Identity and Security in Europe: A Constructivist Study of Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and Lithuania

Abstract: This study examines different national constructions of contemporary European identities. The assumption is made that the construction of states'identities and identification of threats is a mutual process. For this reason special attention is paid to the construction of threats, embedded in a specific structure of the securitisation process. The author tries to answer to the questions of how identities are reproduced through the discourse on security and what information the analysis of national identities'constructions of Germany, Great Britain, Sweden andLithuania can provide about the contemporary ideas of a collective European identity using combination of Alexander Wendt's theoretical framework for analysing states'identities and the Copenhagen school's securitisation approach.