As you’ve probably noticed, OurKingdom has recently been migrated onto the main openDemocracy site, and from now on will be using the same Drupal technology as openDemocracy’s other specialist blogs (such as openRussia, and openUSA). This move comes at a time when openDemocracy itself is changing rapidly, and internally it made sense for OurKingdom to move onto the same platform as the rest of oD. It also gives us a lot more scope for technological improvements than WordPress was able to.

Can a political project survive without a people? Do all states need a nation to exist in? Just who are the Europeans anyway?

These are foundational questions for the EU, it seems, yet they're ones without good answers. In Britain, as we frequently write over on OurKingdom, we suffer from a lack of a coherent constitution but rumble on on the back of a still widely held (though thinning) idea of British identity. The EU seems to suffer from the reverse problem - an abundance of fresh political settlements trying to unify an incredibly diverse set of populations and peoples almost 500 million strong, with no firm European identity to build on and general public ignorance of exactly what is going on. The EU's motto, "united in diversity", celebrates at once a wonderful cosmopolitan ideal and the slightly disingenuous way in which it always manifests itself - people cannot be united solely through the fact that they are different.