Hobsbawm

According to Hobsbawm, the history of nationalism started in Europe; where today’s prominent countries went through a process of forming nations consisting of various steps about creating identities and understanding their boundaries . Nevertheless, for Hobsbawm as for other authors such as Gellner, the importance of nationalism in modern times has decline in historical importance . According to them, this is visible in the process of losing important parts of national structures for the world economy. At the same time, new structures of globalization have disrupted the cultural assimilation because of the changes in the international political and economic system.

Though not all authors understand this changes in the international political

But the European Union was created for a reason, that of bringing integration, so how can this institution legitimize their actions without creating a united community. Coming from the Second World War that gave place to extremist ideologies of segregation, countries found it imminent to create an integrated identity were it would not be possible for it to happen again and preserve the peace. Going thorough various stages of political and economic integration from there, decades later in the 1980s, this community found it necessary to reinforce their union to become economically competitive in the escalating globalized

Rather the institution would like the citizens of the European Union to gain a dual identity of feeling European while conserving their country’s personality . In order to create this identity, there needs to be a feeling of collective belonging; in the words of Benedict Anderson, a nation is an imagined community. It is a “socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group.” In this sense, the European Union can be described as such. There are identifiers that bring these people together; traditionally there was homogeneity in ethnicity and in language . These have evolved; in modern times diversity is not a threat to national identity anymore. Uniqueness of their territory and place serve as signifiers since natural resources do more than sustaining human life; they contain cultural landscapes where group and human identity become inseparable . The set of trails embodies how nations conceive themselves while distinguishing from the other as the opposite .

National identity as collective belonging is conformed of different cultural signifiers from social constructivism . Nation states formulate their identities in relation to domestic and foreign policy