THE CALL FOR increased Europeanization was challenged by the admission of countries from Eastern Europe in the European Union. Post-socialist countries, once accepted in the European “club,” sought the opportunity to reframe their national heritage narratives, make room for post-socialist heritage in the European heritage narrative, and challenge the West– East divide. On the surface, this should be the ethos of embracing multiculturalism, as the European Union's old adage “united in diversity” suggests. However, as researchers have observed, although “[t] he accession of Eastern and Central European countries was justified in the EU official discourse as a ‘return to Europe,’” it also “made [it] necessary to re-think and re-design the EU's discourse on European cultural identity.” It brought increased attention to the inner complexity of the European Union and increased the need for integration.

As a number of academic studies have shown, the analysis of the EU adage has not led to a clearer view of that these words might purport. Equally confusing is the very notion of Europe, as “concepts of Europe differ widely, depending on social as well as geographical location.” As Sassatelli aptly put it more than ten years ago: “‘Europe,’ as I shall try to illustrate, is becoming more and more like an icon, if not a totem, whose ambiguous content seems to reinforce the possibilities of identification with it.” This complicates the situation for countries such as those from Eastern Europe.

The building of a European identity (or identities), in turn, would happen in parallel with the strengthening of new forms of supranational governance that weaken the power of the nation-state and enhance the hold of EU governance on social and political issues across EU territory. Delanty and Rumford, for instance, critique Castells's view of the European Union as a network, emphasizing that increased globalization and mobility as conceptualized in his notion of the “space of flows” can bring forth both integration and separation: “the tendency in the literature to focus on the contradictions between a Europe of places and a Europe of flows (which assumes the integration of Europe) masks more fundamental dynamics which reveal the complex and contradictory nature of Europeanization.” Other researchers agree that Europeanization is further complicated by overlapping and sometimes contradictory processes of “new localisms and globalization.”