As with other forms of collective identity, a fundamental question is what European identity actually comprises and on what it is grounded. Given the constructivist nature of any form of identity or identity building process, we should also question what the substance of this identity does or should consist of.
In this regard, there are two basic understandings of the repository and substance of European identity:
- Europe as a cultural community of shared values, constituting a ‘cultural identity’;
- Europe as a political community of shared democratic practices, constituting a ‘political identity’.
Some fields of study include research by philosophers, political scientists, international relations scholars, historians, psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists. There is also a broad corpus of work on the different aspects of ‘European identity’, such as Europeanisation (see, e.g., Harmsen/Wilson 2000; Börzel/Risse 2000), democratic citizenship (e.g. Habermas 2005; Habermas 2006; Castiglione 2009) and Euroscepticism (Hooghe and Marks 2005; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008), but also EU foreign policy (e.g. Katzenstein 1997; Manners 2002), migration (see, e.g., Recchi and Favell 2009) and territorial politics (Keating 2001a, 2001b; Bourne 2008), to name but a few.