The 'New Germany' and its Transformation process

In his essay A Theory of Collective Identity: Making Sense of the Debate on a ‘European Identity’ Klaus Eder (2009: 427) calls ‘for a robust notion of collective identity which is not reduced to a psychological conception of identity’. A few years before, Eder also analyzed the effects of integration and enlargement on European identity, describing how the exposure of national collective memories to an enlarging communicative space within Europe affects the ways in which national memories are framed (Eder and Spohn 2005). Having these two approaches in mind this chapter asks what is going to happen to national collective identities when the enlarging communicative spaces — in this case the European Union (EU) and within this frame the idea of a European identity — no longer serve the purpose of collective identity-building.