Abstract
The year 2000 will be and have already been pivotal for the European Union. Ten new countries became full members of the Union and Turkey is on his way to the membership. But the 2005 failure to make all the countries sign the project of European constitution asks legitimate questions about the European identity. We are going to study the roles of nationalism and regionalism as far as the construction of the European identity is concerned, to see that they can act respectively as obstacle and alternative. A group of people cannot be defined as a group on really simple and basic criteria such as the lone fact of being together most of the time. Being a group means more. A social group can be called so when the individuals who compose it feel a particular feeling of belonging. In other words, if the group is basically constituted by the individuals, the group still has its proper and significant social life for itself.
