Redrawing the Map of an Enlarged European Id-Entity: New Margins Stretching the Centre

The European Union’s historical development has produced a political and institutional structure based on a set of common items of reference, such as flags, mottos and icons, all evoking adherence to shared European beliefs. The final creation of a pan-European identity is the outcome of different mechanisms, all converging towards the making of a collective set of values and rules that new Member States must embrace when joining the Community. Following the latest evolutions of the EU enlargement process, new issues need to be faced: the broadening of geographical horizons to national entities coming from different cultural and political backgrounds calls for the establishment of a multi-levelled European identity, which is designed to encompass new horizons and bridge the gap between Europe’s margins and centres. The paper investigates the linguistic and semiotic strategies used by the European Union website to promote aggregation and a feeling of mutual belonging between “old” and “new” citizens of Europe. To this purpose, a multimodal analysis of the website’s visual and textual material is introduced to highlight the strategies employed to enlarge, mould and reframe the foundations of a common European heritage. This multifaceted process of integration leads towards the study of the inevitable emergence of new visual and verbal items tailored to suggest a sense of belonging, while redesigning Europe’s new “variable geometry”. Being European thus becomes no longer a matter of birth, but rather a question of adjusting to the Community’s institutions and system of values, which are meant to unite all Europeans, transcending their diversity.