Fall 2017 JPI

The Times of European Identity
Allie Vlachakis
THE INVENTION OF TIME
Europe: in the past decade, terrorism, economic recession, “exits” and unprecedented
migration flows have stripped the word of any confident meaning. A whole generation used to the
perks of porous borders and safety in peacetime, is now confronted with a sudden reality check that
puts into question the perceived communal identity of Europeans. The nation-state, the cornerstone
of the European status quo for more than a century, is placed under scrutiny.
The attempt to understand “what is happening” in Europe, to explain the changes that are
now taking place, implies that we examine an actuality or a situation. Realizing that going into the details
of these terms is ambitious, a basic understanding of what they signify in the context of international
affairs is nevertheless necessary for this paper as it deals with issues of time and collective identity.
How these notions are perceived in the context of globalization is a central theme of the commentary
in this paper.
The recent attention to “fake news” and “the post-fact world” show that the self-evidence of
facts has become less self-evident; the succession of the same term highlighting the mythical nature
of the fact. Using Barthe's definition of myth, 1 it can be argued that a fact is first a symbol – the
signifier – and it contains the signified – something that happened. The linguistic-mythological
dimension of “fact” is not easy to discern as the etymology of the word itself deals with reality; it refers
to the reality of the event that has happened. It is nevertheless possible that a fact bears no trace of
absolute truth. For example, what may seem a belief to an outsider, may still be a fact for the believer.
What this discussion on facts merely underlines, is that contemporary societies are built upon
a rational consensus, based on a general agreement. Thus, the notions of transparency and objectivity
that are meant to define journalism as well as history are inherently political since they too are
negotiated by way of a simultaneous, general agreement. Untangling rational nationalistic discourse
from state sovereignty is crucial to addressing the logic behind exclusionary policies and in imagining
state power as more socially-oriented.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson links simultaneity with press-capitalism and the
creation of global time that permitted regulation of international trade. Anderson's explanation focuses
specifically on nationalist narratives. Western imagination, he says, has been fashioned by “the cosmic
clock that has made intelligible our synchronic transoceanic pairings;” 2 but despite this general
agreement, different groups of nations have different genealogical readings of nationalism that engage
“historical traditions of serial continuity.” 3 Thus, according to Anderson, nations employed common
characteristics that implied continuity, especially language, to legitimize their destiny: in Europe, this
took the form of privileging a common tongue over regional dynamics, whereas in America, it was
the linguistic attachment to the metropolis that permitted colonial nations to appropriate their territory
by labeling it “new;” thus erasing indigenous history. In both cases, “forgetting” is central to the
process of constructing the nation and forging its myth. These processes are central to Anderson’s
1 Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Strauss &Giroux, 1991), 113.
2Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso 2006), 194.
3Anderson, Imagined Communities, 195.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 36