilling prophecy and it appears as if there is no way out of that circle because of "dreams or nightmares 'in which we believe because they either delight or terrify us' (Bayart 1996:10)."[18]

Small and big group choices

There is another dimension to the issue of otherness when those external pressures of larger context cause group's internal soul searching and when otherness is "not as others will see us, but of within, because the otherness could be determined from within as well."[19]

A good example of that larger issue when group tried to merge own identity with the identity of a majority in order to be fully accepted without the stigma of otherness, is the event of the elections in Quebec of November 16, 1977 and position of Jews who mostly came there from North Africa after the French pull out. Rene Levesque and his nationalist party were elected to the premiership of Quebec at that time. Those same Jews "in North Africa, had to choose whether they are going to stay as the members of the Arabic speaking population, which was the local majority; or they going to choose to go with the global majority, but local minority, Francophone world."[20] They chose to go with Francophone world and after the initial try in France, they immigrated to Quebec, which is for all intense and purpose, genuine European cultural space.

"Once there, they were again faced with a choice of whether to identify with larger Anglophone majority, where also the majority of their brethren are, or with significant but smaller Francophone minority. This time they did the opposite. They chose to identify with the local majority, national minority, with the Francophone group."[21]

The identification was followed with a highest out-marriage rate amongst the Jewish women of Quebec with Francophone non-Jews of anywhere in North America. Then the unexpected happen with the election of the nationalist party as the head of the government of Quebec and their ultranationalist agenda. "All of a sudden, particularly amongst the intellectuals, man turned in their beds looked at wives, formerly Jewish women, and said my children are being raised secretly as Jews and not as true Québécois, and they left their wives. Hundreds upon hundreds of marriages were destroyed because no matter what were the choices they made, they had no option and they remind as others."[22] What we see from these two examples is, even though different Jewish immigrant groups had to make choices within the context; very often those choices were preempted by the context as well.

Case of Russia

Can we claim that the same occurred in the case of Russia, as the homeland of European Slavs who were also often seen as the European Others?

In considering other parts of Northern Europe we can see the central theme in European deliberations is certainly the enlightenment "which we understand always to be rational Northern European vs. emotional, superstitious Southern European with all our processions, saints and our candles."[23] One of the giants of those intellectual European products is certainly Karl Marx, a German who grew up suckling off the Hegelian ideas of dialectic world-view. In the article "Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany, Panslavism — The Schleswigholstein War," published on March 15th, 1852, Karl Marx wrote about Slavs "...and at the same time physical and intellectual power of the German nation to subdue, absorb, and assimilate its ancient eastern neighbors; that this tendency of absorption on the part of the Germans had always been, and still was one of the mightiest means by which the civilization of Western Europe had been spread in the east of that continent.... and that, therefore, the natural and inevitable fate of these dying nations (meaning Slavs) was to allow this process of dissolution and absorption by their stronger neighbors to complete itself."[24] Perhaps these kinds of European attitudes towards the eastern part of the continent, with Poland and Russia which were considered relatively negligible because of its proximity to Asia, compared to Northwestern part, which was regarded as the model of modernity, probably made German forces to be so brutal in the wars against Poland, Russia and SSSR.

These European perceptions went so far to influence even the Russian intellectual circles themselves, which sometimes tried to make sense of them. This was especially the case during the era of European nationalism of the 19th century. "Russian intellectuals of that time were preoccupied with the role of Russia in the European civilization. Many wrote of the symbolic differences between Russia's two capital cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg as the reflection of the Russia ambivalent position in Europe and its fractured identity."[25]

Saint Petersburg was build with the intent of "Peter the Great to transform Russia from backwardness steeped in superstition and pietness, into a strong European one. Building of St. Petersburg very deliberately meant to turn Russia into direction of the West; it was after all 'the window on the West.'"[26]

Moscow as the Russian capital, on the other hand, especially after the war of 1812 when European intentions towards Russia were clearly and harshly understood, developed itself in a reaction to St Petersburg, and to remain very deliberately Russian at hearth. "Moscow was much more provincial. It was closer to the habits of the 'народ' (people) not the kind of Europeanized elites. The peasantry in Moscow was associated with old Russia's folklore and tradition."[27]

This polarization created two camps among Russian inteligencia; the so call Westerners and Slavophiles. The Westerners imagined Russia at the hearth of Western European civilization. "The slavophiles on the other hand had no such desire and belief. They believed that Russia is fundamentally different civilization from Europe and should not try to imitate it. In fact, they believed that Russia was superior partly because Russia's civilization had something called 'сабурност,' which is a kind of harmony among people. This harmony slavophiles argued, could be found in its purest form in the peasant commune. They argued that in the commune with 'сабурност,' competition and rationality is not so essential and that was not what made Russia – Russia. In fact, they argued that Western spirit had corrupted Russia and it should be kicked out of родина (homeland)."[28]

So whenever they were not preoccupied with the defeating another invading northwest European power, Russians wondered where they belonged. After the initial attempts of Peter the Great to make Russia once and for all the European power and slavophiles attempts to distance it from cold Western European pragmatism, Russia chose to adopt the very European, in fact Marxist ideas of communism as the path. Ironically though, the Europe then used that very fact to claim further Russian otherness. Therefore those internal choices again could not influence the larger perceptions of the rest of the Europe to change its appropriation of otherness attributed to Slavs, as if there is some invisible curtain that separated them from Europe. Was that the "iron curtain" that Churchill spoke about -- and if it was -- what it was made of?

Case of Spain

European Hegelian ideas could also be seen in the roots of Spanish otherness in the context of Northern European perceptions. "For Hegel, southern Europe, more specifically the land south of Pyreneans, which is Spain, lacked cohesion with the rest of Europe. "Here one meets the lands of Morocco, Fas (not Fez), Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli. One can say that this part does not properly belong to Africa, but more to Spain, with which it forms a common basin. De Pradt says for this-reason that when one is in Spain, one is already in Africa.""[29] It is a kind of irony that Spain is seen as such, considering that it is a birth-place of the policy of Estatuto de Limpieza de Sangre (purity of the blood/ancestry) and inquisition which investigated the necessary amount of 'Europeanness' among the new Christian converts, former Muslims and Jews, after the 'requonquista.' But merciless northern European standard bearers who have "set" an ever-changing definition of Europeanness would not let an inconspicuous Spain into the realm of Europeanness, and Spain for the most part remained as "other" even during the good part of the 20th century. We have heard and read many times how the Allies won the WWII and defeated fascism in Europe. Yet no one explains how come then fascism remained in Spain until 1974? Could that Hegelian notion be the reason? Morcillo points again to the 19th century European nationalism movement as the time when Spanish otherness was further exoticized or rather orientalised. "The first half of the 19 century especially after the Napoleonic invasion in 1808, many writers wrote of Spain as imagined and enchanted community. Those romantic accounts continue to depict pre-modern, untamed society,"[30] and ultimately culminated with the popularized depiction of Spanish Carmen, as Gypsy-Spanish fanfatal with a copper hue skin, "desired yet not to be imitated."[31] These notions were utilized by the Spain itself during the period of propagation of tourism in Franco's era. "The avalanche of tourists visited Spain and Manuel Fraga e Iribarne was appointed the Minister of Information and Tourism in 1962. The slogan coined to attract visitors was: Spain is different. By setting themselves as the sentinel of the West, as guardians of the eternal Christian values, with national Catholicism, Francoists became orientalists and made the Spain subaltern to the rest of the European continent."[32]

These perceptions of Europe and Spain within and without, similarly to Russia, created two camps among Spanish intellectuals of traditionalists and progressives. The difference between these two groups is best personified in the debate between the liberal historian Amerigo Castro and conservative Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz.

"Amerigo Castro proposes that in the Spain there is coexistence of three religions and it could be a good place to visit to understand what we have in common, rather then what divides us and he makes emphasis on the hybridity of the culture vs. Sánchez-Albornoz that actually thinks of Spain as monolithic Catholic and therefore a part of that imaginary Europe that is exclusively Christian."[33]

Layers of identity - healthy identity

As of late European integrations both, Spain and (mostly) Slavic East with Russia are often prefaced with a jingle of "welcomed back" into European community even though they occupied the same land as they did for centuries. That by itself best illustrates how those designations of otherness in the European psyche are not a matter that the designated group itself can do much about it on its own; rather, it is a matter of perception created primarily in the Northwestern European concepts of appropriateness. That attitude could be seen also as an attempt of continues cultural colonialism and imperialism. The problem for them though, is when they try to define roots of Europeanness with the ancient Greece and Rome as "the spring of Europe." In both of those cases Northwestern Europeans were just a bunch of barbarians which need to be conquered and tamed. And they were, so much so that now they set the standards of who is European and who is not.

This would be funny if there was no history to showcase various European solutions for those who were perceived as others. Those realities make the issue scary and certainly relevant for the discussions. In light of that "what we have, particularly in the Jewish and Muslim community, is two groups that have very strong sense of themselves and very strong culture. There is a clash between them and a notion of a state culture at which you can believe in. Very often these state cultures claim exclusivity to your allegiance and all of the sudden, this whole issue, often used by anti-Semites, of dual allegiance comes up to create problems."[34] As if one can not be many different things in the same time and have layers of identity, with "each one as the legitimate category of the identity and they overlap and sometimes compete. The way you can live in that competition makes the healthy form of identity,"[35] European identity of course.

Post Scriptum

This is what usually happens during human history whenever "speculative thought, which is indifferent to existence" is followed as it is often the case in Europe. So the greatest European thinker and father of modern European thought and European self-understanding, Hegel, "would have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived," said Kierkegaard, "if only he had regarded his system as a thought-experiment. Instead, he took himself seriously to have reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical." Could this be the very reason why European perception of itself and of "others" is the deceptive moving target that can actually never be reached by "others," because "real Europeans" won't allow that? Europeans need them to remain as "disconfirming others" to help them realize who they are: "the two-faced genesis that has a benevolent smile on one hand, and it speaks of tolerance and reaching out to object to discrimination against minorities, and yet on the other hand, practices such discrimination and has done so for many, many centuries."[36]