One of the problems associated with attempts to promote a popular sense of European identity is that there are no obvious historical models to serve as a guide. The most inviting analogy is with the process of nation-building in Europe itself in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this raises a number of problems. Given what one author has called "the novelty of our historical circumstances' (Gray, 1996, p. 19), the drawing of parallels between such different periods is clearly a hazardous undertaking. Furthermore, the very success of the national idea has itself raised obstacles to the development of supranational identities.