Political developments since the 1990s have compelled more and more European intellectuals to confront questions of identity, ethnicity and minority rights, first in reaction to the often-violent nationalist demands in the former Eastern bloc, and more recently in debating the future of the expanded European Union, with its growing population of non- European ethnic minorities. Although there is no consensus on whether or not ‘Europe’ needs an identity and what that supra-national identity might look like, there is wide agreement on the inappropriateness of three counter-models: the bloody nationalisms of Europe's own past, US multiculturalism and Eurocentrism (whether racial or cultural). Some thinkers advocate a forth model, that of cosmopolitanism, while others point out that the modernist utopian dream of secular internationalism has not and will never come to pass, and that instead, even in the twenty- first century, as one policy advisor to Europe has put it, ‘the seemingly old-fashioned notions of nationhood based on blood and belonging, and the right of the motherland to protect its kin, are alive and well and complicating bilateral relations in and around the European Union’ (Kemp 2006: 103).

Those who think that Europe's increasingly numerous ethnicities and minorities should be offered a new kind of supra-identity couch this demand in a variety of terms. For example, in their 2003 newspaper appeal for European unity, Jürgen Habermas and his co-signatory Jacques Derrida use the notion of ‘vision’, calling for ‘an attractive, indeed an infectious “vision” for a future Europe’, but qualify this appeal with the caveat that the vision ‘must be articulated from out of the wild cacophony of a multi-vocal public sphere’ (Habermas and Derrida 2005: 7).