Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

The contemporary European struggle over national identity begins with the founders of the European Union, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, who understood that exclusive ethnic definitions of national identity had been at the root of the two world wars that Europe experienced.3 As an antidote, they created the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, composed of France, Belgium, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, which was designed to prevent German rearmament while facilitating trade and economic cooperation in a formerly integrated region that had been ripped apart by war. The Coal and Steel Community evolved in stages into the European Economic Community and eventually into the EU, with a membership that grew steadily to encompass the current twenty-eight members.