Transforming identity in international society: the potential and failure of European integration

This paper relates the theme of integration and identity to the fundamental question of political organisation. It starts from the premise that regional integration contains the potential to transcend the organisation of societies in mutually exclusive territorial containers. Against this, the work of David Mitrany and Hedley Bull cautions against too much optimism: in Mitrany’s case because the reinsertion of territory in regional integration; in Bull’s case because of the power of the existing rules of the society of states. The paper develops these arguments and makes a plea for taking them serious while still upholding the transformationalist promise of integration. It argues that the potential and problems of the identity-transforming effects of integration become visible in particular at regions’ borders. In the case of the EU, its involvement in the Cyprus and Ukraine conflicts is instructive. In both cases, the paper shows how interested parties within the EU and in the conflict cases themselves, as much as the political effects of seemingly technical rules, have played their role in the reproduction rather than the transformation of conflict identities. This ultimately raises the question of how we imagine regional integration projects to relate to each other without replicating the territorial boundaries of nation states.