‘Europeanness’ ‐ a new cultural battlefield?

The nation‐state is par excellence a product of ‘modernity’ in Europe. Its supercession has been trumpeted of late, hard on the heels of the fashion for post‐modernity. However, the self‐service conceptions of political identity that pertained until the end of the Cold War now need to be discarded as ethnicity and nationhood evidently become the predominant obsessions of the 1990s. Consequently, ‘Europeanness’ has become a cultural battlefield for sharply divergent views.