^aGeschwister-Scholl-Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Oettingenstr. 67, D-80538 München, Germany. E-mail: rainer.huelsse@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is a novel political entity in many respects. For example, instead of the monolithic political structure of nation-states, it features a layered structure and a 'variable geometry'. This institutional complexity has been interpreted as an indicator of the EU being a post-modern political system. This article inquires whether the EU's institutional post-modernness is accompanied by a post-modern identity. I argue that an investigation of collective identity requires a reconstruction of how a community is imagined. As metaphors are the principal linguistic means of our imagination, I reconstruct the imaginations of the European community by analyzing its metaphorizations. How do the metaphors of EU enlargement construct European identity? It can be shown that in the German EU-enlargement discourse of the 1990s, European identity was hardly constructed in a post-national/post-modern way. Rather, European identity was imagined much like a modern national identity.