The results of a new European survey are interesting. Respondents were asked whether they viewed their identities as regional, national, European, or international. France was the only country in the sample where a majority put nation first, and even that was only 52 percent. Only 15 percent of French thought of themselves as European and 13 percent put region first. The results for Germany are starkly different. Here, only 22 percent viewed their primary identification as the nation, while 36 percent saw themselves as European and 24 percent identified themselves by their German region.
I believe that, as Catholics, our primary identification should lie at the regional or local developed, and this should combined with a broader awareness of universal solidarity. In other words, subsidiarity twinned with a strong element of supranational coordination. Remember, the founders of the European Union– Schuman, Adenauer, and de Gasperi– were all serious Catholics, steeped in Catholic social teaching. Remember, too, that the ideas behind what became the European Union stretch back to medieval Christendom, and to visionaries like Erasmus and More. The creation of the European Union was one of the great successes of an otherwise dark century. And what of the future? The nation state will, I hope, be increasingly seen as an anachronism, a historical aberration, a relic of the anti-clerical Enlightenment era and bolstered by flawed 18th and 19th century liberalism.
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