A sense of cohesion grounded in a common identity is widely believed to be a prerequisite for a functioning democratic European polity. If the European Union is to master successfully the tasks assigned to it in the Constitutional Treaty and, using a non-consensual procedure, decide on policies that concern the security of its citizens or have significant distributive effects, then a sufficiently thick common identity is believed to be necessary both to legitimate and to ensure the functioning of the polity in the long term. There is little doubt that such an identity is currently missing. The question is what such an identity should be and whether the prepolitical pre-requisites for the development of such an identity exist. Are there historical experiences and accomplishments that enable European citizens to understand themselves as having suffered a common past and which animate them to see themselves engaged in the construction of a common political future? What are the appropriate narratives around which a European identity could, over time, develop? What should the focus of a self-conscious politics of memory be? What are the implications for the role and structure of European historiography, in particular for the European legal and political historiography?
