The American Identity and Self-Understanding

The European awareness of America is based on old concepts and images. America was always seen as an “offspring” (PRISCHING 2003, S. 3) of Europe, so its perception is not focused on religious and political differences. The mistake within the European opinion is to underestimate the differences between Europe and America concerning the founding myths, the evolution of mentality, the economic and everyday culture and values and beliefs. But America keeps its own traditional attitude towards Europe as well. Besides mutual stereotypes and incongruent images there is a lack of awareness of semantic differences: In both cultures terms like moral good, justice or liberty look like the same but do not mean the same, although this obviously seems to be expected. To develop these expectations this paper aims to give a better understanding of the American identity by providing an overview of the background of American values – and answering the question: What is the American self?
The first chapter defines basic terms, which are the prerequisites and tools for this paper, shows distinctness and examples of distinct American values. The second part tries to give insight into the origins, history and evolution – the ‘where … from?’ – of the American identity by portraying the characteristics of selected American values. The last chapter will provide a conclusion on the current development of the American self-understanding and ideas about the future – the ‘where to?’ of the American self. But this ‘identification’ is based on my own – European or German – point of view as a part of the European or German ‘collective mind’, so that the following conclusions are not drawn on an objective selection of facts. This is an abstraction, neither I will not try to provide a complete overview of what I call ‘American values’ nor to discuss the conception of ‘identity’ scientifically but rather try to clear a path to a better understanding of American behavior and mentality.