THE IDEA OF EUROPE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE EUROPEAN UNION - A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH

According to the scholarly literature on the origin of the European Un ion, EU traces its beginnings to events during the years just after Wo rld War II and possibly also to various economic and political events during the interwar period. But there also exist a number of works whi ch are often ignored in the academic debate and which claim that the E uropean community has a very much more distant past - often stretching as far back as the Middle Ages or even to Antiquity. These works, whi ch have developed into a discourse of their own, look at the developme nt of what they call ''the European Idea'' and how this has developed over the centuries. This article presents and analyzes the discourse o n the European Idea, mainly with the help of Emile Durkheim's notion o f ''collective representations''. It is argued that there exist intere sting affinities between this discourse and the type of collective rep resentations that Durkheim was very interested in towards the end of h is life, namely community creating collective representations. The wor ks on the European Idea, it is claimed, often exaggerate how far back one can trace the European community. They nonetheless have an importa nt contribution to make to the standard literature on the origin of EU through their emphasis on the role of ideas, ideals and cultural symb ols.