Is there any "there" in the EU?

I've wondered off and on whether there was any developing sense of EU/pan-European identity, something that would help the nations hold together in mutual sacrifice in a crisis. Since I only met scientists and engineers, and since the elites run the European newspapers just as ours do here, I really have no clear picture of what the common man thinks.

From The Global Journal you find an interview with Professor Jürgen Habermas in which Fukuyama asks him about this directly.

But isn’t the weakness of current European identity due to the fact that it has been described in such largely negative terms, i.e., to be a European means to be against war, against national selfishness, etc., instead of in positive terms, e.g., "I am proud to be member of a European civilization that represents X or Y" as positive values? And if so, how do we define those values and what kind of education project is necessary to give them meaning?

Jan Werner Müller, a younger professor of political science at Princeton university, recently rebutted the frequently heard accusation of the "failure of European intellectuals" with an argument that I find convincing. The expectation that the intellectuals should construct a "grand European narrative," a European "identity," with the aid of a new founding myth remains captive to a "nineteenth-century logic," he argued. After all, the now well-studied history of the "invention" of national consciousness by historiography, the press, and school curricula during the nineteenth century, in view of its horrible consequences, does not provide an inviting example. We in Europe are still coming to terms with forms of ethnonational aggression – as is shown, even within the EU, by the example of Hungary. This is why I think it is sufficient to cite a couple of concrete demographic and economic statistics to remind ourselves of the diminishing weight of Europe in the world and to ask ourselves whether we must not pull ourselves together if we want to remain in a position to defend our cultural and social forms of life against the leveling force of the global economy – and, most importantly, to maintain a certain amount of influence on the international political agenda in accordance with our universalistic conceptions.

That's scary. Habermas seems to miss the point. Whether "European intellectuals" ought to be the source of the "grand narrative" isn't quite the issue: I'm not sure that class has done a bang-up job of designing "narratives" in general and some of the narratives of the last century were pretty vile. But the point isn't that "nineteenth-century logic" is passe or that Mussolini's mythic vision of Italy was evil. The point is that there needs to be some positive center for identity or there's no cohesion, and that the positive vision needs to be taught somehow, either implicitly through the culture or explicitly through schooling. It is not sufficient to "cite a couple of ... statistics to remind ourselves." The children must learn what is positive about their land before they understand statistics and start to worry about needing a passport for hitchhiking across the continent.

The tribe and nation are extensions (a little attenuated) of the family. Unless there's some species of love involved, the construct is fragile.

At some level the EU and the US are rivals (explicitly on their part), but we're part of the same culture and same economy and I'm not looking forward to the disintegration of the EU.