Thus far into my project, I am still wrapped up with the philosophical implications of identity.
While taking a break from the oh so exciting preamble of the EU, I did my weekly philosophy reading. This week’s topic is focused around aesthetic judgements and implicit biases. Once I had finished Hume’s famous Of the Standard of Taste essay, I was faced with a predicament. Hume is absolutely correct to point out these underlying biases all humans harbour. I think these biases at times, cloud our view of ourselves and the world around us. Really milking the philosophy student cliche, but I am wondering whether our general perception of reality is merely just one of a generated bias. Is there even a standard reality? Or, as I skeptically think, we all just live in our own separate realities. This relates to my project in the sense that identity is merely just how one perceives themselves, and attempts to convince others to see them in the same light. For example, my family is incredibly Eastern European. Though they have embraced the ‘American Dream’ in all senses of the expression, they still feel Hungarian and have strong (sometimes annoyingly strong) views about the political culture of Hungary. For example, my Bubbie (grandmother in Yiddish) HATES JFK. She accuses him of killing boats of Hungarian refugees attempting to come to the States. Instead of letting the boats come into the country, JFK turned them back, ultimately in my Bubbie’s eyes, killing all of those Jews who were forced to return to occupied Hungary. Moreover, while others see JFK as a hero, pulling the U.S back onto its feet, my Bubbie sides with Hungary, harbouring a bias against any other political decisions JFK would go on to make. In this sense, she lives in her own reality, prioritising the safety of Hungarian Jews like herself over internal advances within the U.S. In this way, it seems individuals like my Bubbie hold transnational biases. What I mean by this is even though my Bubbie only has an American passport and has lived in the states her whole life, her Hungarian traditions and the language they spoke in the house influence her to be more sympathetic to Hungary. Her kinship to her country and origins is merely worn outwardly by labeling herself as “Hungarian.” In this respect identity is merely equivalent to wearing your bias as a name-tag for the world to see, acknowledge, and hopefully, respect.
My point is, identity is socially constructed. This seems obvious but I’m understanding it has a deeper meaning. For example, in terms of the EU, many European policies have been unfairly isolating the East. Countries like Hungary who have a track record of economic upsets and political instability are compared to a yardstick of successful Western countries such as France and Germany. Holding these biases against people, countries, and regions, I would cling to my conclusion that there is no wholly successful “European Identity.” While the concept itself might serve as a tool of unity and solidarity, closer investigation will only strain these connections. For example, A Hungarian like my Bubbie might consider themselves “European” but for different reasons than for which a French person would consider themselves “European.” While the French might cling to cultural similarities like literature, philosophy, and music, Hungary has historically been so isolated from these factors that they cannot relate. For Hungarians, or at least for my Bubbie, being European is not necessarily about this idea of solidarity or conjoined policies, but more the idea of liberation and freedom and protection of human rights. Breaking from Communist rule, many Hungarians are fearful to give over power and control to governmental institutions considering past history. The social benefits and human rights protections are what motivate much of Eastern Europe to consider themselves Europeans.
So I still hold to my cliche philosophical question: Is identity merely just the name tagging of biases?
As a fellow philosophy student who just had “Of The Standard of Taste” inflicted upon me, I share your concern and interest about the problem of identity. And identities like “European” are especially tricky.
Something I would be especially careful about is equivocating the attitudes of diaspora/emigre populations with those of the remaining population. The reason I bring this up is because of the conclusion drawn at the end about Eastern Europeans seeing themselves as “European” because of the legacy of Communism and the rights and benefits they now have, in common with the rest of Europe, with your Grandmother being the source for that claim. While there certainly are Eastern Europeans who do see it that way, both abroad and back “home”, that particular understanding of “European” is definitely not the dominant one in Eastern Europe today.
It’s actually kind of bizzare that I’m in a position to talk about this because before last week I definitely wasn’t. Over break, I took a trip to Prague, Budapest, and Vienna (the last leg I talk about in my own post), and when I was in Budapest I had to take a taxi from the train station to the hotel as it was too far to walk. The driver was an older man who spoke reasonably good English, so as he drove I remarked on how modern the city looked. He agreed that Budapest was catching up with the West, but he said that the rest of the country was being left behind, and that Budapest was becoming too expensive to live in. It was, to use his words, something that “would never have happened under the Communists”. The ride ended soon after but the conversation made me interested in how Hungarians and other old Eastern Bloc citizens viewed the Communist past.
What I found was actually pretty shocking. According to this poll ( https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/legacy/267-09.gif ), which was part of a wider study you can find here: ( https://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered-but-now-with-more-reservations/ ), many Eastern Europeans and especially Hungarians believe they were better off under Communism. I knew previously that nostalgia for the Soviet Union had majority support in most of the former Union, but I didn’t think that this nostalgia would extend to such a large degree to Eastern Europe.
Reading that study and other articles about this phenomena, it appears to be less an attachment to Communist ideology per se but more a nostalgia for a more communitarian, egalitarian, and cohesive society as well as anger over reductions in social services like public healthcare or public transit (for what it’s worth the Budapest public transit system is one of the best I’ve ever seen and is a legacy of that period).
To bring this back to the issue of “European” identity, I don’t know to what extent you can credit that identity to “liberation and freedom and protection of human rights”, given the dominant view (esp. in Hungary) that it used to be better when they supposedly didn’t have those things. Your Grandma, growing up in the United States, only has a second-hand understanding of what life was like for Hungarians, much in the same way that many living Cuban-Americans in Florida hate the Castros but have never experienced life in Cuba. That does not, of course, mean that their own experiences are invalid or even that they are necessarily wrong in the arguments they make, but the fact remains that cultural heritage and lived experience aren’t equivalent.
That being said, I think you are absolutely right about the lack of a single “European” identity, and how people in different countries view being European differently. I would just be inclined to believe that Hungarian (and Eastern European) “Europeanism” is a more ethnic and racial categorization than one of a common language of rights and freedoms. That politicians like Victor Orban can be so successful painting non-whites as “hordes” invading Europe seems to point in that direction, anyway. But even within Hungary I suspect you’re finding evidence that people wholly opposed to each other politically might both consider themselves European just for completely different reasons.
As an addendum, do you know what event your Grandmother was talking about with the Jewish ships being turned back and the people being killed during the Kennedy administration? I’m not aware of any post-WW2 massacres of European Jews on that scale but I’m not exactly an expert on that.